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If you have a strong network of support for housing and/or returning/new health issues, there’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of that to pursue your passion while you’re young. That being said: In other industries, this is known as “being paid in exposure”. It rarely translates into real monetary value, and it’s usually a sign that your client/startup would like you to work for free. Your time is worth more than you think. So by all means go for it if it seems exciting, but if any any point it doesn’t pass the vibe check, walk out sooner rather than later. You can get exposure to robotics elsewhere.

I just finished almost 5 years out of the corporate world after a pretty rough family loss. Many months of it were busy fighting personal fires. Many months were explorations into other career paths. And then when things stabilized and I realized my motivations, many months were spent hacking.

I only really regret treating the time off as more of an issue than it was. I was convinced by month 10 that I had failed to meet some imaginary, impossible deadline I had set for myself against the imaginary, impossible expectations of imaginary and impossible people. That cognitive distortion only got in the way of the inevitable and only possible resolution, which was a better sense of my own motivations and a broader horizon to sail toward hope again.

I would agree with the advice of everyone here, and add: If you’re stressed about the opportunity cost of lost earnings, weigh it against your sense of value for the time you’ll take off, whether it’s in the skills you’ll be building, or the new experiences, or the renewed mental health. And above all, talk to your friends early and often. Even if the roof is on fire, especially when the roof is on fire.



To continue your analogy, 1000 other potential robbers are trying to get in every day, you are virtually always on holiday or otherwise outside the house, and the window was voice-activated. The intruder said a well-known special phrase which caused it to open. The expectation is that you've checked the windows, door, lock, and any other potential openings yourself to make sure they can't be entered like that. So yes, I'd say the person who doesn't take the valuables and run is doing you a huge favor.


I think Lytro lost some of the magic for me when I realized it was just utilizing a depth map to generate an iris blur. Looks like the same deal for the 3d effect, around edges you can see reconstruction artifacts. I'm impressed by the fact one lens can capture depth, but with two lenses at a narrow aperture they could create the same effect in higher resolution and quality.


My understanding is that the camera's file format is essentially a stack of JPEGs and a depth map. That's how the camera can do it's own refocusing without needing a huge processor. It's not generating the image from the light field, it's combining regions of a series of JPEG images.

I was really disappointed when I found that out. I thought the software on the computer was to process the raw data, but I guess not.

I still might be interested, but the the form factor is odd. Worse is that since they decided to go with that shape, they had to make the screen very very tiny.

It's an interesting product, considering it's the first of it's kind on the consumer market. I hope there is a version 2, because I think it could be very interesting. If it could shoot video, that could be pretty fascinating.

Heck, tell other people how to use the format. A series of focal planes and a depth map? Seems like hackers might be able to come up with some pretty fun stuff.


This is actually not the case. I wrote a tool to pull apart the file format: https://github.com/nrpatel/lfptools

The image is stored as a raw Bayer array on the camera. The conversion to stacked JPEG occurs on the computer. The camera has a pretty beefy DSP on board to do live refocusing on the preview.


The camera's raw format is indeed an entire light field (I've used nrp's tools, they're great). The camera import software creates a layered JPEG out of the raw data for uploading and sharing, since the size and the amount of math involved in refocusing the raw image on the fly is significant.


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