I teach part time at the university level (I am not going to say where).
I would love to give you my perspective on this as I see a lot of non-neurotypical students. Some of these students do well in an academic environment; some don't - and to generalize this across schools; some schools have a more regularized population and select for this. Similarly, others accommodate more for these types of things versus schools that do less.
Additionally, it is well recognized that academic success is not necessarily an indicator of how well people "do in life". What academic success is, however, is a door opener for other opportunities. There are other door openers, like being a really good coder.
What you need to do is to figure out what your "superpower" is. It might be coding; it might be math, or something like being able to relate longitudinally to a task over a long period.
Everyone has a superpower, it's just some people are not aware of what it is. Go at figuring that out, and don't let people tell you something about yourself that you do not believe. My sister puts this another, simpler, way "Don't let the turkeys get you down".
I would say just be a little bit cautious of the "what's your superpower" thing because it can imply effortless success if not delivered carefully.
I've seen many people try something to a very superficial degree "oh that's clearly not for me".
This is particularly frustrating dealing with people who haven't yet found their path but clearly have potential. They keep looking for something they can somehow do naturally thinking that's the way success happens. Even the best artists, programmers, mathematicians had to actually work at it before they became good.
I appreciate you bringing this up. I myself suffered from this type of thinking: "if I am struggling with something, that must mean I am not good at it, and shouldn't waste time on it". The idea that you need to struggle a bit, get better at things little by little, look at how much progress you've making over time and then decide whether it's for you or not I think is much healthier thinking
> There are other door openers, like being a really good coder.
This may have been true at one point, but if it was ever true, it no longer is.
To get well-paying jobs (above the poverty line), you either need a degree or you need a certification. The certifications run into the exact same component issues of academia. Its optimizing for a specific type and limiting everyone else, and importantly its not primarily based upon knowing the material.
Certifications are the only alternative to a degree, and they get deprecated regularly and have no due process. Deprecations are as if you never had the certificate. If there is an issue, at best the single (only) company doing the testing will refund you for one certification, and then not allow you to try again (barring you from receiving a certificate). This is only in the case where you can prove they have done fraud/deceptive and unfair business practices, but can't get a court to nullify the NDA to provide standing for future litigation. If you can't, prove malfeasance they'll just keep your money; and their default practices try to limit any evidence they might provide. Accountability SOPs in a normal functioning business are often completely absent.
Employers will bring you in for interviews, and low ball you because they'll say "I see you don't have a degree, or applicable certificate. We can't pay you what we would pay a qualified person... How does ... <lowball or just above minimum wage> sound?" (for skilled work normally paying 70-100k for the IT position). They count on you being desperate enough to take the pay cut after they have wasted as much time as possible.
Additionally business insurance can sometimes dictate that certain positions hold a comparable indicator of proficiency, where experience is not counted.
This same conversation occurs regularly even when you have a decade of direct experience doing the exact same job. I know because its happened to me during many interviews, and I've compared notes and every other person who has followed a similar path that I've met has had it happen regularly as well. I do well because I'm a miracle worker, but I always have to prove myself at every step, because I am significantly more than I am on paper.
For many people who have the education and skill to do the jobs, qualifications are just another means to limit future opportunity, keep wages low, and reduce income mobility.
In my opinion your advice is harmful because it misleads about reality, and the experience required to find out otherwise necessitates needless suffering.
I've been in IT for over a decade and in almost all companies, with the people that hire these types, before the hiring manager or person who makes the decisions even see the resumes for any position; HR throws out everyone without a degree; if they are desperate they hold onto the certificates in another pile. Not a choice, no say, it happens, unilaterally just about everywhere.
Don't like what I said?, tough, this is the harsh reality of IT and really any job today. Its the cult of qualification. Who decides who is qualified is a corrupt process when that criteria is not based solely upon knowledge and skill... as education and certifications are based on other criteria with the mentioned criteria being secondary today. Its another form of tweedism by adding a filter at an earlier stage so you only get certain candidates later. Lawrence Lessig can explain it to you.
Those stories of getting hired into IT are unicorn stories that are almost always the exception than anything else. You might get one opportunity in a 30 year period if you are lucky, if at all.
I would have appreciated someone not giving me the same advice you gave, 30 years ago. It resulted in two decades of wasted effort and financial loss, it was deceitful and limiting. It is the former because the person giving the advice should have had constructive knowledge of knowing better based upon their position and authority.
Ignoring what I'm saying or downranking to make my post invisible to go on with happy thoughts just means you are volunteering or misleading others into a struggle session that won't ever end, until they re-exam what you said and ultimately discard it. They won't thank you for that when all is said and done, and doing something like that is one of the more evil things a person can do. This is why when giving advice its important to know from what you speak, to have and show credibility.
These are hard truths, its better to actually educate and give people a chance than mislead them into self-limiting cycles of suffering without warning for potentially decades.
"Just be yourself and find your superpower" is rubbish when you are trying to find a job to feed yourself and progress to financial independence. Coding at this point will likely be eliminated by a Chat-GPT based derivative in a few months or worse case a few years, and you'll be only a halfway decent programmer by then and likely completely dependent on social nets for food thereafter while somehow bearing the cost to go back to school to re-educate.
> HR throws out everyone without a degree; if they are desperate they hold onto the certificates in another pile. Not a choice, no say, it happens, unilaterally just about everywhere.
What we need is a class-action lawsuit, with discovery. Throwing out certifications should be a blatant violation of Griggs v. Duke Power. And anyone downgraded in salary should get equity increases along with however many years of back pay.
The question goes to, how do you prove or meet any kind of burden of proof needed for discovery, where they've done it when you aren't even an employee. No lawyer will take that job just on your say so unless you are bankrolling it.
There is simply no way for you as a candidate to know short of you being in or near the room where it happens when it happens. Certificates or education level are also not a protected class. Discrimination based off race would be a blatant violation, but certificates vs degrees; I'm not so sure (and I'm not a lawyer).
> The question goes to, how do you prove or meet any kind of burden of proof needed for discovery
You need a whistleblower from HR, or a person who used to work in an HR department.
I think the big problem is that this would bite all companies in the butt, including law companies. They are disincentivized to even try going after this.
> Certificates or education level are also not a protected class.
Degrees and certificates are disproportionately distributed among protected classes. And the Griggs ruling is more general than protected class in general.
Old mac cheese grater g5 towers are some of the best cases for ATX conversions - they are pretty much all dead due to the coolant leaking into the PSU and motherboards and not viable/worth repairing, and the case design makes it easy to retofit an atx motherboard tray and PSU.
however, given that your 1923 dollars were likely silver dollars which currently trade for $32 (for junk grade) and up ... I made that 8m * 32 = 256m :) - and better if you were sensible and stored un-circulated dollars
> It's unlikely that you had 200 metric tons of silver coins stashed away.
I think the grandparent was imagining they were silver certificate dollars[1], not actual silver dollar coins. That said, silver certificate dollars needed to be converted at some point in the past, in 2023 they can't be converted and only have collector value, and $8 million worth would dilute their collector value substantially.
Well, you'd have to have a safe place to literally store that cash. If that save place was a bank, then you'd not have silver dollars, unless you paid for storage.
If I as a small company actually decided to sue a large company, I think that the response would be "hang on, here are 20 of our patents you are infringing on - you actually owe us money". Larger companies treat patents like trading cards, sadly.
Usually the software using the interface (pro tools / ableton) has settings to tweak audio latency via buffer size for audio. I have not had issue with this or midi, and I record a fair amount. Motu makes a good cheap audio usb-c interface.
It seems based on the two times I saw it that it is mostly delusion. The idea appears to be that you can learn to do something complex on the job with a slight amount of experience and a lookup site, like stackoverflow or rose. I assume this would be sufficient if you assume really non-technical management, incapable of gauging progress.
Can someone explain to me why it makes more sense to put large, complex pieces of equipment in space where maintaining it is costly, and then beam power though the atmosphere, as opposed to putting simple, easily maintainable tech on the ground, with the input radiation already having traverse the atmosphere? Is there such an advantage power wise that this is worth doing?
Solar power in Germany has a ~1-2% capacity factor. Winter heating demand also means energy demand (and power prices) peak in the winter. So any renewable energy source at 50-100x high cost per kw/h (with nearly a 100% winter capacity factors) will be competitive with solar in the winter.
Power prices show huge temporal, seasonal, and geographic variance. So LCOE (Levelized Cost Of Energy - i.e. average cost) arguments miss that the ability to sell power when power prices are high is critical. Key thing that SBSP as an idea has going for it is high capacity factors at the time of high prices.
To your point, if the idea is to succeed, someone would have to make a SBSP plant that is way less complex than current proposals.
Winter heating in Germany is covered by gas, not electricity. There is no competition here. In fact, one could use surplus renewable energy at close to zero marginal cost to produce green LNG, the efficiency wouldn't matter. Store that gas for winter or something like that.
Solar on geosynchronous orbit is 24/7 power supply. Solar on land works only in day, and in northern latitudes like in central Europe it does not really work during winter (there are too little insulation, so production is on 10-15 % of summer values).
Firstly you're comparing silicon with vastly more expensive panels, there are a number of techs that have ~10-15% capacity factor (not 10% of 20%) in winter in the area 80% of the populations lives (and within easy transmission distance of 95% of the rest). Secondly you're comparing tracking with fixed systems.
Area is not remotely a limit, so the real question is can your space boondoggle go up for <10x the price per nameplate watt without wrecking the ionosphere, eliminating 2.4GHz comms, damaging ecology, and being unavailable to the 70% of the world that don't have a space program?
Then even if you do that, is the petajoules of energy you need to put it up there ever going to pay off or are you better off just burning the thousands of tonnes of methane or hydrogen required?
The article claims that someone wants to put power stations in space and transmit the power over long distances. If you're willing to do long-distance transmission (to central Europe), there are enough low-population area with much sunlight in winter, and the technology to generate solar power on the surface of the planet is cheap and getting cheaper.
Solar requires surprisingly little space. The city where I live now generates about 90% as much renewable electricity as its total average use, and it doesn't really show. Visitors don't say "wow, there really are a lot of solar panels here!" or anything like that. You don't have to look far to find some solar panels, and there a few geothermal facilities, but it's not immediately noticeable. It's been retrofitted to a densely populated city and doesn't really show.
Not really. If i look on average production for utility-scale power plants (e.g. [0]), i get average net production of 5 MW/km^2. Germany has average total primary energy consumption ~387 TW, so to satisfy it with solar, one would need to use ~20% of Germany area for solar power plants.
It is very rough estimate, on one hand, primary energy is often less efficient than electricity, on the other hand, it completely ignores the issue of seasonality of solar power, just comparing yearly averages.
You've cherry picked a project at 53 degrees north and come up with a value that is barely area constrained once you include wind in the mix. There are numerous countries south of 40 degrees where existing projects produce over double the power per area. Example: Nunez de Balboa which is mid latitude spain has an average capacity factor of 20% at a latitude where winter capacity is usually around 60% of summer -- easily hitting the constraints of >10% and within transmission distance where geopolitical, cost, and efficiency factors are manageable. Southern spain, italy and greece have some areas that are even better.
Moreover, the existence of a plant at 53 degrees with under half the capacity factor achievablein europe is strong evidence for the thesis that solar is both sufficiently cheap and small, otherwise it would have been built near munich, not hamburg.
Moreover you need to compare like for like. When the proposal is to spend tens or hundreds of euros per net watt on multi junction panels that can handle shock loads of 1000s of Gs using launch capabilities that don't exist, then compare against something other than the cheapest available previous generation modules.
A 29% efficient hybrid silicon perovskite panel would be an example. This would produce double to triple the net wattage again as they perform much better in partial cloud or with sunlight further from normal and with realistic projections for cost would be around €1 to €2 per net watt installed as a dedicated facility including land.
In total you're around a factor of 5-15 over what is necessary.
A reasonable proposal then puts your "20%" figure at something more like just putting panels on top of the built up and paved areas starting south of Nuremberg and only going north when you run out of space. So to conclude
It's in the second paragraph of the article: "The approach has several advantages over terrestrial solar power, including the absence of night and inclement weather and the lack of an atmosphere to attenuate the light from the sun."
Armchair moment: I have a _really_ hard time believing there could ever be a cost-effective way to make space Solar worthwhile. For the price of one football-sized field of solar panels in space (which I’m guessing on the low end might be $5-10 billion? Probably more though) how many terrestrial solar plants 10x that size could you build? And how much battery capacity could you build to store it over night, eliminating the major advantage of space solar anyways
Every study done on the concept basically show that its non viable unless you make some pretty extreme assumptions. And even then most of those studies are financial and don't take into account CO2 use form the rockets and other factors like limited launch site availability and so on.
