A related good piece of advice I got early in my career was to do the tasks no one else wants to do. Less risky than "do the hard things". You quickly become invaluable and those tasks become less painful the more you do them.
This is a double edged sword. It can be a great way to gain recognition and clout in your org. However, sometimes there's a good reason nobody wanted to do that thing, and you can get stuck just doing something that you don't really like doing.
Same but I've also been in places where they do look over your shoulder and I ended up fighting the tide. Everyone around me was in a constant panic mode, so I slowed my work output for 2 weeks (most I could get away with without ending up in a room talking about my work performance) where I studied and optimized the tasks consuming most of my time. Then automated them (this involved working what felt like two jobs at once pushing well over 80h a week)....
When I finished I had so much free time I could finally start doing the interesting projects and my work output was consistently 2x my co-workers. I considered explaining this to management but they had just admonished a co-worker for not doing the thing they asked and trying to improve process. So I kept it to myself.
Obviously this was a bit of a toxic work environment (early in my career) and I was luckily switched out of this group.
My point is that you can fight bad management to make a better working environment for yourself but it takes a lot of effort and you need to be strategic in what you tell them as it can backfire.
People can be friendly to your face and still vote for and support laws and political leaders who want you out of their area or worse.
Look at how they fought gay marriage or how they treat Mexican-American's. There are pockets of safety in that state (Houston/Austin) but as a whole it's not that great.
I lived a number of years in Idaho which has the same problem. I'm "OK" in Boise (even there things can happen) but I'm genuinely concerned for my safety when I have to drive anywhere else in that state.
Ran an ML model years ago had a number of great months then out of no where no trade I or the ML would make, would work. Looked like someone was front running my orders and messing with my trades. Weird delays, trades would take to long to go through all, and all sorts of odd events on Level 2. Ended up shutting it down took a good 2 months before my manual trades started going through at a normal rate again.
This is why the whole $0 trading fee and robinhood concern me. I'm paying for the trades and someone is still messing with me.
I think, though I'm not sure, that RH makes their money by investing in treasury bills with the cash balances of people's portfolios. You're (most likely) not getting secretly screwed.
Contrary to popular belief robinhood makes a good bit of money from selling order data, more than most brokerages. This is due to the fact that most robinhood users are inexperienced, and thus, their trades are less likely to indicate big movements of institutional money. I.e. HFTs pay more for data that is less risky.
Edit: Fun fact, the founders of Robinhood worked at an HFT before starting robinhood, which used to be shown on their LinkedIn until several years ago. Bad optics I suppose.
In other languages a part of me always feels like if I'm using regex I'm doing something wrong, because I used it so liberally in Perl. It feels like a Perl-ism so I try to make a conscious effort not to carry those over as they tend to be the source of inefficiencies.
TBF for this specific case it's very much unnecessary to break out regexes: most languages do have some sort of literal replacement string API:
str.replace = replace(...)
S.replace(old, new[, count]) -> str
Return a copy of S with all occurrences of substring
old replaced by new. If the optional argument count is
given, only the first count occurrences are replaced.
(though the documentation turns out more misleading than re.sub's: this states it replaces all occurrences but really replaces all non-overlapping occurrences, which re.sub actually spells out properly).
Oddly enough I was asked once to determine if there were any differences between Perl Regex and Python's implementation in an effort to convert a tool I wrote into Python (so other developers could help)
I found only one very weird edge case worth noting, in Perl the regex "s/ a* / x /g" (spaces added to prevent formatting) will turn the string "bac" into "xbxxcx" because the "a" technically means zero or more so it matches the spaces between the characters, not so in python it creates the string "xbxcx" because it matched the a in between one time and didn't count the empty spaces. Slightly less accurate results since * does mean zero or more so the space between counts as zero characters.
That was changed recently, I get 'xbxcx' on 3.5 and 'xbxxcx' on 3.7
And coming to Perl vs Python regex differences, there are too many to count, Python's 3rd party module 'regex' is more comparable to Perl regex. For example, Python doesn't support possesive quantifiers, subexpression calls, \K, \G and so on
I have Sonic, and it's $64.05 not $75. The promo router is a bit annoying but they only charge you if you return it before the promo period ends or if you keep it after. The land line is annoying but still comes out way cheaper Comcast (at least any plan worthwhile).
I get Bi-directional 1Gbps, top upload from Comcast is 35MBps.
Tested it at 896MBs down/941MBps up from work which has connection that can keep up. Also tested fast.com and speedtest.net
*Worth noting most routers you buy at something like Best Buy can't hit those rates in both directions.
It's a great robot! His remote controller seems a bit cobbled together, but you can easily use a $50 RC controller with a $5 receiver and an Arduino to control whatever you want with 16 channels, it's amazing!
I'm fairly certain his robot was designed and built before Arduino's existed. The barrier to building robots and electronics has come way down in the past 15 years.
Funny you should mention it— I built a line-following system into the forklift, using an Arduino: I put a row of 16 downward pointing leds on the bottom of the chassis; the Arduino sequentially scanned all 16 leds. A photocell detected reflected light from the floor, and fed this into the Arduino’s analog input. In turn, this let the Arduino decide which side of the line it was on, and how much to turn to get back on track.
But odometry proved a bit more challenging, and it turned out to be more reliable (and fun) to simply move it using a RC controller.
I keep an old tablet at home with a second copy of all my rotating keys.
I know all the sites say not to do this, but if I loose my phone or it breaks or while switching phones I have that tablet around.
Not the ideal "cheap" solution, but I had it on hand already and if I hadn't I would have gotten something like a Yubi Key and use that as my second set of keys.
A related good piece of advice I got early in my career was to do the tasks no one else wants to do. Less risky than "do the hard things". You quickly become invaluable and those tasks become less painful the more you do them.