Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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5

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm some form of science hermit, so I measure these things by degrees of separation. So I meet people by proxy. Some long after they are deceased, I suppose.

I have two degrees of separation from Paul Erdos (and of course his mother), several prime ministers of Vietnam, Kevin Mitnick, and Keanu Reeves. Three from John Von Newmann and most world leaders.

I also probably have an Erdos-Bacon number. It would be quite large though.

Are you in Quebec? The CEGEP system there is specifically a great and cheap way to try out multiple career paths. It's like a mix of trade school and the freshman year of every university faculty.

It's still a system that sort of pushes you into university without any experience of what doing a real job is like, but it's at least a good way to explore the academic side of a wide variety of subjects.

This is a major failing of the school system.

The best I can recommend is that you try out jobs now -- but maybe skip anything 'fake' like online courses unless you think they prepare you for what's in the next sentence. Go find people professionally doing a thing you might like, and try to work with them, somehow. Internships, volunteer work, organizing events, etc. File paperwork and make coffee, if that means you get to see the work actually being done.

Barring that, do the thing yourself if possible. Publish the results. All code goes on public repositories, all stories should be submitted to magazines or literature groups. All songs written must be sung in public. Get certified for CPR and first aid if considering medicine, and volunteer using it. Get an amateur radio license and build a radio. Look at jobs on a freelancing platform, and just do them on your own to build a portfolio (maybe actually apply for the jobs, once you have a portfolio). Not every type of job can be tried out this way, but many can.

You're going to get rejected a lot, you can't just show up with a resume and demand a job (people who claim this works are weird). People who create and do nothing will mock you sometimes. A lot of jobs want young people 'out of sight and in school' too. However, this kind of disappointment happens to all of us at some point anyway, so may as well get it over with.

If you're lucky, you've got a few years between the age of say 14 and 19 where you're not expected to support yourself financially but your brain works as well as it's ever going to. While it's useful to get good grades while you're in school (although they are useless afterward), I think it's a mistake to focus on that at the expense of actually trying to do things. A college degree is too big of an investment of time and money to go into blind.

If you're in a situation where you do have to support yourself or your family before finishing school, then the necessities of life obviously take precedent. I won't pretend I have a good solution to that difficult situation.

Learning things quickly.

It's totally its own skill, and you can learn to learn faster. What skills are useful changes with time -- the ones used in your career now might age like milk for reasons beyond your control.

There's some part of my brain that applies display:none to the upvote/downvote function on every platform.

So if I don't vote on your content it's not because I hate it. My brain is just wired to automatically edit out anything that's not content. Mostly this means ads, but voting features seem to have been caught in the net too.

Haha, you got me there. So I guess you could more correctly say 'a font with serif for titles only'.

Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:

1. Don't use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
2. Break up content using horizontal rules

   <hr>

   and various headers

   <h1 to h6>

   You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
3. Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
4. Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
5. My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I'll go back and make titles serif only.
6. Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)

I only concern myself with 'how'. 'Why' is a question for philosophers and cowards, of which I am neither.

This struck me as super weird too. It still 'feels' wrong to use a whole CPU instead of a few logic gates or a 555.

It took some getting used to. Maybe soon I'll dive into the world of one-time-writeable Chinese MCUs (the ones I normally use have rewriteable flash). Those are 9 cents a piece!

If they get any cheaper I'll start using them as ballast!

Yeah know what you mean. However these days I can generally get a microcontroller for a lower price than a cds photo resistor, and with a 100 year expected lifetime -- also usually it consumes less power too.

I could do it with a phototransistor more easily than a photo resistor. That would be a solid competitor to using an MCU in terms of cost, performance, and power consumption in a simple system!

Anyway in practice I rarely get to use analog or discrete components professionally. The MCUs are just too damn good.

Ho Chi Minh City. I immigrated here a bit over 10 years ago. Air pollution is a relatively new issue here. 5 years ago it's was not so bad, but there are more cars now. In Ha Noi it's typically worse. Both places have less air pollution than say, Beijing, but it's still not exactly fun during my daily commute.

I plan to move to the countryside when I can afford to, I have some minor respiratory problems that make the air pollution rather unpleasant.

Sure -- and that's an easy way to do it. However if I'm going to make it automatic, I like the elegance of using an LED as it's own sensor for how bright it should be. It also uses up fewer microcontroller pins -- for example, I can use pulse width modulation to give the LED a default brightness. Then during the OFF part of the cycle, reconfigure the pin to act as an ADC and make a measurement of the ambient light and adjust the duty cycle as needed.

It's the kind of optimization I enjoy! Another neat trick is using the watchdog timer and counting CPU cycles to allow really low duty cycles for lights you want to keep very dim, without using a resistor to limit current (you are instead using the IV curve on the datasheet and a little math). I use this plus magnets and coin cells to make little lights I can stick to things to avoid hitting my head on them, usually doorframes (I'm very tall and live in Southeast Asia). They run for 3+ years off the cell, and have configurable brightness!

In my city, it's been normal to wear a mask when outdoors (especially when driving a motorcycle) for something like 5 years as air pollution worsened. It doesn't help that much, but it's a bit better than nothing.

So I wear one now, just like I did before Covid.

There's a whole amazing secret world where our devices come from! I'm glad just to have a little window in on it.

I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it's a cheap way to show the state of a system.

The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There's no specific amount of current that produces light that's bright enough in a lit room, but isn't too bright in a dark room.

I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I'm in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won't think of specifically doing this.

Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.

All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I' don't like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there's a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.

I suppose you could model the Earth as a thermos, or some type of vacuum flask.

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, specifically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester).

Next, that I can buy and program a computer for 0.30 USD that's half the size of a grain of rice (ATtiny10). There are cheaper too, but that's the one I like.

Finally, on to the horrifying: Boltzmann brains. The idea that given a reasonable interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics, and long spans of time, the most common form of brain in the universe ought to be one that forms due to random fluctuations. It exists for long enough to have exactly one thought (e.g. recall a false memory), then dissipates.

This ought to be by far the most common form of conscious mind in the Universe. In a sense, you could say it 'blows' the general case of minds.

Since you are a mind, statistically, you ought to be a Boltzmann brain. You may not be, but are unable to prove otherwise, even to yourself. So either we have some things left to learn about thermodynamics, or the most probable outcome at all times is that you cease to exist immediately after having your current thought (although I hope you don't). Sleep tight!

Hm, uniting people in general is like herding cats. Uniting hermits? Sounds hard. I'll stick to science :D

Being mercenary is largely overrated -- better to try and live a calm and happy life filled with friends and family.

Many opinions have been offered on whether the most valuable attribute in warfare (and by this I mean business) is loyalty or bravery, but few people are willing to admit it's actually just hunger.

It probably is at that retailer -- although that's not that good of a price for a good pan locally.

The Vietnamese market is super demanding when it comes to these things, it really drives price down and quality up. I bought a large, quite good, enameled cast iron pot recently for less than this pan costs :D

No, and my boss is an unsympathetic jerk who makes me work long hours, often for no good reason.

(I own the company)