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To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

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Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#151

Post by accurrent »

dbcurtis wrote: post #79
lmilcin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble seems that there aren't many people that get software AND electronics AND mechanics AND on top of that marketing, right. It is rare enough to find people with good electronics and software skills.

After working in robotics for a few years, I came to the realization that people (applies especially to managers) don't recognize when they are bringing the wrong instincts to a problem. If you come up through software, you develop one set of instincts, EE another, and ME yet another set of instincts. When making a decision, step one must be identifying the appropriate set of instincts to bring to the problem. Once u…

I'm in robotics and I agree with this. ME people are 100 times more thorough in checking things are done correctly than EE or SWE. Its very hard to make changes in ME. Also people heavily underappreciated the difficulty of the field.

From a SWE perspective, Robotics Engineers need to know physics and math than the average SWE learns.

Interestingly almost all the successful robot projects I've worked on seem to follow a waterfall process. You keep working on it till it works. After its ready don;t change anything.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#152

Post by p_l »

mrgordon wrote: post #67
gowld wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the old MIT. For the past 15 years MIT leadership has been dedicated to destroying the creative hacker spirit.

Melodrama much? It’s still one of the most creative and amazing places to meet hackers (or become one) in the world

A lot of MIT "myth" for me, daj when I was trying to get in, was that they would do a lot of things internally and dogfood - for example, project athena, using that as basis for many other things, etc.

Recently I heard from some fresh MIT grads that a lot of that is now pushed to outsourcing and same cookie-cutter approach.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#153

Post by eru »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #85
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. Having worked in this space, the failures usually come from lopsided teams. Too many startups try to treat these products as technology products with a side of building materials, assuming that the technology is the hardest part. In reality, the technology part is easy. The most difficult part is manufacturing and shipping reliable mechanisms at low cost. It can be done, but the mechanisms and mechanical p…

it's kind of interesting that places like University research groups (including MIT in the early days of computing in the 50's/60's) recognized this need and had dedicated machinists to build a lot of the mech that they needed. If you've ever watched a talented smith work a lathe - wow, they are the true wizards!

These days you can scratch that itch on youtube.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#154

Post by lmilcin »

dbcurtis wrote: post #79
lmilcin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble seems that there aren't many people that get software AND electronics AND mechanics AND on top of that marketing, right. It is rare enough to find people with good electronics and software skills.

After working in robotics for a few years, I came to the realization that people (applies especially to managers) don't recognize when they are bringing the wrong instincts to a problem. If you come up through software, you develop one set of instincts, EE another, and ME yet another set of instincts. When making a decision, step one must be identifying the appropriate set of instincts to bring to the problem. Once u…

This is even worse with managers. Managers have whole lot of other problems to deal with and what they frequently fail to recognize is the need to separate areas where it is up to manager do act on their "instincts" (which I call experience) and where it is up to engineer to do their job.

Unfortunately, the power assymetry between managers and engineers frequently manifests itself as you have described:

-- managers trying to understand everything through the lens of their past experience,

-- engineers trying to conform to managers (ie. using manager's language to formulate problems and solutions)

-- managers dismissing/prioritizing down areas, ideas, problems that they are not familiar, promoting/prioritizing up where they feel they have good understanding,

-- engineers responding by doing the same (ie. focusing on where they feel they will be rewarded by manager).

-- managers hiring/promoting based on their assessment of the candidates/employee competency in the area of expertise of the manager, because it is easier to rate candidate/employee competency if it is in your area.

-- managers failing to improve in areas where they are completely new. Maybe because people in general tend to want to improve in areas they already know. Maybe because they don't want to be seen as noobs making silly mistakes with experts around, and so trying shun entire area as less important so that the discussion can focus on where they are comfortable talking to experts.

-- so on...

So where a team works on a product that requires software/electronics/mechanics, the team, regardless of its initial composition, will over time get skewed in the area of expertise of its top manager.

Same goes for startup -- duo of guys who know software and electronics will inevitably look for products in the areas they know best. Not being able to quickly rate how difficult something is, mechanically, is definitely scaring a lot of people away.

I also noticed people dealing with software and electronics rarely mingle with mechanics/material experts which I think might also explain a little bit why there aren't too many enterprises that join those areas well.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#155

Post by jimmySixDOF »

Mizza wrote: post #107
an_opabinia wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - forget about your "global library" dreams. I don’t know, if you’re basically saying your stylized, hyperbolic, generalizing, imprecise, inaccurate discourse is better than theirs just because it’s negative and theirs is positive... I would rather have the positive?

I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying very specifically: The material conditions of people alive in the west today are significantly worse than they were in 1999, largely as the result of the ascendance of the digital platforms and economic arrangements that organizations like MIT and Berkman were taking money to promote. Ordinary people today are more lonely, overwhelmed, polarized and impoverished. The "new" econo…

You capture the symptoms of technodystopia well but seem to say the cause is due more to the techno than the dystopia.

Hyper Globalization, the Post Colonial re-emergence of Asia, and the forgone peace dividends of Forever Wars are not due to technology.

MIT & The Labs, for all their shortcomings laid bare by many in these comments, are contained within a larger society experiencing larger forces at play on par with the early industrial revolution where urbanized mind numbing factory exploitation existed but also eventually led to an empowered middle class with more leisure time, disposable income, and upward mobility than at any time before.

Perhaps the last 20+ years of technical progress efficiencies were unjustly captured by return on investment capital instead of by increasing everyone else's leisure time but your average western person who no longer enjoys a 1999 quality of life still has a whole lot to be thankful for even if they choose to enjoy the hard fought for luxury of taking it all for granted.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#156

Post by [deleted] »

mjevans wrote: post #128
tfigment wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much this. Last time my dad visited he had 4 pill boxes: 7am,10am,2pm,6pm. We had to color code so he knew which ones at which hour. They had to be portable, at least 10 and 2 did. He had slight dementia so he would get confused about colors and sometimes the day. Even worse was trying to decipher the instructions for each medicine to refill the boxes especially after some would change doses after initial couple…

It's really sad, but the automation for this is a pharmacy that creates custom plastic sealed single-dosing packets. Some people, most older people, are on THAT many meds and just need to take the next one off the roll.

[deleted]

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#157

Post by ascar »

dhosek wrote: post #96
dbcurtis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After working in robotics for a few years, I came to the realization that people (applies especially to managers) don't recognize when they are bringing the wrong instincts to a problem. If you come up through software, you develop one set of instincts, EE another, and ME yet another set of instincts. When making a decision, step one must be identifying the appropriate set of instincts to bring to the problem. Once u…

This is one of the cool things about the Harvey Mudd College Engineering major. Rather than doing Mechanical Engineering, or Electrical Engineering or Cheese Engineering or whatever, you just do Engineering. Graduates leave with a full toolbox of skills. I kind of wish when I was an undergrad, I hadn't had such an aversion to practical knowledge (I started out majoring in Physics/English, then Math/English then dropp…

That might be a start, but higher education only scratches the surface of on-the-job skills in engineering. You learn the basic tools, the way of thinking and the skill of acquiring additional knowledge. You get near to zero experience on real engineering problems as encountered in business.

So in the good case this degree might broaden your horizon and teaches you that you don't know enough and in the bad case it might make you overconfident in even more areas while having even less knowledge than from a more focused degree.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#158

Post by ptx »

accurrent wrote: post #151
dbcurtis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After working in robotics for a few years, I came to the realization that people (applies especially to managers) don't recognize when they are bringing the wrong instincts to a problem. If you come up through software, you develop one set of instincts, EE another, and ME yet another set of instincts. When making a decision, step one must be identifying the appropriate set of instincts to bring to the problem. Once u…

I'm in robotics and I agree with this. ME people are 100 times more thorough in checking things are done correctly than EE or SWE. Its very hard to make changes in ME. Also people heavily underappreciated the difficulty of the field. From a SWE perspective, Robotics Engineers need to know physics and math than the average SWE learns. Interestingly almost all the successful robot projects I've worked on seem to follow…

> waterfall process ... keep working on it till it works

I thought waterfall was to plan it out in detail, then do all the work according to the plan despite realizing that the plan is wrong, then finally, after disbanding the development team, test it to see if it works?

That's obviously a caricature, but if you have the feedback loop to see if it works while you're working on it, you might also call it agile.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#159

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

distances wrote: post #150
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know I'll be actually surprised if that isn't a product, because that seems "As seen on TV" level amount of effort. Have some hopper with 7 compartments, put a disk with a hole underneath it, and hook it to some 3 cent digital clock module such that spins it around 50 degrees or so everytime it rolls over. Build the whole thing out of plastic, throw it at some factory in China, and before you know it you'll be se…

I'm no market expert, but wouldn't a pill dispenser be a very niche product? Most people aren't on any medication and thus won't need one, at least until reaching old age. Though the number of old folks is getting larger, so maybe that's a market by itself.

Basically every person over 70 takes some pills in the West.

I know for a fact that my parents and my wife's parents would all love this.

My mother was a nurse, so she handles it better than most, but she still spends an hour a week on it.

Re: To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

#160

Post by tonyarkles »

bsder wrote: post #26
zxcmx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a comparison between "CNC retrofit" and "CNC from the factory" machines. What are buildings after all but big machines around us. CNC retrofits (even when successful) tend to be never ending projects. This is partly because the kind of person who retrofits a machine is seldom satisfied with it. But also one tends to end up replacing the whole machine over time - the motion and way the machine gets used is diffe…

> CNC retrofits (even when successful) tend to be never ending projects. This is partly because the kind of person who retrofits a machine is seldom satisfied with it. There are two primary reasons for the infinite refit: 1) No definite project for the CNC If you have a definite project, you have a deadline and want that project done. The project also has a monetary implication so you have a budget. I bought a Formla…

I’ll just throw this out here for people interested in 3D printers: the Prusa i3 mk3s was a very similar experience for me. I actually wanted the kit but no localish vendors had any, so I ordered the preassembled version. Open the box, set it on the table, load filament, and go!

I’m probably ordering a Formlabs Form 2 for work in a couple of weeks because of some of their specialty resins, but did want to point out that around $1000USD can get you a workhorse if a printer!

Another option that I’m also looking at is the Prusa Mini. We have a bunch of small parts to print, and getting an army of smaller printers to work in parallel looks like a significant speed improvement.

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