Just to give some balance here, I'll state a seemingly unpopular opinion.
Personally, I have not had issues doing complex coding questions in interviews, or at work. And it becomes clear pretty quickly on the job, when your co-worker has weak computer science fundamentals. Reasoning from first principles is a very powerful technique.
The issue for me is that even if you have strong computer science fundamentals and lots of experience most of the time you won't be able to come up with an advanced optimized algorithm (that took years of research) on the spot, which is what is often required in these kind of interviews. Even if you manage the average kid that grinded leetcode for years will appear a better candidate than you, maybe he really is, but that's unlikely on the day-to-day job. In the end it's just about who grinds more, obviously if somebody is really weak on the basics it shows immediately without having to go through the hops, fizzbuzz is enough.
To be fair, while grinding shows opportunity of having enough time. It also shows determination and grit. I have determination and grit in other areas of life, but when it comes to leetcoding, I find it hard to have it.
I find it much more easily to have grit when it comes to dating/romance. I already feel it, it's a few orders of magnitude higher, at least on an emotional level that is. The strong motivator there is the rebellious belief/thought of "I won't be ignored! I deserve love too!" (I think everyone does). It's a trauma (little t) response. I'm married nowadays because of that drive, I'm currently reading the 7 Principles To Make Marriage Work.
But leetcode? In a good week, I do like 5 problems.
You are just justifying pointless time wasting on Leetcode questions as "grit".. There is a world of difference between perusing deeper connections with a potential life-long partners than doing Leetcode..
I mean if it works for you and you enjoy doing it, great but don't pretend it's for a higher purpose. It just sounds like Kool-Aid.
We don't demand surgeons to grind Leetcode for their interviews, nor we ask lawyers to solve trick gotcha questions.
Other industries recognize and value professional experience and are able to determine a candidate's quality with sane interview processes.
People complain about having to reinvent major discoveries in interviews, but in my experience this is very rare. The overwhelming majority of coding questions are more advanced versions of fizzbuzz, which merely require reapplication of common techniques. It is very frustrating as an interviewer if nobody can solve your questions, so the questions used will evolve to things that the typical competent applicant usually solves.
It's a bit of a strawman argument - I'm not aware of any company that hires purely based on leetcode results; they typically also include interviews focused on product/design skills and "culture fit".
Sure, the FAANGs and other companies aren't exclusively hiring based on time-constrained leetcode performance, but they are extremely biased towards it.
The coding sessions are pass/fail, you need to get to some type of solution that works. If you get most of the way there and were maybe just slow, it doesn't matter, you will not be hired.
On the other hand, companies are very flexible on system design and background sessions.
This lopsided process allows LC superstars to get through despite glaring deficiencies once they are involved in day-to-day work.
From the article "The simplest method of beamforming is delay-and-sum (DAS)". Measure distance from a point (couch) to each microphone, delay the signal in time domain by the time the sound takes to travel from point (couch) to microphone, and add up the signals. Pretty trivial. Basically you want the microphones receive the couch signal at the same time, even though they are different distances away.
Make sure there is enough variation in microphone distances for this method to be effective.
I agree, people's creativity in grabbing cash from VCs has no limits. You'd think you've lived long enough to see enough and the next day you get another surprise.
But maybe that's the way it should be - a lot of rubbish and among them one good idea that gets developed and actually make some positive change.
From my experience, it's still not a 100% replacement. For example, there are no drivers for a pretty common steering wheel (Logitech G923). There is a driver for an older version of the wheel that kind of works, but no TRUEFORCE support. And even then, you have to mess with some low level details to make it work, send magic values to the hardware on plugging it in.
I also noticed that games from Steam end up taking up substantially more disk space to the point where I can have only a few games installed on Linux.
And even the games without any special hardware dongles don't work so well as you imply.
I am new to steering wheels-not sure if this is the exact version because they mention xbox)? Try a distro with a very recent kernel (6.11; like Nobara for a gaming focused distro).
> I also noticed that games from Steam end up taking up substantially more disk space to the point where I can have only a few games installed on Linux.
Shouldn't be substantially more disk space. Would you provide stats?
Proton makes a Windows environment for each game as it installs those 3rd party libraries in the environment and that is used for disk calculations, while on Windows those libraries may be installed directly to the OS. Each 3rd party library and the shader cache is stored separately. This is my guess-I do not work on Proton.
> And even the games without any special hardware dongles don't work so well as you imply.
Anticheat and a few obscure Windows libraries are an issue. River City Girls needs some media foundation library or it does not show cutscenes. Valve is working on them.
I wish anticheat/multiplayer was universally an option on install. I don't play multiplayer games online, and often I'd like to be able to cheat in single-player, because I'm time-constrained and would like to cut out some part of the game I find less fun. Anticheat only makes my experience worse.
My steam system is somewhat questionable. it is netbooted, everything is nfs. This... well, it sort of sucks, I would not recommend it. But I love having the "one good drive" my NAS and then using that for everything, I am patient So I am sticking with it. But the "rebuilding shader cache". what is it doing? why does it take so long? why does it do it every time a launch a game? why am I offered a choice to skip it? why do I not notice any difference if I skip it?
I have a 10G connection to my nas but things are still much slower than I think they should be. I think it is related to poor interaction between nfs and a lot of small files. Otherwise, linux and proton are working great for games. When running games on windows I used iscsi for my games, and that worked well, I should probably do that on linux but I like having a filesystem on the far side instead of an opaque block device so I thought I would try nfs.
There are some weird artifacts in the system, I have to start steam twice, The first time it fails to connect to the webhelper, once everything is cached, it starts faster and thus works the second time, the shader cache takes forever and a day to rebuild, I can manually empty it which helps the next rebuild, I suspect many small files, having to check and replace them one by one, but I don't know, nfs tuning is somewhat of a dark art. Steam does not get along with my favorite tiling window manger(spectrwm) so I thought I would try that other openbsd floating window manager(CWM), steam is happier, but still has a few artifacts with menus, I suspect the CWM zero sized borders are the cause.
Overall, The experience is much worse than on windows, but that is because I made it that way, and so I am much happier than when I am on windows.
> But the "rebuilding shader cache". what is it doing? why does it take so long? why does it do it every time a launch a game?
Does that happen for every game, or just specific ones?
Asking because this is a behaviour I saw for a short time (week or two?) a few years ago, but these days it'll just do the "rebuilding shader cache" thing once for a game. Mostly after upgrading the Nvidia driver to a new release.
> I have a 10G connection to my nas but things are still much slower than I think they should be. I think it is related to poor interaction between nfs and a lot of small files.
That sounds more like your NAS is using hard drives (slow, especially in an array) rather than ssd's. Is that the case?
> There are some weird artifacts in the system, I have to start steam twice, The first time it fails to connect to the webhelper, once everything is cached, it starts faster and thus works the second time ...
Yeah, that really does sound like your storage isn't set up optimally, so is timing out as Steam loads into cache on your NAS. :(
With regard to the shaders, I actually started steam instead of going off memory, it is any windows game, so proton is involved, and the message is "processing vulkan shaders", This take a long time to finish(5 minutes for simple game "CW4", Long enough I always skip for larger game "satifactory") I just checked and opposed to my memory it does appear to cache them correctly, that is, only run the process one time. I cleared the cache at one point as nothing was progressing(too many skips, corrupted cache?), I just deleted everything under "steamapps/shadercache" and this appeared to help.
You are probably correct about the nas, it is full of wd reds, that is, the very slow supposedly reliable drives. I was prioritizing cheap bulk space when I built it, hoping the infamous zfs cache would save me. On your not quite advise I will probably add a ssd pool and see how that affects the whole system.
The nas is a 5 year old home built clone of a IX systems truenas box. 32gb memory.
Thank you very much for your kind words on the subject. It is more than I deserve for my screwball system.
No worries at all. I've used TrueNAS before, and you should be fine with adding an ssd pool. That'll work well with a 10GbE connection. :)
There's one thing you might want to try first though, which is to create an iSCSI volume from your hard disk pool and try running your Steam library from that instead of NFS.
iSCSI is a "single user at a time" access thing (unlike NFS), but the caching acts differently to nfs so you might get a better result. Or not. ;)
Am suggesting that as it could be useful to try prior to spending money on ssds. :)
The actual mounting of your TrueNAS iSCSI volume from a Linux box just needs the installation of "open-iscsi" (on Debian anyway).
You run the appropriate iscsiadm command to log in to the iSCSI portal, then mount it:
Heh, and now I just noticed your earlier message had this:
When running games on windows I used iscsi for my games, and that worked well ...
Ahhh well. If you want to try iSCSI for the Linux side of things too, then the above might help. :)
Using an ssd pool on the nas will be your best bet though. With a 10GbE connection it'll feel like a natively attached ssd, which sounds like it'd be a massive improvement for you. :D
I think the point OP was trying to make is that there's still a large amount of programs and devices that don't work on wine. Probably for at least as many people that "everything just works" for, the opposite is true in my experience.
I still don't get why wheels even need drivers at this point. It's 2024 and even with a legit version of Windows, there are all kinds of problems with all different wheels and all different games. We have a couple of axes and a bunch of buttons and some feedback. Steering wheels have been around for at least 30 years.
And if you DO have a driver, why does the fucking game have to have a list of supported steering wheels? Shouldn't that be abstracted away from the game? Isn't that the whole point of all those gaming and device APIs that Microsoft has built?
The experience with racing games isn't great on Windows, it's going to be worse on Linux where manufacturers put exactly zero investment into making it work and the crossover between sim racers and Linux developers is very small.
> From my experience, it's still not a 100% replacement
if it were a perfect replacemente, there would be no Windows.
for some it's good enough to endure the rough spots.
if you want to replace Windows and give yourself a gray area, and you can afford it, get a computer with 2 gpus and use a VM with VFIO and looking glass and you can contain its naughtiness away while enojoying it at native speed for gaming or whatever you want at 4k@120hz in a window or fullscreen inside Linux.
I'm not the poster who mentioned this, but I assume they're thinking about tax brackets. If you make a year's worth of income in a year, then take a year off starting in January, some of that income may be taxed in a higher bracket. If you take a year off starting in June, then you make 1/2 year income in one year and 1/2 year income in the next year, so there's a better chance that all the income will be taxed in lower brackets.
I don't want to undercut the very real physical toll of blue collar labor, but I'll note that the blue collar people I know who wore protective gear including knee pads, did things by the book, followed safety protocols and ate a healthy diet are doing so much better in late middle age than the ones who fit the construction worker stereotype.
That would be cool indeed. I haven’t thought about others creating Wireshark compatible baseboards but it’s an idea I can get behind! Thanks for your feedback.
Way too expensive for what? If you're making under the $40/h that they do and you're still young and fit then maybe you could switch? I hear this sentiment a lot though but knowing plenty of blue collar workers they aren't so desperate for bodies they're beating down the doors of middle aged softhands like us.
Heavy equipment operators start at around $100/hour where I live. A more extreme case is that I know a union AC tech in NYC who makes the equivalent of a Google salary (about $300-400k/year) and he doesn't pull a ton of overtime to do it.
>AC tech in NYC who makes the equivalent of a Google salary
My immediate thought was "thats crazy, capitalism is out of whack"
My second thought was realizing I couldn't rationalize Google salaries either. I could imagine a parallel universe where they make less than civil/mechanical engineers (~$160 TC). Supply and demand I guess.
It’s easy to rationalize Google TC by looking at their balance sheet. Thanks to the work of Google employees it basically prints money. It’s only fair that they share in this success, since if Google could find someone cheaper, it would.
I couldn't get past the first two paragraphs without the article losing all credibility.
> And although there are many different kinds of electric motors, every single one of them, from the 200-kilowatt traction motor in your electric vehicle to the stepper motor in your quartz wristwatch, exploits the exact same physical phenomenon: electromagnetism.
Well, basically your whole experience of the world is just electromagnetism, nothing more. And electrostatics is part of electromagnetism theory.
> In some applications, these motors could offer an overall boost in efficiency ranging from 30 percent to close to 100 percent, according to experiment-based analysis.
What practical electric motor is even close to 30% efficient? This is laughably low.
THey are in fact talking about absolute efficiency.
Conventional electromotors are designed with high efficiency... at a certain range of RPM and torque. For lower RPM's permanent magnet electromotors suffer dramatic decreases in efficiency and torque, unless you use a gearbox, which also produce heat due to frictional loss.
These electrostatic motors can achieve quasi reversible performance (i.e. asymptotically close to 100% efficient, not a violation of thermodynamics, since neither electrical nor mechanical energy are thermal forms of energy).
Turbosets also reach nearly 100% conversion efficiency.
Electrostatic motors started their niche with miniature motors, since they were more compact and it becomes progressively harder to miniaturize winding coils. Where a simple electrode surface would be more space efficient.
Pay attention to Macroscale in the title, its these miniature-niche low RPM motors slowly capturing larger torque and higher RPM lebensraum from the gearboxed permanent magnet electromotors.
I assume that they are looking at in laymans terms, and saying that if an electromagnetic motor is 80% efficient, an electrostatic motor could increase efficiency of the remaining 20% by 30% to 100% (86-100% total efficiency).
Not that it makes any sense, but I think that was their intention.
I wish people would just explicitly state they can't believe their eyes that 100% efficiency can be asymptotically reached, i.e. no known law of the universe prevents us from building electromotors that are 90%, 99%, 99.9% etc... absolute efficient.
Then we could just remind them that Carnot efficiency does not apply to electrical / mechanical energy conversion.
This is absurd, detecting that a wrong interpretation is inconsistent (because it would result in overunity violation of energy conservation) and instead of rejecting the misinterpretation of the parent, concocting an even more convoluted interpretation.
All because people refuse to believe 100% energy conversion between electromagnetic domain and mechanical domain is impossible?
Turbosets have been doing this for a long time already, the Carnot efficiency limit does not apply to non-thermal energy conversions...
Also, piezoelectric motors are a thing - sure, they're super tiny and for specific purposes (very fine movement), but beyond the fact that they use electricity to generate the vibrations that they then use for movement, I don't think it would be considered "electromagnetic".
Actually, in that same vein would be a Nitinol or similar "shape-memory alloy" motor - run power through it to have it change shape, then remove power to let it relax.
So yeah, unless I'm misremembering or grossly misusing terms, "piezoelectric" and "thermoelectric" electric motors both exist...
> I reread the paragraph around it several times and still have no clue WTF they are trying to say.
some advice: next time you don't understand some article, consider the possibility that it is not a case of:
> Yeah, that was some poor quality for IEEE. I'm pretty sure they confused "electromagnets" and "electromagnetism."
but that the problem might be your lack of understanding that you already detected. it's a press article, it can't teach you an undergraduate course in physics condensed to a few paragraphs of text...
I have taken several undergraduate courses in physics. If you have some clue what they are saying with:
> In some applications, these motors could offer an overall boost in efficiency ranging from 30 percent to close to 100 percent
please illuminate. Brushless DC motors across a wide variety of applications already exceed 50% efficiency. Perhaps there are applications in which they cannot reach 50% efficiency, so a 100% boost in efficiency would be possible.
The key is “in some applications.” Not in all applications. There are areas where brushless DC motors are inefficient, these are better in those areas - my guess is low speed, high torque use cases.
A) that's the sort of thing I wish the article had mentioned.
B) I know it's research, but low speed high torque situations usually involve a reduction gear-set. They make some surprisingly compact ones these days.
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