Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

Slartibartfast

Haha, I have a similar problem. I had (very carefully) salvaged the battery from a crashed drone. They were higher energy density than anything I could buy in my country at the time. I rebuilt battery packs from them.

Now years later they're not so good and they have a semi-permanent home in a fireproof enclosure :( I should have thought about disposal first. Oh well, lesson learned.

Judge weak people by their natures. Wiser ones, by their goals.

Good life advice from Francis Bacon :)

Our inability to learn from other people's mistakes is staggering and bizarre.

Or more poetically, I think the thing I understand least about humanity, is why it understands itself so poorly.

The officer would likely look up, tell you to get out, and go back to their work unless there was some obvious reason to arrest you.

Unless they felt like issuing a fine of some type for wasting their time.

I read the first page of hacker news twice a day. Once in the morning, and once at night. Usually nothing comes of it, but sometimes some new tech shows up with immediate application for one of my clients. Or someone posts something really insightful that makes me think.

If I want to play a game on my phone for 15 minutes? Fallen London. Great writing, tons of content.

I (strictly) have no social media apps on my phone. My rule is to decide how to spend time, then do it -- never ever just do things to 'kill time' (it is, after all, time that kills us).

If I don't know what to do, I study. I pick a subject and try to learn it to an 'average' level of competence. I typically do this ~2 hours a day, and it's been my conscious habit for approximately 25 years so far. This is hard, but possible to do on a phone. Sometimes I'll do research on a phone, and save the links to read properly on a laptop later. If I scroll on a phone, it is an act of hunger and hope.

People sometimes tell me to 'live a little'. I don't think they know the difference between living and dying. Every day, I become more. My neighbors spend their days at home drinking and eating -- every day, they become less.

Yup. Got one right next to the laboratory. One day, you could always forget to turn off a soldering iron!

Also -- if you're doing modern electronics development (or RC cars, or just have a lot of old phones), boy will you accumulate bad lithium cells. Fire-safe bags for them are really cheap!

Sure. Go ahead.

Long story short though, my field of study disappeared in a puff of legislation, then the field I pivoted to also disappeared in a puff of legislation. So I decided to try and immigrate to a growth economy. I also taught myself software and hardware engineering. After visiting China and Vietnam, Vietnam seemed to have substantially clearer laws regarding foreign owned companies and immigration, the language didn't make me functionally illiterate, and 12 years ago the economy hadn't boomed yet, so the timing was better. The 5 year plan also had specific incentives for people like me.

The rest is mostly paperwork and immigration compliance (which you can also ask me about if you like). Currently there's a trend where calling yourself a 'digital nomad', 'expat' or 'remote worker' means you ignore the laws of the country you're a guest in -- I'm not one of those (haha, I have dark stories about that crowd). I've seen so many of those come and go, that I don't remember their names or faces -- only their misplaced optimism.

Haha wow. Times have certainly changed!

This city is nearly unrecognizable from 10 years ago.

Haven't found an option that does this with any degree of permanence. Always re-enables updates after a short time without prompting. Then reminds me every 3 days to set up a MS account.

Not very concerned -- it's not worth my time to fix. I don't have free time.

Well, a lot of labor goes in to making things like electronics. The supply chain and regulatory compliance are very complicated, and the margins are very thin (highest I've seen is 15%, maybe exceeded by some exceptions like Apple but usually it is less).

So small changes to the hard costs, distribution, tax status, labor costs, shipping costs, duties, or regulatory burdens would affect the end price. For electronics at least, it's a pretty complex equation.

Anyway, I've got good news! You've got it relatively easy. Here in Vietnam, land prices are much higher. Want a reasonably modern house 90 minute drive from HCMC? If you are university educated, and so is your partner, and you have no kids, and no luxury expenses... I worked out you could afford it, if you save for about 40 years and prices don't go up. No yard or anything -- just a 100 square meter plot fileld to the brim with a concrete house.

Food is cheap here, at least! You would be shocked at land prices in Asia though.

I moved my business off MS to Linux a few years ago, and unplanned maintenance just... stopped being a thing. It was surreal. I expected something to not work or require lots of expert configuration, but nope. Most people here already use cloud applications for work anyway.

Never thought I'd see the day! I did make a whole bunch of HD images just in case though :D

Oddly enough, pretty much any good content written on Medium.

It's weird to me that we accept 'reinstall the whole operating system' as a fix, it's so absurd. I've literally never had to do that with any other operating system.

Yes -- frequently, but this is a bad thing.

The issue was that their automatic updater makes my computer unable to boot, due to some compatibility problem with an update. Which it keeps trying to apply. Then every time it fails, startup repair or some troubleshooter rolls back the update and it works again for a while.

Since I cannot turn off updates, it's stuck in this loop forever. However, I can turn off my computer via the power button (sending shutdown signal, not hard power off), and this avoids applying the update most of the time.

This is an older computer that is only used for games, and a slicer for my 3D printer. I've decided to leave it in this state -- at this point it's more a piece of performance art than a reliable computer. I moved my business and my clients away from MS a few years back.

This cost me a lot of easy money though -- there's no maintenance work for me to do and I've had to move on to more productive things.

Vietnam. I've never seen someone with a gun that wasn't army, police, or at an Olympic event. Civilians can only own shotguns, and even then under a lot of restrictions. It's quite uncommon but I've heard of companies with rubber plantations out in the middle of nowhere having one gun on site. I've only heard of it being used to kill the odd wild boar that accidentally wanders into the office building.

There are some illegal guns from time to time, but not that many. It's something I've only seen on the news.

The current situation suits me just fine -- at our population density, I'm not comfortable with gun ownership being widespread. When you put enough people in a small space, there's always someone angry nearby, always someone celebrating, being born, dying. With everything happening everywhere all at once, adding guns to the mix would not be great, I think.

Also as one of very few immigrants to Vietnam, I am already seen as a target for thieves. People imagine I must be magically very wealthy or something -- I'm not. I came here with nothing and built a company, to progress to maybe middle-class. I live in the slums quietly like a normal person.

I would be OK with the police or army running shooting ranges where you could rent a gun to practice target shooting. Maybe that already exists, for all I know. I haven't really checked. There are archery ranges though, this is good enough for me :D

On the other hand -- more or less all citizens are trained to service an assault rifle. The means disassembly, cleaning, maintenance. My wife was fastest in her university class. We just don't own guns.

Standardized exams have a long history here. They were initiated in 1075 to determine entry into the civil service under the Confucian model. Not sure what it was before that.

That got suspended in the early 20th century (e.g. during the French colonial period), and was replaced later after with modern written Vietnamese. University enrollment has gone from about 3% to 30% in the last 20 years. The education industry is booming currently.

Whether there are opportunities for all these graduates is an open question! Hopefully there will be.

Ooh, now that's an interesting engineering problem.

I could design the myoelectric sensor interface, but they'd have to learn to lucid dream to use it. From there pushing it to RSS is easy.

So after watching yet another time travel movie where there's a stupid closed time loop plot -- e.g. someone invents time travel, goes back in time, and gives themselves the idea to invent time travel... a colleague was wondering if there was a practical way to prevent time loops from forming (if we hand-wave away the inherent silliness of traveling back in time). That gave them an idea for a hard-science-fiction story.

The key element is the construction of a device that will produce different outcome if you go back in time and run it again, e.g. via nondeterminism of quantum-scale events like tunneling, entanglement, and so on. You would need to then buy lottery tickets based on the output of the device, then if you win, buy more tickets the same way. If you win the lottery N times in a row, you assume you are in a time loop and devote the resources you have to subvert it (while also continually buying more tickets).

If you can force a new stable state, e.g. by allowing the traveler to form the loop as before, but creating a requirement for your input... or putting it within another loop, you are now a very wealthy and powerful person.

Then you would ask a few friends to log on to a social media platform where you are have some level of anonymity and disseminate the method in a subtle way, for example in a question asking for story ideas. That way the idea is present in other minds and a removal job becomes more difficult, as it's not clear where the idea originated.

If you were fulfilling this request on Lemmy, someone would be able to go to your home instance, and find plans for such a device. It would probably look a lot like a particle detector that you could build at a low cost. They would have published first light on the detector a few weeks from when you read about this story idea.

This is story about you, who will have participated in the history of the future.

Can you find us?

Ah yeah I remember those days. The progress KiCAD has made is nothing short of amazing.

I used to like the code simulator in AVR Studio 4, but since acquisition by Microchip it's borderline unusable and crashes constantly.

Haven't heard of iCircuit! Maybe I'll give it a try.