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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

    His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.




  • My first reaction was how stupid this is. Dirt, debris and other things will get on the panels and cause lots of problems, but after a few minutes I realized it’s actually quite brilliant.

    There are three major costs of solar, the panels, the location, and the wiring + inverters. If the tracks are used as the wires (extremely low resistance paths back to an inverter), the location is wasted space so basically free, and the inverter can be placed anywhere along the path to remove the power from the tracks, the cost of this comes down to mainly the cost of the panel, which is actually pretty cheep these days.

    The real challenges will be in cleaning & maintenance, vandalism, and modifying the track to limit the conductive paths (assuming they’re used for this).


  • This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.

    Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

    The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

    There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.




  • Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.

    When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.





  • About 15 years ago I was giving a presentation at a technical conference. This was me giving a presentation in front of a room full of about 50 other engineers. At this point in my career this was still pretty new to me, so I was nervous. It was getting time for my presentation and I needed to do a last minute nervous pee before I did my presentation.

    I went to the bathroom, peed in a urinal, and then went to wash my hands. I pushed down the bathroom faucet and it exploded sending up a geyser of water about air a foot or two into the air. Now had I really been on a TV show, my pants would have been soaked in the crotch area, but luckily in real life I stepped back and didn’t get wet. However, this was the perfect setup for a young nervous engineer giving a technical presentation to be thoroughly embarrassed. Luckily I’m either not on a TV show, or I’m not the main character.