I’ve been tangentially involved in experimenting with Meshtastic and trying to scale it for large events like Burning Man, on the order of 2000–3000 nodes on a single frequency.
Node to node mesh communication is cool and it works surprisingly well at small scale, but the moment we brought high powered repeaters online the difference was night and day. Coverage, reliability, and usability all jumped instantly.
It makes the tradeoff really obvious. Mesh is great for bootstrapping and local traffic, but once you care about real data propagation at scale, centralized infrastructure wins almost every time. Airtime is scarce, coordination matters, and having a small number of well placed high sites beats thousands of mediocre relays.
I still think there’s room for novelty P2P protocols, but mostly as an optimization layer on top of infrastructure, not as the foundation. Every time you push on this problem hard enough, you end up rediscovering the client router model for a reason.
Of course there's no reason to use a mesh when infrastructure is available. That's not why a mesh would be useful. But it doesn't even need to be a mesh to be a useful feature. Walkie talkies aren't a mesh and they remain useful.
On the other hand a "high powered repeater" for Meshtastic is just the same board with a bigger more optimised antenna.
You can get solar powered ones for under 100€ and slap them wherever you want pretty easily. (But please don't unless you know what you're doing, adding useless router nodes makes the network worse, not better)
They certainly made it impossible to plan a trip to NYC with more than 2 people if that's what they were aiming for.
I had previously been planning yearly trips to visit NYC with friends. For the last 3 years with Airbnb and I was booking 2-4 bedroom places for between 3-6 people. The cost per person per night jumped from ~$75-150 to $150-250 depending on the week. :-O
That sounds more expensive, but not impossible. Frankly, that's how much I used to pay for a room in Manhattan before AirBnB existed. I chalked it up as the reality of booking in the most populated city in the world.
I've only ever booked the Airbnbs in Brooklyn before. (We usually try to visit friends in Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick) Hotels in those neighborhoods are easily $300-500 per night for a queen bed on a weekend.
The alternative of midtown/queens hotels are typically still $200-300, but cost more in travel time/expense.
My gripe here is mainly that before I could plan an outing for group and we could all live in the space and have common areas for eating/relaxing. Even if hotels were the same price, they still are a worse experience than staying in a house/apartment with friends.
More pedantry:
Population density would make more sense in this context, but it's also not true. It's the most densely populated major city in the US, but that's definitely not the world.
Per the same article, by city limits NYC is #18 out of 81, by urban area it's #74, and by metropolitan area it's #19. Densely populated, but it's no Mumbai - which, no matter how you measure it, eclipses NYC in both population and population density.
"I have a design I would like produced. Please make it like this please."
I couldn't imagine giving a machinist or welder a drawing containing no annotations. (This would be something an intern does once and the shop calls them up to tell ask them questions about what they actually need for 45min. Probably sending them back to rework it)
Pulling from the mechanical world:
* make 3d models (equivalent to HTML/CSS components)
* put 3d models into an assembly (HTML components together on the page)
* make variations of the assembly to show range of motion (variations on user activity)
* make "drawings" that contain components that are broken down to the smallest practical level (this would map to: modal, tables)
** in software these are usually managed similarly to Spreadsheet tabs
** this would contain a reference to the 3d parts + dimensional annotations. This means updating the assembly/part geometry automatically updates the drawing
* anytime significant changes are made, issue new "Revisions" of those "drawings" are committed, issued, and then sent to the shop
* 3d modeling software has change management systems so you'll automatically know if your proposed changes to a 3d part will break a drawing or assembly that depends on it
Sure solo/self-paced can work for some people. I am not one of those people.
I spent a couple of months learning and working on projects in my free time. A consistent theme was getting stuck on a concept or bug and having no feedback to get past it. (Either, "give up, move on, come back to this later" or "oh, fix this one thing and its done".)
I guess, I could have made the transition without an immersive program, but I'm sure my outcome would have taken more time, had a lower starting salary, and eventually more cost money.
Retrospectively, there was $30k post-tax in opportunity cost of not working at a Mechanical Engineering job (bay area) for 6 months and the $22k tuition.
I explicitly tell it about the skills and that it should load them when the context feels correct.
```prompt.md
Company Name codebase ...
# Skills
Use the company specific skills that look like `company-*`. Load them once per conversation if they seem relevant to what you are working on.
```
```SKILL.md
---
description: Company TypeScript libraries and conventions
trigger: Writing or reading TypeScript in Company services ---
# company-ts
```
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