It’s funny, when I’ve seen this demonstrated, it’s basically literally impossible to get the right result because the test maker doesn’t define an instruction set that you can rely on. They will deliberately screw up whatever instructions you give them no matter how detailed. A computer has a defined ISA that is specified in terms of behavior. A compiler transforms a language with higher level abstractions into this low-level language. I’ve never seen this “test” done with any similar affordance, which doesn’t really teach anything.
Oh I think this lesson teaches quite a lot. Maybe your instructor is deliberately screwing up, but perhaps other end users are just not paying attention, or are missing assumed knowledge, or are feeling particularly adversarial on the day they need to follow your instructions.
One of many lessons that can be taken away from this exercise is to understand your audience and challenge the assumptions you make about their prior knowledge, culture, kind of peanut butter, et deters.
I suppose. My original comment should have been “doesn’t teach you how to program.” It would be great to do it the normal way first, then point out that it’s impossible to do without a contract of behavior in place, then start creating that instruction set and building up from there. It is in fact possible to program computers, so this method would teach what makes programming possible.
One of the best parties I’ve been to in my life was the reception after a funeral for my wife’s great-aunt. Generations of relatives and family friends, some of whom hadn’t seen each other in thirty years, took over their house from after the ceremony at noon until 10pm that night. It was a rager.
I built a variant to very successfully estimate state of charge for a large battery pack in a production hybrid-electric vehicle.
Often some tweaks from the standard formula are necessary to account for real-world non-linearities, and some creative design work is required to define states in such a way that the Gaussian noise assumption can hold well enough.
Wrightspeed did this a while (10 years?) ago. It looks like they have since pivoted to fully electric powertrains for buses, but when they first started they were doing range-extending hybrid powertrains for heavy trucks. I found an article the describes the system at the time:
With a range-extender hybrid system, you can keep the turbine closer to its peak-efficiency operating point, since it only has to handle steady-state load while the battery takes up the spikes. Not sure how it would do up a long grade, but I imagine they designed for that.
I’m excited about Slint. It’s great to have a solid Qt alternative for embedded UIs. I doubt I will need to use it on a MCU rather than an embedded Linux processor, but even so, it’s also nice to know that it’s lightweight.
"How to See, How to Draw" by Claudia Nice is a good book for learning to draw in a self-guided way. Doesn't take much money -- $20 at any art supply store can get you a decent drawing book and a decent set of pencils.
and Patrick, I can say that you were the first heavy influence on me that pushed me in the direction of solo entrepreneurship. From your writings and podcast I found Brennan Dunn, Amy Hoy, Jonathan Stark, Philip Morgan and others who have inspired me to choose and pursue my own path. Thanks for all that you’ve done, and I aspire to leave the kind of mark on the world that you have left.
reply