If you work in VR odds are you’ve made yourself vomit via code at least once.
I made a janky AR rig with a webcam taped to an Oculus DK2 as part of a hackathon. My code ran at 15fps. after taking off the goggles, my vision was 15fps.
Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
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Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#32A long time ago in a university far-far away, I stayed up for several days straight writing code for an aerial robotics platform. I was so focused on writing this code that even my dreams were trying really hard to be expressed in perl. I woke up extremely tense and in a sweat because I couldn't figure out how to express a strong emotion in perl.
As for the harm, well ... that code led to a marriage which catastrophically failed. Lesson learned: keep code and emotions away from each other.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#33Not my own code, exactly, but back in the day I was trying to get a balky dot-matrix print head working and accidentally sent power to it while I was holding it.
I had a row of dots tattooed on the ball of my thumb for a year or two afterward.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#34I once programmed an arduino driving multiple solenoids with felting needles at pretty high speeds (wool felting uses needles to push wool fibers together into shapes), all pointing to the same target area, at slightly different timings. In the perfect case, it worked really well. Felting needles however bend and break with heavy use, leading to colliding felting needles projecting toward my hand. Ouch.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#35A few years ago, I ordered the cheapest six-axis robotic arm from ebay for about $100 that came with basically no software or motor-driver boards, so I did it all from scratch with a PCA9685 board, a basic kernel driver and some very hacky scripts from user space. One day I had some friends over for a glass of wine, and wanted to show off my creation. I invited them into my "lab" and placed my wine glass down on the…
I used to do robotics, I can tell you that the fact that it was the cheapest or the most hacky does not matter in the least. Everything can and will go wrong, even the priciest and well documented part.
I used to have multiple clamps around the controller, message bus, the firmware and also a physical barrier, and yet would not feel safe with my fingers or person around moving parts.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#36If you work in VR odds are you’ve made yourself vomit via code at least once.
If anyone has trouble with normal (not-obviously-broken) VR, I recommend Yoga for Building VR Tolerance. https://web.archive.org/web/20190813004505/http://elevr.com:... The research organization ran out of funding but IMO they had some groundbreaking stuff. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive at least.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#37I learned that you could pipe anything to any device. Decided thirteen-year-old me was an avant-garde artist who would pipe my hard-drive to my speakers and create beautiful works. Was that just a `cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/snd` or something like that?
Incomprehensible shrieking. Later that year, someone posted about the thing that would become the Internet phenomenon called 'Anonymous'. I am certain that idea was birthed from the wailing portal of hell I summoned that day.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#38Is there a reason why you might want to mix endianness within a file format? Wouldn't it just be extremely error prone as demonstrated in the article?
Yeah I was kind of confused about this when I was reading through the spec trying to figure out what went wrong. I wanted to touch on this in the blog post, but I wasn't able to find a good resource explaining the advantage for mixing endianness in a file format.
Because the important thing about those fields is that they aren't really big endian at all, they're clearly ASCII characters. Why the spec you have decided to say they were big endian is beyond me.
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#39I've melted a table once. Was testing a heat controller, and had the debugger left on.
When the laptop the debugger was running turned off, it also stopped the code from running on the microcontroller, leaving the heater on without adding any new controls.
It was a good learning to make sure there's a watch dog circuit, and that the microcontroller is much less trustworthy than the fpga
Re: Have you ever hurt yourself from your own code?
#40Yes, I setup a DDP to figure out how I can make my own TNF blockers using nutrient intake optimization.... yada yada yada. Immunomodulators and the immune system are really complex and now I have 2 detached retinas.
Can you explain more about what you did and why?
tl;dr - too much modafinil.
Yes, I have Crohn's and I do not like to take the meds or listen to the doctors. This is NOT AT ALL SOMETHING I RECOMMEND, PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT IT.
Crohn's is an auto-immune disease and the main class of drugs that is used to treat Crohn's like mine (long term) are called TNF inhibitors or TNF blockers.
TNF alpha triggers the production of several immune system molecules, including interleukin-1 and interleukin-6. I realized I can track this with basic inflammatory marker test, I also realized that I could use diet to impact my markers. So instead of taking what is referred to as a Biologic e.g.: Adalimumab, Certolizumab etc... I started using NIO to try and get the same effect.
I got a pill making machine, and learned how to make supplements but they were not working well enough so I knew I needed something stronger. Then I found this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32311496/ I think it was on HN but I do not remember for sure. I order some modafinil and worked it into my mixture.
I do not manually create my mixtures because I do not want to know which version I am on, I want my symptoms to go away and that should be the trigger to tell me if its working. So I have a 14 vile setup with an audrino all wired into my press and based on my food diary (e.g.: nutrient intake) it decides how much of what should go into a run. e.g.: how much burdok, tumeric, serrapeptase etc...
I got something wrong and ended up adding far too much to a run of pills, I didn't realize this until i started ti see floaters in my eye and I checked to see how much moda was left and it was far less than should have been left.
Then i did some reading and a side effect of taking too much moda can be detached retnas, since I have all the symptoms: Floaters, stars and peripheral flashes I am assuming that based on the timing I now have detached retnas, I also found my mistake and essentially no matter where my markers were I was getting about 600mg of moda per day. Which is far more than should be taken. This was for about a 1 month period.
I have fixed the issue now and I have a much more sophisticated pipeline but I will have to get this fixed.
NOTE: I am not a doctor, I have no college education or anything like that. I just like bio-hacking and decided to pursue my moonshot during the pandemic. I can explain more or provide pics and vids to explain further if you like, email in profile.
I am currently writing up a 100% independent non peer reviewed case study to document everything I have done and the results.