What happens in reality in systems like that is that doctors are lectured to avoid prescribing expensive exams, things like MRI or PET scans, even sometimes not telling patients they should do them if they could afford to pay them on their own.
Yes you can report problems with the road network and people update GMaps manually. And up until a couple of years ago users could do it themselves, but they took it down for some reason.
Changes to other types of places can still be done manually by GMaps users themselves, and other users can evaluate that, and I guess if it's a "controversial" (low rep user did the change or people voted against it) a Google employee evaluates it. And if you're beyond certain level as a GMaps user you can get most changes published immediately.
Has been like that for quite a while, it has up and lows with the 90s marking a winter season for AI, and now the hype machine is on full steam again, until people find out again a lot of it is marketing BS to get funding. Then the research that is worthwhile gets mixed up with that, go into a lack of funding and in 30 years or so it's back on full hype again.
Good luck with that. Anything that can put in a good light some public policy or is remotely related to some politician can be seen as political ad.
Politicians already make use of that kind of veiled advertising with hot button issues. And there's a reason sometimes campaigns are mostly the same at the core except for PROBLEM X WHICH MUST BE SOLVED NOW OR WE ALL DIE.
Neither is living in a crowded urban area or riding bikes.
But OK let's not nitpick, I'm not talking about only regarding CO2, it was just an example of something that is relevant these days for a lot of people.
My point is that would be interesting to study this as matter of what kind of life would be better, given different metrics.
It's sad to see people you love doing this. You cannot equate retirement with not working. Work in things that you do enjoy and always wanted but didn't have the time, or get a hobby.
Also there are interesting things that can probably be studied from that, like is that healthier or better for the environment than living in packed urban areas?
Maybe if you're worried about CO2 emissions having those CO2 eating beings in your backyard could be a better option.
Exactly but now embedded systems look more and more like personal computing used to be not much time ago. We're certainly on par with mid to late 90s in regards to that, and even farther if you consider things like the RPi as embedded. Not only processing power but relating to the skill set needed.
I don't take lightly your skillset at all, but it comes a time when people start using inneficient solutions because it's faster to produce, and you have plenty of hw resources, so... why not? Do it in Python and improve it later... maybe, and then you don't. :-)
I believe you get my point. Not that I personally think using micropython is a worthy path solution for embedded dev as of now, in a professional context. But there will come a time when that can make sense, as it's already the case in the RPi, as I mentioned.
> I consider myself a very good embedded engineer, but my software is merely "straightforward"
And that's where I make my business. I'm merely a straightforward embedded engineer but focus on the software/hw integration making the excellent work of people like you work with the external world, databases, desktop/web UIs and all of that using software engineering practices. Basically doing the "cloud", "edge" and "IoT" buzzwords.
> Almost all of these concepts could easily be learned in a few weeks by a talented engineer with strong fundamentals in software design and computer science.
It's web development, and let's face it, many companies don't want long term talent, they just want someone to finish their current project and move on. Which can make sense in some circumstances. You don't need a software engineer level guy to make a dashboard.
People that are beyond the framework user level end up also moving on from even considering working on those kind of jobs.
And the same goes for drug prescriptions.