Having a following on social media has great benefits for regular techies, not just influencers and entertainers, etc. It lets you magnify your resume to reach people with authority who you normally couldn't connect with. It helps you get spots at conferences, seats on cool new projects or positions that you can further leverage to increase your online fame and bump up your compensation. You can also use your following to get preferential treatment with companies and authorities, have your problems solved faster. Got your app removed from the Play Store with no explanation? Raise a stink on Twitter.
That's one of the reasons why people are so quick to join the fray and throw a punch. They want to be that one quick Tweet that goes viral, gets them thousands of followers and builds their brand.
As a regular techie with a 16,000 person following you are not getting any of those perks. Your app will die. You may feel like you are raising a stink but a phone call would work better. Recruitors finding you on twitter is possible, submitting your resume ensures they have it is a better strategy. Making conference organizer friends on twitter or in person can get great conference speaker spots but not something the average developer does.
You can certainly be both an "influencer" and a "techie" but what you describe is someone participating in the "influencer" side of things and no longer being just a "regular" techie.
There are a lot of benefits of being an influencer, but it has its downsides too.
I don't work with the tech, but is there a use case for operating drones in the field?
You want to peek around a corner or under a door, drop a tiny robot. Operate it with a handheld joystick and get a camera feed into your headset while still maintaining your regular field of vision.
Final product won't necessarily take the form of the hololens. Might just be an attachment to whatever standard equipment they have, more like a Google glass.
I'm curious, what's the obstacle? Can't they take the display from the hololens, make it smaller and integrate it into one eye of an existing headset that the military uses?
Existing HoloLens devices show semi transparent holograms overlaid on the real world so to speak, in a viewable frame size resembling something like a oversized postage stamp. (That is, holographic content does not fill your entire field of view.) It's not conducive to showing 100% opaque video content for a live drone feed, in my opinion, due to technical limitations (opacity, rendering proximity) and human comfort issues.
I appreciate that they're offering "custom" units and could theoretically fix these issues. But it _sounds_ like it'll be more of a ruggidization and compliance realignment of existing hardware. Pure speculation of course.
HoloLens 2 devices offer an expanded field of view of approx 60 degrees. It's still semi-transparent, and opaque content has improved but still can't outshine looking directly at lighting.
A video feed has areas of lighter stuff along with areas of darker stuff. (Most) AR systems work by projecting lasers on to a glass plane in front of you, adding light to your FOV. How do you project darkness on a transparent background? The video feed won't look that great in AR.
> losing half of his fortune in the case of a failed marriage
Marriage isn't a necessity for this to happen. In some jurisdictions (e.g. Canada) you even don't have to have been married to pay alimony in the case of a split.
I don't know what it is, but I actually find a visual of the speaker to improve the tutorial, even if it's not strictly necessary for the material. I think it helps with engagement.
If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch.
> Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places
I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.
That's a bit rude. I did the same cursory search and realized my friends and I are big fans. Just because you don't recognize the name doesn't mean others don't.
My name is known in certain small circles, it doesn't make me famous. So just because you recognize the name, doesn't mean he's what one would classify as famous.
Well he's not JK Rowling famous, but he has sold over a million books which puts him in a pretty elite club author wise. Especially in sci fi, that's a lot. I'm very proud of my brother, he started down a very difficult career path and became very successful. All self taught.
Former publishing industry professional here. If he's broken the 1 million books mark, I wouldn't hesitate to call him famous. He's more successful than 99.99% of authors.
Makes me very happy you celebrate his success so openly. In my time in the industry, I saw a lot of fiction authors dismissed by their family/friends who worked in non-creative industries. Thanks for being one of the awesome relatives. :)
Perhaps I was the one stretching with my "cursory search", because I missed the pseudonym. A million sales is certainly "famous" from any reasonable standpoint.
>Then I just got tired of having to Google obscure Linux issues, edit config files, and reboot all the time.
So is this the normal state of Linux then? Every few years I'll take some time to try and "learn Linux" by installing a distro and try to use it as part of my regular workflow. It's always been a never ending train of very specific and obscure, time consuming issues. My personal motto for Linux is "It Just Doesn't Work" (at least for desktop). Even basic stuff like Wi-Fi and the login screen often doesn't work correctly and requires more tweaking. Using MacOS, it's different and you have to get used to things. But it's not an bottomless pit of time sunk into fixing configurations. Windows isn't perfect, but at least I don't feel like I'm wasting my time.
To be fair I don't think Linux is bad (obviously or it wouldn't be widely used), just that those who like it, either enjoy solving these issues or started with it during a time when they could spare the effort, and so they built up enough experience for it to no longer be a chore.
Yes. I would also say it's part of the fun for some people.
I used to be obsessive about optimizing my workflows using customizations that are only possible on FOSS nix systems, but eventually I got other hobbies. Now I just want my OS to disappear in the background and "just work".
Honestly the telemetry is arguably better from a security perspective. We already trust Microsoft out of necessity, so what additional harm does the telemetry?
I was trying to say that installing a closed-source program with admin privileges is technically a bigger security risk than allowing Microsoft's telemetry, and it's arguably a bigger privacy risk as well.
The truth is it varies, largely based on your personal setup.
Personally, I think the "mean tweaking time" of an average Linux is very low now. I spend almost no time forced to tweak things, except maybe a bit after installation. In concrete terms, for me it's usually a few hours of work spread out over the first 3 weeks. It might be 3-20 hours tops, but some of that might be setting up cool new fancy fun things rather than necessary configuration. From then on I rarely have to touch configs for years.
That being said, I do read of some people having really painful bugs that take forever to fix. You can mitigate this by using mainstream distros on well supported hardware. Ubuntu and Fedora are your best bets for stability.
A decade or more ago, tweaking and maintaining felt like a constant Sisyphean struggle. Now I can throw Ubuntu on a laptop and 90% of the time it's fine after installation.
>Even basic stuff like Wi-Fi and the login screen often doesn't work correctly and requires more tweaking.
I haven't had wifi troubles on Linux in over a decade. Nor any login screen issues. Maybe things are better now, or maybe you've had bad luck with the hardware you're using. Ultimately it boils down to your individual setup. I know how frustrating these issues can be. Anyways, good luck!
I bought a System 76 darter pro and wifi and printing and bluetooth and sleep and so on work equally well to my partner's macbook air. I probably sound like someone with stockholm syndrome for saying this, but there is only one tiny problem which doesn't bother me which is that the laptop randomly hard powers off in the middle of use 1-4 times per week. Since everything I do autosaves, meh.
I really have to applaud your courage to start in a space that's already occupied. I know I couldn't do something that wasn't absolutely novel because the marketing chops aren't there.
EDIT: Absolutely brilliant. Your service is the top result on Google for "send photos to grandparent" and you snuck an ad into the featured result listicle. Not to mention this very "informative post" that doubles as an ad.
There are some giants in the space for sure: Walmart, Amazon, CVS, Walgreens, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and many more. None of them did what I needed: Nag all my siblings on a regular basis to send photos to my elderly grandparents. Print quality in the industry is surprisingly varied: https://nanagram.co/photoprintingnearme
Here's a concern I'd have investing in this space. What percent of the population* prefers receiving physical photos from loved ones instead of digital ones, and how do you expect that group to change within the next few decades?
* Within the geographic area that you plan to serve, e.g. USA and potentially Canada, West Europe
We ship worldwide. This is a good question. To be honest, I'm not thinking decades out.
My siblings and I tried to set my grandparents up with devices which never worked. People often tell me the same when signing up for NanaGram. Products like digital photo frames are great but require set up and internet. An envelope of 10 prints can be mailed in a couple minutes and provide joy in several places throughout the home; after delivering the first set of photos to my grandparents, I came back the next week and my grandmother taped photos across her entire kitchen. :)
There's also something about printed photos that a glowing pixel can't beat. The closest analogy is vinyl records.
All businesses need to adapt to their customer's changing needs as time goes on; some know that in advance and some don't. I think you've built something incredible here: you've taken the lowest-friction way your customers want to share photos (texting them), and made that your primary interface.
You took a real-world impedance mismatch, and you serve as the interface between people so that all of them can interact in the way they most want to interact. There are a lot of potential businesses there, and I'm sure you'd be well positioned to grow into future such adaptation layers; I can imagine a brand built around a family of such inter-generational adaptations, in both directions.
A close relative of my partner's just passed away and one of the first things the family did was dump out a couple of boxes of photos and spread them out so they could go through a bunch of memories together. Then they picked out a bunch of the photos and attached them to some posterboard today for tomorrow's small service.
These people aren't luddites. It's just easier to do this stuff with physical photos. The tech-obsessed might forget about that sometimes.
I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why.
There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.
Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured out and the next version of the driver would detect them...
Of course it's market segmentation by obscurity so it only lasted a few weeks and it's trivial to work around, but still it's quite shady since there's absolutely no ill effect from the work around.
It is absolutely not a bug, Disassembly of NVIDIA drivers shows that its looking for specific KVM signatures, and if you modify those signatures, magically it starts working again...
Removing KVM signature is now the standard solution. But there's still a working driver patch to remove the virtualization check, it's available at here.
* sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher: Fixes "Bug" in Nvidia Driver preventing "Unsupported Configurations" from being used on KVM
"Fuck you, pay me". Nvidia explicitly forbids "datacenter usage" of their drivers outside of specific licensed-for-datacenter product stacks. (The only exception is for crypto mining, for some reason.) This isn't the only product segmentation in their lineup, either. CAD software optimizations are only available for Quadro cards and up, virtual GPUs are only available for GRID cards, etc. The same GPU they'll charge $600 to gamers for will often go for $3000 or more for businesses.
> The only exception is for crypto mining, for some reason.
I think this is because they were outcompeted by AMD in the GPU crypto days, so they didn't want to get in the way of that (nor were they likely to succeed in blocking this use).
Why does Intel cripple ECC and I/O virtualization [0] in high-end consumer desktop systems? Force people to buy Xeon, even if the performance is otherwise equivalent or higher for the use case. Why does Nvidia restrict virtualization? Force people to buy Quadro and Tesla.
> nVidia
FYI, a few years ago, nVidia has officially changed their name to "Nvidia"...
[0] IOMMU is not only a virtualization feature, it's also an important security feature to protect the host from DMA attacks of malicious peripherals (e.g. 1394, ExpressCard, Thunderbolt, USB 4). Fortunately Intel no longer cripples IOMMU (VT-D) since Skylake, but ECC is another story.
I stand corrected. I also found a clarification from Wikipedia on the situation.
> "From the mid 90s to early-mid 2000s, stylized as nVIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products. Now officially written as NVIDIA, and stylized in the logo as nVIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA".
They don't want people using geforce cards in compute servers/clusters. It's artificial market segmentation since the workstation cards are higher margin. They want customers to pay the big bucks since hypervisor setups are basically only used in business and big budget settings.
> I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why.
It was about NVidia wanting to make it so their 3rd party GPU partners, (EVGA, Asus etc.), could only sell their popular GPU brands with NVIDIA in them, so for AMD they'd have to come up with something customers are entirely unfamiliar with.
> here's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers.
It's not just that. AMD didn't open-source their original Linux driver, presumably there could have been some 3rd party licensing issues, but they wrote a new one that is open-source.
NVIDIA doesn't even let others write an open-source driver for them, they make it purposely difficult to reverse-engineer, sign their firmware that they only release with a massive delay and generally refuse to cooperate.
> It's not just that. AMD didn't open-source their original Linux driver, presumably there could have been some 3rd party licensing issues, but they wrote a new one that is open-source.
Even further than this, they created such a healthy environment for it that there are now two competing open source Vulkan drivers, and the third party one (RADV) is usually winning by a bit, and is now directly supported (with staff) by Valve.
