Moritz Klein is the reason I got into synths, his YouTube videos[0] are a really accessible intro. I’m super excited for this, we need more accessible prototyping platforms/tools. I ended up going down that rabbit hole myself a few months ago and built this[1] but it would be a pain to commercialize.
Two very very deep rabbit holes in the last 6 months:
- Designed/built a small USB controlled pan/tilt camera head to control the mirrorless I use as a webcam (couple of servos, gears, belts), and then designed/built a custom ortholinear keyboard with a joystick to control the camera (custom PCB, CNC'd aluminum case, etc)
- I'm a pretty big runner, built my own web based calendar UI that integrates with Google Calendar where I can type in workouts like "1 mile warmup @z2 + 5x(30 seconds @ 6:00/mile + 0.5 miles recovery) + 1 mile cooldown" and this gets parsed/total weekly mileage gets tallied. The next step down this rabbit hole is building a small iOS app to automatically generate Apple Watch Workouts using WorkoutKit.
Very interested in your first rabbit hole. Which servos did you use? Which gears? For me, it would be to use with an action camera. How many hours did you spend on it before you were satisfied? I've seen some arduino-based projects to do that, but servos look quite bulky... and with the right gears, very little torque / power should be necessary. But i have not spent the time yet.
I've had a similar weather experience where my internet connection dropped when it was cold. Turns out some water had seeped into the optical fiber connector, when it froze it broke the connection, and it would recover when it thawed. This one was a nightmare to troubleshoot.
In my experience, the most effective way to minimize the odds of a company never responding is to identify someone who works at that company who either you know personally (best) or they know someone you know and you ask for an intro. This allows you to skip the online application black hole. As a corollary, invest in your network and keep good relationships with former coworkers.
Yeah, I really can’t imagine cold applying for a place at this point in my career. I got my first job via a recruiter, every job since has been working with people I worked with previously.
This person sounds like they have been in the field for quite a while (since the dotcom bubble, at least), but still mostly did cold interviews? I have been in the field for a bit less time (a little more than 15 years), but I have dozens of former coworkers I would go through before going to cold interviewing. I wonder why they didn’t rely on their network more.
Anecdotally, I've been through ~10 employers in my ~30 years and about half were "cold applies" and the other half I was recruited in by former contacts. By far, the better experiences have been with the cold apply companies than the "already had a foot in the door" companies.
> Most "AI"s would be better called "Machines that use tons of statistical learning to decide their next move". ChatGPT (and similar AI) were trained on several hundred gigabytes of data, so it has a lot of raw data to train on.
Whenever I read this argument I ask myself with a certain amount of dread: "what if I'm nothing more than a machine that uses tons of statistical learning to decide my own next move?".
Put differently, it's unclear to me whether we have compelling evidence that we humans, in fact, are "better" / "more intelligent" than those LLMs.
>"what if I'm nothing more than a machine that uses tons of statistical learning to decide my own next move?"
What if you're not even determining your next move? Sabine Hossenfelder did an episode on Superdeterminism that considered this possibility - that you have no free will, that your every decision and action was fully determined at the moment of the Big Bang, and that your conscious mind is merely observing them as they happen but not actually causing them.
If our consciousness is merely observing the universe, why do our physical mouths talk about the consciousness we experience? It sure seems like our consciousness is affecting the material world.
That's not really what the idea of determinism excluding free will is about: Let's assume for a second that the Big Bang is the singular starting point of the universe. The Big Bang causes the first things to exist or move. Everything else exists in a cause-effect-relationship with this first move, and we could imagine the whole history of the universe as a directed graph of causes and effects, with Earth, living beings, brains and consciousness being part of this inconceivably complex graph.
If that was the case, then it makes sense that we do not have free will in the Christian sense, we are not really responsible for our actions. If it isn't the case it might well mean there are things that aren't caused by anything, which would be really weird as well.
Can we agree that consciousness is outside the realm of mathematics? That, while there could be a formula that determines what our conscious experiences should be, the fact that we actually experience them, as opposed to them just existing in some abstract sense, is not mathematical?
So if the behaviour of our universe can be described entirely mathematically, isn't it weird that it physically contains this comment about how we know that we're in a universe that contains non-mathematical stuff? It's of course possible. But I find it strange.
> If it isn't the case it might well mean there are things that aren't caused by anything, which would be really weird as well.
Isn't this necessarily the case for anything to exist? Is it more strange for there to be exactly one thing without a cause (the initial conditions of the universe), or for things without causes to just be a regular part of the universe we live in?
> Can we agree that consciousness is outside the realm of mathematics? That, while there could be a formula that determines what our conscious experiences should be, the fact that we actually experience them, as opposed to them just existing in some abstract sense, is not mathematical?
There's certainly a difference in our feelings, I'm not sure if a mathematical description of experience has to be incomplete - but I agree that all attempts of doing so have been complete failures.
> So if the behaviour of our universe can be described entirely mathematically, isn't it weird that it physically contains this comment about how we know that we're in a universe that contains non-mathematical stuff? It's of course possible. But I find it strange.
It is, but this kind of self-referential process isn't unheard of, in fact we are currently consciously discussing consciousness. A popular sentiment in some sci fi circles (fe. Babylon 5) would be to posit that life is the universe's attempt to become conscious of itself. If true, it would do worlds for us to regain the self-importance lost from Galilei and Darwin.
> Isn't this necessarily the case for anything to exist? Is it more strange for there to be exactly one thing without a cause (the initial conditions of the universe), or for things without causes to just be a regular part of the universe we live in?
You are absolutely right, I think we are generally much more used to the "first mover" concept, since it is the basis of most, if not all religions. Personally I find the concept of truly random events to be very unsettling. A possible out could be that the causality graph is not acyclic, that is, that future events can inform the past, and that for example the "last" thing to happen in the universe "caused" the first.
While at first seemingly depressing, I find the concept actually quite comforting.
Regardless if "free will" exists or not, it seems quite obvious to me that none of us chose our genetics nor the environment we grew up in (or to even be born at all). These two things dictate our entire lives. If that is the case it makes very little sense to carry guilt, regret, remorse and all kinds of negative baggage we hold on to.
While I don’t share the dread, I’ve come to a similar mindset. As a parent of small children I’ve come to the simplified mindset that one of humanities “super powers” is pattern recognition. Yes it’s well documented and researched but seeing a toddler piece together the world around them is quite an impressive thing to witness. (Edit for clarity)
These resonate a lot! Tiny projects are very rewarding, because you get something that works pretty quickly, this works well with my short attention span. Couple of ones I did in the last two weeks:
- A little mac app that reads my calendar, grabs the next 2-4 events and sends them over to my Vestaboard.
- Setting up Cloudflare as a failover load balancer to reach my home network (I have two ISPs for redundancy), this involved writing a small script to get the WAN IPs out of my Omada router and using that as a custom command in ddclient to update the DNS entries for both uplinks.
Over the past few years I’ve thought about building something similar to Home Assistant, but for human centered data and APIs vs home centered. Essentially a shared bus on which different data sources could be plugged into a standardized format, on which people could build dashboards and automations. Never got around to doing so, because sidetracked by other projects, but if others are interested in teaming up I’d love to work on something like that (email in profile if anyone wants to start this)
A few weeks of regular use and practice will overcome muscle memory. You just have to force yourself to never touch the old layout during that time. I think that's where most people stumble, because adapting a new layout while trying to do work is kinda frustrating.
[0] https://youtube.com/@moritzklein0
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/synthdiy/comments/14roaib/synth_bre...