Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

Haha yeah. Supply chains for software are a mess (just like most supply chains), and the product with the worst character support will define the limits of everything else :(

You could verb meme. They memed. She is memeing. He will meme.

Another descriptive candidate could perhaps be 'echoing'. It evokes a rapid repetition without processing. Other uses work nicely too -- e.g. "the notes of the student echo the notes of the teacher, not having passed through the minds of either". Or "they simply echoed the meme they had received".

I immigrated to Vietnam. It was... difficult, but I eventually made it work. I am happily married and run a small company.

Samurai Commando Mission 1549 (spoilers for an obscure movie follow)

The Japanese self defence force gets sent back in time to defend the future from the japanese self-defense force sent earlier back in time who is trying to derail history for... no reason really. This is apparently destroying time itself by altering history!

They stop them by blowing up a bunch of stuff and leaving tons of modern tech (including a nuclear weapon, helicopters, tanks, tons of automatic weapons, and an entire oil refinery) in feudal Japan. The movie suddenly ends on a freeze-frame with characters smiling, but none of these issues addressed, which I always understood to mean that they failed and time was destroyed, leaving them forever frozen in that moment.

The movie was unexpectedly hilarious overall. The guy that hosts Iron Chef is in that movie, and is the best character.

Sure. Both parents die, neighbors / other family / friends might take you in. They might do this formally or informally (e.g. legally adopt you, or just raise you without doing the paperwork), to give you a better life than in an orphanage. Or maybe some aunt or uncle can't have kids, but wanted to. It's not that uncommon, I've met a few people in this category.

Vietnam has had a fairly turbulent history until fairly recently (quite an understatement). I don't have many stories from those less peaceful times (my ancestors here are through marriage), but my impression is that it's the sort of situation where adoption would have had to happen pretty often.

Oh one tangential tech story : You know all those scammy blockchain "projects"? Boy, they made a lot of t-shirts in Vietnam. A lot of the leftovers made their way to orphanages (a side effect of the economics of manufacturing is you always have extra, often containing nonsense text), so it was pretty common to see orphans with Bitcoin-whatever t-shirts for a while. So at least one OK thing came out of that technology.

I live in a country that is both Buddhist (so vegetarianism is fairly common, although veganism is seen as some weird foreign thing) and nominally communist.

Adoption is fairly common and discussions around it are also common. I know several people who were adopted and talk about it fairly casually, e.g. there is no stigma.

(we also have orphanages, often run by monks)

You're setting them up for a lifetime of being unable to fill out online forms (because supported characters ,minimum field lengths, &c &c always seem to be implemented poorly client side or in the DB). Some required by the government or bank or airline or police. Forcing them to go through a long manual process, if it even exists.

Then staff will make a typo in the name every time, and be locked out of their own bank account / government portal / hospital records because it doesn't match their ID. It will take months to fix each time, and half the time they will make the same mistake again, or a different one.

I go through this enough as an immigrant, and my name is 4 letters long and they are all on every keyboard. Having a name foreign to your country of residence sucks.

When it doubt, I use Noto Sans.

If I'm feeling fancy (almost never), I'll choose a serif font for section headings.

Indomie! It's not instant ramen soup, exactly.

You cook the noodles, drain them, then mix the flavor packets in. I prefer using half the salt powder package.

They are the pretty much the best instant noodle, and available in the West too. Seriously, go try them sometime!

If I'm too lazy to cook, I open a can of fish and wash a pile of cucumbers to eat as side dishes with the Indomie.

That's a bit overkill in terms of processing power, but it will definitely work! It's actually powerful enough to do machine vision and mapping!

One thing to remember is that the current draw for the Pi 3 will be much higher than the Pi Pico. Some students have had battery issues using motors + the Pi at the same time. They got the batteries in a sketchy industrial market here in VN though, so they were definitely not rated for very high current. This is one reason I use the Pi Pico and low power 6V motors -- it runs all day of a single very questionable lithium cell. Boots in milliseconds too, vs. much longer on Raspberry Pi + Debian, at the risk of comparing apples and oranges.

Another thing that was annoying, is to remember to put nonpolar capacitors across your motors if building your own motor controllers (most modules you buy will do this for you). Otherwise, noise from the e.g. brushed motors will probably make the Pi reboot constantly. I had this problem pretty bad -- it worked fine hand-soldered but when I got the boards from the factory it would fail often unless I put the caps in.

Anyway, if you're short on time and want to get the project done, there's also a thing called the Motorshield that will let you very quickly build a robot from the Pi you have. There are also LiDAR shields if you want to try mapping and fancy autonomous navigation. If you want cheap, you can't beat this motor controller module though (and you'll just need 1 for a differential-drive rover):

https://hshop.vn/products/mach-dieu-khien-dong-co-dc-l9110

You can generally find it anywhere in the world!

No room to live, and no room to die / Hell is a kettle with a concrete sky.

Life in a big city in the developing world. Makes you hard like hunger, sharp like regret.

Well, the false-positive rate for people claiming to be time travelers will have been pretty high, if we are going to have been honest. At least in the reverse direction.

I'll also have concluded that the verb tenses will have been miserable. We will have needed a less cumbersome language. Maybe I'll have solved that, someday.

I mean try untangling 'You will have had to have had had had traveled'. Bit of a pain to discuss iterations of a loop, and that's not even that many deep.

I'm an even more unlikely thing! I wasn't born with any Vietnamese heritage -- I immigrated to Vietnam and integrated. I've met as many as five others like me in the last decade or so!

The RMIT forum isn't specific to art, it's just a job forum where you can post jobs available to students:

https://rmitvn.careercentre.me/employer/default/RMIT-Careers-Portal

I've used it once to hire a software developer. It was much better than VietnamWorks, the big online HR thing in those days. I don't like VW much.

BTW you should have a budget, scope, and timeline when you post a job. It will make it much easier to hire someone, e.g. how many illustrations, what format (Width x Height), what style, when do you need it done by, and a pay range. I would estimate at less than 80$ or so, it would not be worth the trouble for most illustrators who are any good. Notably, most RMIT students are from wealthy families.

If you can read/write Vietnamese, let me know and I can maybe point you toward better resources. English-language-only leaves few options here.

For increasing the number of robots in the world, mainly!

I create things for filthy lucre all day at work -- "those must stoop, who gather gold". In my limited spare time, I mostly do the opposite -- I create things mostly just to create things, I don't worry about practical applications :D

I do design robots for STEM education at work though, and it shared a lot with those designs..

Well, you can have one now, if you want!

I usually build around the Pi pico as a brain, L9110 motor controllers, N20 DC brushed motors, and a standard 18650 lithium cell, and some generic BMS + switch mode voltage converters. From there you can either add sensors and make it autonomous (more challenging), or just control it via your smartphone (easier). You can either make it omnidirectional with mecanum wheels, (more expensive) or turn/forward/back motion only with a differential drive.

Along the way you'll learn to solder and code, if you don't know already. It's a suitable beginner to intermediate project. Most of the work is knowing what cheap parts work well together (read and interpret lots of datasheets), actually assembling and using the robot is pretty easy. Usually I can keep cost under 50$, but parts are cheap here -- certainly under 75$ in the West though.

Not having a Facebook profile. I've had someone initially refuse to associate with me on the basis that they couldn't investigate my life beforehand.

I just laughed and asked them how they managed to survive before the Internet (we were both old enough). We both got over the weirdness of the situation, built a robot, and were friends for a while before they moved away.

Well, here in Vietnam a lot of art students and graduates would probably be quite happy to take this on.

I recall RMIT has a local job forum, for small jobs for current students and alumni. The instruction is all in English, so communication should not be a problem. Maybe other universities have the same.

Or maybe an art school in the Philippines where English language instruction is also common? I bet they have job forums too.

In my workplace we've got a 3D designer or two, probably not ideal for your task though :(

BTW using AI to generate an image as an artistic brief is a great application that supports both human and machine artists. This is my biggest use of the tech in production so far -- really great especially when language barriers are present.

I saw some dumb movie about a time travel loop a few months back, I don't even remember the name. The plot was so uninspired, I started to think about how to prevent time loops from ever occurring, so at least that kind of lazy writing won't invade nonfiction. It sort of snowballed into a hardware design.

It's definitely the dumbest reason I've had to build a particle detector. The idea is to generate output that would be different in every iteration (via no-hidden-variables + a tunneling-governed radioactive decay), to determine whether you are in a loop via a simple statistical test.

If that poses a problem for something you will have been working on, just reach out by December 1st, 2023 with the one-time-code "19 8 9 2 2 15 12 5 20 8 ". I will have recognized that, and we could have planned around what your needs will have been.

Some industrial / automotive MCUs have 1024 words of memory, so you really need to be efficient.

Assembly language is fun to learn, fun to use, and still relevant professionally.