231–240 of 794 posts
Worked for a client via freelancing. Built 3 projects, all failed. He likes to follow the trends, first SaaS, then crypto/blockchain, and now AI. He apparently raises money, pays himself and builds bullshit projects. That's it. But while doing so, he does everything to look like a legit startup. Ngl, he was my first major client with whom I gained a lot of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a hype…
Working for big tech, our Director wanted to add "ML" to one of our workflows no matter what. He identified a "problematic step" and a team of scientist spent 1 year coming up with a ML model to replace this step. I was asked to deploy this solution in production. When we tested the model (which somehow hadn't happened before) we found that the workflow was 5% quicker, but the results were more than 10% worse, and wa…
Do you think the director was truly convinced AI was a good technical solution despite the evidence? Or is it possible they were participating in an emperor-has-no-clothes situation, i.e. the CEO has mandated all teams implement AI somewhere , anywhere ?
My team worked on a project for about 18 months. I won't go into detail about what it was, but it was (and still is) badly-needed.
We worked with the top interaction and graphic design folks in the world for the aesthetics and interaction. We had many meetings, flying the whole team to San Francisco, several times a year.
When the project was in its final testing, the company got cold feet, and canceled the project. I had to lay off two of my engineers.
It would still, to this day, be the best of breed. It was designed about twenty years ago, in the early aughts.
After acquisition - we were handed down the order to migrate to AWS.
This was after (in the mess of the merger) the colo contracts were basically ignored and not renewed. Once someone within the company realized the issue, it was the 11th hour.
After many, many attempts to discuss our (Operations team) concerns, we abandoned our protests. It was clear the new CTO wouldn't cave and sign the contract.
Some superficial testing was conducted and the order came down to move...NOW.
We began moving hundreds (maybe thousands) of very resource hungry DB servers first (there was no way to use something like RDS without major app/config changes).
Once the AWS bill came in, the CFO blew their lid and within 90 days we were migrating BACK to our DCs (and the millions of dollars of hardware we left idling).
Oh I thought this was gonna be that like the entire product / company / idea was useless, not just like a small number of weeks' worth of work. I've probably created a hundred or more proofs of concept for things that turned out to be a bad idea. Say these averaged out to a week or so of work each, and that's about two full years of useless work. And that's ok! Most stuff you work on will get thrown away before you l…
I'm trying to teach myself how to sniff and interact with i2c hardware on consumer products. I'm doing this by attempting to connect my standing desk to the internet. Literally the whole goal is to have a "make desk go up" and "make desk go down" button in my Home Assistant. The real goal is learning to sniff i2c though.
https://github.com/jhallen/i2cmon
You capture the serial using minicom log to file or similar, then you can peruse the log at your leisure.
I spent the better part of a year re-documenting a piece of medical device software that was going to be taken over by a different division of the company. We didn't build any new code, just documentation. This was originally supposed to take 3 months and was going to be done by a single contractor who was supposed to just update documents with new templates. When we were just a month from completing this project, th…
I am writing a solution manual to this textbook, by solving EVERY DAMN exercise and writing it up in latex. It is EXTREMELY time consuming. The actual solution manual is already available online. I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will ever get an interesting job because of this effort. Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few years. Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhap…
What book? I always thought that doing this with Evans PDE would be the best possible way to learn the subject, but I am not skilled or dedicated enough to do such a task.
I am writing a solution manual to this textbook, by solving EVERY DAMN exercise and writing it up in latex. It is EXTREMELY time consuming. The actual solution manual is already available online. I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will ever get an interesting job because of this effort. Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few years. Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhap…
That reminds me of a story about a friend of mine from high school. In fourth form (age 14) he did every exercise in our maths textbook and sent the author a list of corrections to the printed answers. I don't think this was very well received by the author. That friend went on to miss 7th form year, got preferential entry into a maths degree, and had his degree by the time I finished year 1.