Dammit, I don’t think this is going to be as popular as the Steam Deck at this price. I hope they don’t shelf it and I can buy this in a few years for a reasonable price once the big AI labs go bankrupt.
Really cool. Good move on writing your own stack. I was weighing using ros2 or building our own, but ended up going the ros2 route to “save time”. We are working with autonomous mobility robots in nature, so we figured the ecosystem around ros2 would be worth the compromise. It was not. All the time we saved setting things up initially, we are paying for now.
There should exist a minimal, clear, robotics library like what you’ve built. The Flask of the robotics world.
The core advice of the book is to smile, flatter, avoid all criticism, and feign “genuine” interest. People can sense this performance from a mile away. It is a dated, salesy, conflict-averse (to the point of dishonesty) way of communicating. It is too surface-level to address real, sustained relationships.
I too read the book in my younger years, and it helped me a lot with making friends and my career. However, the book itself is filled with some terrible advice for communicating with people. I realized that as an older person. But as a young person it filled me much needed confidence. Like many of these books, the actual advice is crap, but I think it gives people the confidence they need to change something in their lives they are not happy with.
I highly recommend the podcast: If Books Could Kill. They have an episode on this book.
I guess you can describe me as anti-AI. I use AI everyday to write code. I can’t deny that it makes me more efficient. And there’s pressure from the people that pay my bills to produce more and more with it. But I still hate it. I hate the code it writes. I hate what is turning my job into. I hate the main companies behind it. I hate all the resources being poured into it. I hate that most of the real profit and benefits from it will just go on to make more delusional tech billionaires the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk instead of actually being distributed somewhat fairly amongst all of us.
But yeah, I can vibe code the same crappy app as millions of other engineers in a weekend. And we will all pay Apple $99 a year to upload the same crappy app to the App Store hoping to catch some of that AI-wave money.
I’ve noticed a lot of fear mongering with screens and kids. So called “experts” have taken a few correlational studies and concluded that screen time is the devil. Instagram is full of these podcast clips of experts warning parents of the terrible effects of screen time. However, if you actually read any of these papers, they make it quite clear that is impossible to fully separate screen effects from family environment, and effect sizes are often modest.
Giving your 2 year old an iPad with YouTube everyday for 2 hours is obviously going to be bad for them. That’s a terrible extreme. But 20 minutes of Bluey here and there throughout the week is not gonna mess anybody up.
So while I’m glad people are more aware of the negative effects of screen time, I also hate how extreme it has become. Parents, specially new parents are so susceptible to this kind of fear mongering.
This is what happens when you can code faster than you can think. It’s kind of similar to a Facebook hiring 100s of engineers before it even knows what to do with them.
“It sounds like you feel that autonomous killer drones are a dystopia, and that anything related to the drones“
Yes!!! What do you think a dystopia is? The entire world of 1984 is a dystopia. Just cause there’s a company making money to “combat” that dystopia doesn’t make the thing any less dystopian.
Yeah, but the whole thing is still dystopian. If there was a company A planting mind controlling chips in your mind, and company B selling a service to destroy those chips… neither company makes the whole thing less dystopian.
A company named 9 mothers, which sells a service to stop artificially intelligent machines from falling from sky and blowing up everything… funded by another company that lures smart young men and women with billionaire dreams that wreak havoc on society.
I recently used Suno to generate a whole album for myself. I was after a specific style. I had this one song in my head and could not find anything else like it. So I tried Suno, very skeptical of it, but was completely surprised by what it could do.
So I spent a whole day making an album for myself. Completely mesmerised and blown away. Even thinking… I should publish this, this is amazing music. The next day I was listening to it, and after a little while the magic had faded. It felt like just a very generic, average crappy album. It didn’t have the lasting effect and replay value that my favorite albums have.
Maybe it’s because I knew it was AI. Or maybe the magic came from the tech and not the actual music. Anyways, I gave up my music production dreams after that.
I see. So your brilliant logic is to reduce the actions and impact of multi billion dollar institutions down to simplified versions of the technical solutions they offer.
“You don’t need to worry bout them Palantir boys, they just make simple harmless dashboards. Don’t worry about the deep involvement in government surveillance, military targeting, and immigration enforcement.”
“Amazon just provides simple VMs. Ain’t no need to be concerned about worker treatment, anti-competitive practices, tax avoidance, and environmental impact.”
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that a big tech CEO used his powers to gain access to all the US government data he wanted? Did you forget that already?
Did you see any clips from Trumps inauguration? Weren’t the CEOs of these big tech companies sitting right behind him?
Shall we even talk about Palantir?
I think it’s pretty obvious what the power of these companies are. You have to have your head pretty deep in the tech hole to think this is just about fair ec2 pricing. What I’d do to have that kind of ignorance again.