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nifty tool!

> NOTE: It does not control any actual cloud resources nor does it generate cloud formation or terraform code.

would be kinda cool if it could, though


Yep. Or implemented an interface that let someone else build that.


"After receiving some bad news about my wife’s family, I suddenly realized that my future life had just been predetermined indefinitely. Due to the situation we’re now in, combined with my values and ethics, my actions for the foreseeable future are already decided."

But you have no idea how your life will turn out. Something could happen that would cause you to lose your entire family. And if that happens you might even say "look, here's another thing preventing me from achieving my full potential". All the while you're dismissing the life you're leading because it fails to live up to some imagined expectation you have in your mind.

Instead of lamenting how reality does not match expectation, consider immersing yourself in your reality. Look, hear, and touch the rich detail that every single moment contains, feel what it feels like to be a person in your exact life circumstances. You will never experience this collection of thoughts and feelings in this precise moment in your life ever again.

"No such thing as a life that's better than yours (love yours); no such thing, no such thing" - J. Cole


When the operator was demonstrating "perturbations", they were reaching into the scene while the robot was very close to grabbing objects they had their fingers near - isn't this dangerous? What if the robot clamped down on their fingers?


This looks like a cobot (Collaborative robot). They are meant to work alongside humans - chance of injury is low because their speed/maximum force exerted is limited.


> What if the robot clamped down on their fingers?

Sometimes risk needs to be taken.


It’s easy to use tongs or other manipulators to interact with scene objects from a safe distance.

This isn’t demonstrating good robot safety, someone will get hurt, and likely already has been, at least to minor degrees.


Imagine you’re working at a startup and trying to solve a tough real-world problem by creating software that involves writing some CRUD APIs. You bring on someone to the team who says, “we gotta stop writing these pointless CRUD APIs and write compilers instead.”

I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I think this actually well illustrates the central tension between engineers who are more interested in the business problem and ones who are more interested in solving technology problems. I know that when you get to a later stage as a company you need both kinds of engineers, but at an earlier stage company you have to ensure all of your engineers are of the former kind and not the latter kind or you will probably not succeed.


I work as a consultant, and we are also looking for talented people interested by solving business problems.

We actively avoid the technology-focused kind, because we know they will not be able to adapt to the work we do. To be honest, we write a ton of CRUD apps, but anyone who would come and say "let's write a compiler" is guaranteed to get funny looks. Even if you are extremely talented and can deliver to the same pace as we traditionally do, you will probably fail to consider one or two "little" things that would turn out to be fundamental requirements! Nobody is impressed by half-working cleverly written software.


It sounds like you're categorizing me as one of the people interested in solving technology problems more than business problems. In fact the opposite is true, to the extent that I've become a go-to person for questions on the domain I'm working in, even without any programming context around it (e.g. a senior technical review of an Excel document in the domain). I've become a recognized subject-matter expert in multiple business domains. If I'm not focused on solving the business problem, I don't know who is.

In fact it seems like it's quite the opposite: people who think in terms of loops, conditionals, and objects seem to be happy writing repetitive CRUD APIs all day. People who think in terms of business logic want to write business logic. You don't need to write your own compiler (it's weird that this became the thing I supposedly suggested), but you do need to develop good abstractions and data structures that fit your domain to get your code looking more and more like just a spec in the domain language.

The "don't reinvent the wheel" people who want their programmers to just bang out repetitive API code all day aren't any closer to the business logic than I am. They just don't understand what makes good software, and they don't realize that the wheels that are available to them out of the box actually suck for their task and always need some modification.


There’s a character on For All Mankind (the tv show) who sounds like she could be based on her.

I wonder if that character was based on her or if there are others at NASA who came from a similar sort of background.


> I think people need to realize you’re getting a terrible deal when you give Lambda School x% of your earnings at your first job

To people who have other options, yes, it's a bad deal. But to those who have no way of navigating those options, like the people mentioned in the article, fundamentally changing your options landscape in exchange for a fixed percentage of an income bump you never would have realized otherwise is a fantastic deal.

I say this as a largely self-taught programmer who at one time considered giving away a huge chunk of 2 years of salary in exchange for a programming bootcamp + apprenticeship type of opportunity (this was a few years before bootcamps became a mainstream thing). It was extremely tempting and many times on my self-taught journey I second-guessed whether I could figure it out on my own and TBH, without an extremely high level of self-confidence in my intelligence and scrappiness, I probably wouldn't have figured it out on my own.


Yes, but this is where politics comes into play. If you're a Google/Amazon/Samsung/any big player, why would you stick to the open standard when you could just change to a proprietary standard for more lock-in and profit?

With a blockchain-based standard, you could make vendor buy-in permanent and enforceable. The only way that one of the big players could win in this new normal is if the products on their proprietary standard are better (in merit) than the entire marketplace that implements the blockchain standard.


but why would they agree to that blockchain standard in the first place? it’s the same issue


You could do that with any widely-adopted standard. No blockchain required. Remember that even IBM at their late-1980s juggernaut status couldn't put the genie of the ISA bus back in the bottle.

I think the trick to lasting open standards is to provide only a MVP ecosystem at launch. No one vendor is strong enough to close the platform behind them. Again, like the IBM PC, their product both needed and spawned a galaxy of add-on and compatible products, providing enough of a force to protect the open standard.


Perhaps this is too simple of an explanation to be true, but maybe the lack of capitalization comes from people on the internet typing internet without capitalization, and then the “important publications” all followed suit eventually. Sort of like how no one really uses “LOL” instead of “lol” even though it’s an acronym and of course acronyms are supposed to be capitalized.


> acronyms are supposed to be capitalized.

Style guides have different rules. Here's BBC saying they don't capitalise all acronyms: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/collegeofjournalism/entries/8f7c...

And there are words like laser or Benelux that tend not to be capitalised even if the style guide recommends it.


Based on the title of this thread, I was disappointed that the title of his memoir did not end in an exclamation mark, but then was happy to discover that it is indeed titled "Memoir!"


Only a few of the games had bang in the name, e.g. Sid Meier's Civilization or Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon are bangless.

Still, I find the cover of this book so delightful!


SMAC is also bang-free (and the best games IMHO).


Some how Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was a 4x game that had one of the most interesting stories / atmospheres in video game history, even if it was just from a few clips and quotes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24OXzIRIiMQ


Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri


Flip the "i" in "Centauri" upside down and there's your bang.


“Sid Meier's Alpha Centaur!” sounds like a game I would play, but also like a brand of ebook smut.


There can be only one (centaur).


I don't know why I love this comment so much.


True. But we were all thinking Pirates! :P


because you wrote Futurama and referred to it so many times in this reply, when I skimmed the thread I read the word in this post and the one above it as Futurama. it took me like 3 re-reads to realize the original did NOT say Futurama.


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