George Hotz. Niche celebrity hackerman. Comma.ai self driving car stuff with cameras only.
In an interview some years ago (I think it was lex friedman) he was asked about Tesla and their radars etc and he said he thinks the future of self driving cars is vision only.
Back in university I took a course in legacy programming. We did a project in each of Fortran, COBOL and Ada. I enjoyed Ada very much. The module system made a lot of sense to me and the compiler found a lot of mistakes (compared to C). Thanks for sharing this article. It brought me back and makes me want to give Ada another go now that I have 10 years of real world experience.
I had a digital design course. The instructor hated verilog and preferred VHDL for reason that didn't make much sense to me those days. There was only one VHDL compiler available that time called ghdl which worked fine for course. There was modelsim as well but one had to go to the lab.
Later I learnt that VHDL is related to ADA. I've been itching to try it for a long while. Might give it a try this week. Currently I am in my Rust phase and loving it (thanks cargo). My Haskell fever is gone though.
I haven't tried Ada yet, but do have experience with VHDL. It's the most modular language I've encountered. It's easy to work with big teams in VHDL. Choose everyone's responsibility, design the interfaces (entities) and have a brief discussion on it. Then go separate ways and implement your parts (architecture). They all finally fit together like magic without needing too much coordination or interaction between the team members. I'm pretty sure that's what's great about Ada too. However, I still don't understand what it is about the language's design that makes this possible.
One place where you can easily use ADA syntax is any database that implements ANSI SQL/PSM, and there are many.
"SQL/PSM is derived, seemingly directly, from Oracle's PL/SQL. Oracle developed PL/SQL and released it in 1991, basing the language on the US Department of Defense's Ada programming language."
Not the OP but we could mention that time where he called a hero a pedophile or when he bought twitter to promote free speech and then banned anyone who said negative things about him. No one human should have 260 billion dollars and be thought of as a good person unless they do a ton of philanthropy.
Now, I'm not saying this is the case for Musk, but surely if a person that rich was heavily investing in technological research that resulted in positive feedback loops that benefitted humankind then they would be a pretty good person, right? Who was really a better person: Mother Teresa or Norman Borlaug?
This is exactly how I feel about my side projects. Sometimes our day jobs are not exactly what we’d like to be working on so it’s nice to “putter” on a side project to scratch that itch. If someone else finds it useful one day that is a nice bonus but is ultimately not what drives me to work on it.
On a recent thread about a shortage of electricians, several commenters talked about taking on electrical work themselves, in a way that passed every inspection, by working on the scale of months instead of, as the pros do, days. This tracks exactly the distinction between my garden vs. the garden, and the analogy is great for software.
I'm currently working on something, "using AI" (read: the ChatGPT API), and it's coming out perfect in a way I couldn't have done without this API, but I also couldn't have done at work; there are too many efficiencies involved when you're making software for yourself.
For one thing, the feedback loop between implementation, UI and UX is a dot instead of a loop. For another, I'm infinitely willing to sympathize with my user, and will take all of their suggestions as if they were gospel. And my budget, while not infinite or even large, is extremely generous.
I guess it's also worth mentioning people whose recent pet projects became their main project, the most salient of whom, for me, is AngeTheGreat on YouTube (https://m.youtube.com/@angethegreat).
There's something to be said for dogfooding first, then releasing something.
I love this perspective. And I love these moments when I demo my project (people can request a demo on the home page) and people realize that it actually solves the problem they are struggling with for a long time.
I also deliberately choose not to do things that I don't like (like content marketing) even though they'd for sure bring me more revenue. It has to be enjoyable because otherwise it'd be just another job.
That’s what kept me going for years in my own. Now that I finally quit my tech career to focus on my own apps, I wish I had been more ambitious earlier on. I learned a lot in industry but controlling my own time and reaping the full reward of my own labor is glorious. Not to mention the ability to seek "promotion" is far more understandably under my control and ability to achieve.
Even though features are half-baked I still think the future is bright for them, especially if GitHub slips up or gets complacent. Intel showed us that it is possible.
