back working on my lighting desk, after a couple of years of hating it because the communications bus between the many different modules was flakey and so the whole thing wasn't fun to use. I bit the bullet last year and re-implemented everything with CAN-bus communications and it's actually fun to use now.
Current work has been improving boot time. Was nearly two minutes because of one board, and that's a long time for the lights to be out if you have to reboot during a show. I'd wanted to use buildroot to get a custom kernel that should boot much more quickly, but the buildroot learning curve was steep for me, particularly as I've no expectation of ever needing the knowledge again.
Independently but concurrently I decided I really ought to understand what all this AI stuff was about, for fear of getting left behind. That coincided with the release of opus 4.5, and holy heck has it made a difference! With a little guidance from me Claude got the buildroot environment working and the boot time down to less than 10 seconds. I've been _really_ impressed. I've had Claude write a few boring utilities that I could easily have done but Claude managed much faster and with less boredom on my part. Fortunately for my AI revolution I think I'm a better Business Analyst/writer than I am a coder, so it fits with my temperament.
This is one of the things I actually remember my mother saying. Festina lente [0]: Make haste slowly. I've always tried to stick to it because when I have I've found more to appreciate in whatever I'm doing (as TFA says)
Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.
I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.
_totally_ off topic, but what sort of brain must Ms Collier have that she can play a game at the same time as giving a cogent lecture on String Theory with very few hesitations? I could hardly concentrate on the lecture because of the game being shown in an inset window. Truly impressive
Yesss! I had an ex complain/advise that, if I could just stop thinking for a moment, I'd enjoy life more. In my mind, that's what Ms. Collier is doing: distracting her hyperresponsive brain parts so she can present a longer speech on the topic.
One thing not mentioned in TFA but I came across following the 'we're hiring' link to the Back-end Engineer role. They use PERL (v5). That certainly surprised me!
DDG has been around for a long-long time, and when it started Perl was an old fashioned choice but still very reasonable. Even if they moved to other languages they probably still have old bits of Perl code running somewhere.
For about first 5-10 years of its existence DuckDuckGo also promoted their use of Perl, and afaik they contributed to Perl development.
I had a gig last night. Small local band with a bit of a following that hasn't performed for a few months. Audience of 120 or so. Great fun. My occasional hobby is lighting live music so I have to take what bands I can. Fortunately I really enjoy working with these people.
After the show two of the band (40 and 37 y.o.) were talking about what next. They realise that, sadly, they're probably not going to make it big, but aren't sure that the occasional local gig with audience of 120, or supporting someone bigger but where the audience don't care, is enough. What should they do? give up? change mental focus and do something completely different (one thought about being a counsellor, the other about going into visual art). I'm older, so they were asking whether I'd had similar thoughts. Sure have. I long ago realised I could never make a living lighting live music unless I moved to the US, or possibly europe. For reasons, neither were practical, so I consciously decided that desgining hardware, writing software, and doing the occasional hobby lighting gig were enough. But for those two? No idea.
Not really sure where this is going, but the tone of the article really resonated with the discussion with those two last night, and my tiredness this morning.
I still think live music beats the pants off recordings. And show in smaller venues where you can really see and interact with the band are _way_ better than big shows where you just have loud television
Maybe it's just optimism talking but I foresee a cultural shift towards favoring live performance. When people spend so much time looking at screens and being alone at home, they long to be immersed in a live sensoral experience.
* that the interaction with a peer _is_ the problem. I know we should all be grown up and able to talk about these things in a mature and effective way, but I can't cope with conflict in any shape or form, so if someone says Boo to me I cave in which doesn't get me any further
* because peers aren't the people that need to hear some of the things I've got to say, it's layers above me that need to hear it
Ugh, your attitude really pisses me off, but I want to help you because my liberation is bound up in yours, so here goes.
> It's layers above me that need to hear it
Most workers socialized under capitalism feel this way, that the power rests at the top of the hierarchy and IF ONLY THEY KNEW, they could FIX THINGS. Well, guess what? Your job is to keep them from knowing. You, as a leaf-node of the hierarchy, operate "the sharp end of the system" where "all ambiguity is resolved."[0] You exist to DO the WORK, and that includes the "theory building"[1] from which the owners of the business pay you to be insulated.
However you interpret that on a moral level, practically speaking it means that YOU and your peer practicioners are actually the ones with the power and the (sometimes merely implicit) mandate to enact whichever policy you think the "layers above" ought to impose.
If you REALLY need something from the higher-ups, the only real way to get it is to march on the boss and, with sufficient leverage, demand it as a collective. You're going to have to talk to your peers to organize that, or we'll slide further into thisbdystopia in which "we fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice."[2]
To effect lasting change, one must act with consistent commitment alongside one's peers, rather than waiting for a moment of grace from the "layers above."
"Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it."[2]
I’d think I generally lean towards capitalism, yet I strongly agree that talking to peers and building rapport first is a good idea before pushing for change, that theory building is an important and inescapable part of doing your work well you may not even be paid for (and that higher-ups are often not concerned with it), that you hold more power than you might realize based on your position, and that you should defend your interests.
One extreme counterpoint is all the cases where human activity is “abstracted away” (e.g., the gig economy).
Indeed even in less extreme cases, in a traditional role, sometimes you feel to be not given the knowledge that you need to be better at theory building. How does one deal with that?
Ultimately, capability is a combination of training and innate capacity.
Do you think all people have the same innate capacities for all skills?
(That's not to say that training can never improve capabilities, but those with a fundamental handicap will always be disadvantaged, as with the blind, deaf, paralysed, amputees, etc. And psychological limitations.)
Some more details from the Apollinaire wikipedia page:
> On 7 September 1911, police arrested and jailed Apollinaire on suspicion of aiding and abetting the theft of the Mona Lisa and a number of Egyptian statuettes from the Louvre, but released him a week later. The theft of the statues had been committed in 1907 by a former secretary of Apollinaire, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, who had recently returned one of the stolen statues to the French newspaper the Paris-Journal. Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who had bought Iberian statues from Pieret, and who was also brought in for questioning in the theft of the Mona Lisa, but he was also exonerated. In fact, the theft of the Mona Lisa was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter who acted alone and was only caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence.
I understand many cars nowadays have some sort of auto-levelling feature that is supposed to adjust the where the beams point as the vehicle load changes or related to tire inflation. I know some cars used to have a manual control for this. I don't own a car, but often hire, and often it's seemed that the auto-levelling is just adjusted too high.
The first time I had a car with this I was getting flashed by about 1 in 20 other drivers because they thought I had the high-beams on. I eventually took that car back to the rental agent who said that yes, it looked like the beams were adjusted too high.
With a manual control it's easy to fix. With auto-smarts (tm), not so much
Current work has been improving boot time. Was nearly two minutes because of one board, and that's a long time for the lights to be out if you have to reboot during a show. I'd wanted to use buildroot to get a custom kernel that should boot much more quickly, but the buildroot learning curve was steep for me, particularly as I've no expectation of ever needing the knowledge again.
Independently but concurrently I decided I really ought to understand what all this AI stuff was about, for fear of getting left behind. That coincided with the release of opus 4.5, and holy heck has it made a difference! With a little guidance from me Claude got the buildroot environment working and the boot time down to less than 10 seconds. I've been _really_ impressed. I've had Claude write a few boring utilities that I could easily have done but Claude managed much faster and with less boredom on my part. Fortunately for my AI revolution I think I'm a better Business Analyst/writer than I am a coder, so it fits with my temperament.
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