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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Sort of. It just depends on how much the person needs to control the vehicle.

    The easiest example I can think of: Imagine lorries traveling along a motorway, and they can do that autonomously because it’s “easy”, and when they get into a city a remote operator needs to drive them manually into the depot.

    Each operator could easily drive 4 or 5 lorries, if only one of those is entering a city at a time. Instead of needing a driver per truck, you only need drivers for the maximum number of trucks that might be entering cities at the same time. For a fleet of 30, that could be 5 drivers.

    For things like mining, where safety regulations mean that you want to avoid having people in the mine as much as possible, even having one driver for every haul truck (so yeah, regular driving with extra steps) could be economically profitable if it means you can reduce some other, potentially expensive safety controls.


  • So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn’t do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired “career managers” whose only skill was to organise things?

    I’m obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don’t have much time for that and there’s no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I’ve usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.

    What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.


  • I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?

    The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.

    My point to all of this - “middle manager” is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of “middle manager” hoping they’ll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.










  • My partner and I got invited to a wedding with a funky, everything-goes sort of dress code. For £50 we bought enough clothes for two blade-runner-esque outfits (we added some bits of our own so the ensemble wouldn’t look too cheap) and a big goose plushie (bigger than an individual pillow). The goose was £14 and not cheaply made at all! That one was genuinely a nice suprise.





  • The problem I have is that this covers a very niche use case for me. I want it to be a tablet - lightweight etc, but not be constrained by mobile apps. I don’t want iOS’ version of lightroom, I want to have Darktable and Rawtherapee and a full fledged Visual Studio code, and well, you get the picture.

    I don’t need a laptop because I also have a MacBook Pro - I went this way because Apple’s processors are too far ahead to ignore. So I can take AMD but my opinion is that intel’s offerings are just not competitive and I’m not buying any of them.

    This leaves me with very few options - I’d be keen on buying an AMD-powered Ubuntu tablet but they don’t seem to exist.

    And also my surface works perfectly fine, so spending a non-trivial amount of money and ewaste just to change OS seems rather silly. I’m sticking to that one for now.



  • If only I could install it on the Surface Pro X…

    Damn, they worked so hard to gain goodwill in the last few years and it seems they’ve set out to destroy it in record time.

    WSL and WSL2, Android Apps, working with Qualcomm to get their ARM computers to a credible state, the new Powershell and the push to open source so many things…

    And in the past 12-18 months they’ve been crashing and burning, either backtracking on those things or by starting new initiatives to become scummier and scummier. TPM, Copilot, the ad situation, abusing their position of power with office/teams, the giant safety holes in the Recall feature… But it seems every day there’s something new in the news. It’s never ending.



  • In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

    Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

    To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

    As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for “grip” reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).