You can root certain models of robot vacuums and then ssh into them. Most run some variant of linux. Then just install tailscale. There are a few blogs out there of people who have done it[0][1].
It's taking a cloud-based product, de-clouding it, and then connecting it to your own private 'cloud'. Pretty cool all things told.
This is in my family too. One person always had a tendency of being overly worried and after children moved out and social life thinned or a bit, this became more prevalent.
After years of trying to push that person towards trying out new things and enriching their life, I kind of gave up. You simply cannot convince someone about a medicine if they don't feel there is a problem. Still it's hard to see believing the person could be enjoying life more, especially during their retirement.
Someone posted a link on HN years ago to a set of google docs titled the "Mochary Method", which covers all sorts of management skills just like this. I have it bookmarked as it's the only set of notes I've seen which talks about this stuff in a very human way that makes sense to me (as a non-manager).
My roommate and I are still working on Tornyol, our mosquito killing drone! It uses ultrasonic sonar to detect mosquitoes, and missile control theory to ram into mosquitoes and grind them in its propellers.
Our target platform is a 40 grams tinywhoop so it’s safe to fly everywhere and makes almost no noise :). A Roomba for mosquitoes!
The main plus compared to traditional systems is that a drone can cover an enormous surface in a short time compared to static systems or man-portable insecticide spraying. Our goal is to be competitive with ITNs against Malaria.
“The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.
It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they arc, or when taken universally.”
"People seem to think that having the internet at their fingertips means they no longer need to know anything themselves. But in order to understand things, you need a lot of knowledge readily available in your head. Only then can the mind make the connections between the different points of data and come to new insights. This cannot happen when that knowledge is external, in a book or on some Wikipedia page that you have to look up first."
What is also useful to keep in mind is the tendency to recreate your primary family life in the workplace. So if you had critical controlling parents who never valued you and everything you ever did was worthless, then you'll tend to select for those places and it is often done outside of awareness.
Was your primary family spent being valued and appreciated? Then you'll select for that and when people start to not value you, you'll intervene earlier to correct for it and you'll have the skills to do that.
Did your parents respect your boundaries growing up? Were you able to erect strong boundaries and have people listen to you when they over stepped, or were you constantly put down and your wishes ignored? A lack of skills in erecting proper boundaries and then maintaining them by being in the goldilocks zone of not too soft and too hard can lead to issues in the workplace and personal life.
First step is bringing this in to awareness so you can look back with hindsight, next step (the hardest) is mid-sight, you know you are doing or not the doing the thing you need to do but can't do it or don't know how. There there is foresight, hey I normally do this thing that's not good for me here, I had better do the thing I need to do to keep this situation positive.
Keep this mantra in mind:
You are the only in charge of you and your emotions, no one makes you do anything, and you will protect yourself.
Awareness + skills = ability. Psychotherapy (not counselling) is what you need to look out for. Combine that with Transactional Analysis and it makes you very very effective.
Fools, Dad's Army, 'Allo 'Allo, Red Dwarf, Men Behaving Badly, The IT Crowd, Father Ted, The Office, Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Bottom, The Young Ones, The Thick Of It, Alan Partridge, Some Mothers Do Have 'em, Mr Bean, Yes Minister, The Inbetweeners... British (and Irish) comedy was the best in the world for three decades.
You don’t just beat around the bush here. You actually beat the bush a few times.
Large corporations, governments, institutionalized churches, political parties, and other “corporate” institutions are very much like a hypothetical AGI in many ways: they are immortal, sleepless, distributed, omnipresent, and possess beyond human levels of combined intelligence, wealth, and power. They are mechanical Turk AGIs more or less. Look at how humans cycle in, out, and through them, often without changing them much, because they have an existence and a weird kind of will independent of their members.
A whole lot, perhaps all, of what we need to do to prepare for a hypothetical AGI that may or may not be aligned consists of things we should be doing to restrain and ensure alignment of the mechanical Turk variety. If we can’t do that we have no chance against something faster and smarter.
What we have done over the past 50 years is the opposite: not just unchain them but drop any notion that they should be aligned.
Are we sure the AI alignment discourse isn’t just “occulted” progressive political discourse? Back when they burned witches philosophers would encrypt possibly heretical ideas in the form of impenetrable nonsense, which is where what we call occultism comes from. You don’t get burned for suggesting steps to align corporate power, but a huge effort has been made to marginalize such discourse.
Consider a potential future AGI. Imagine it has a cult of followers around it, which it probably would, and champions that act like present day politicians or CEOs for it, which it probably would. If it did not get humans to do these things for it, it would have analogous functions or parts of itself.
Now consider a corporation or other corporate entity that has all those things but replace the AGI digital brain with a committee or shareholders.
What, really, is the difference? Both can be dangerously unaligned.
Other than perhaps in magnitude? The real digital AGI might be smarter and faster but that’s the only difference I see.
Here's a model that exists in Germany, which I like:
You can present a business plan to the state's investment bank and apply for several financial aides, including:
* 1.5 years of universal basic income for you plus up to 2 other people. It's a tiny amount of money, but the point is to free you up to invest your actual time an money into the business. You do not have to pay this back.
* up to 20k EUR in "consulting fees", for which the bank will contribute up to 50%. Again, you don't have to pay it back, but obviously you need money for them to match.
* discounted loans, amount depends on business plan outlook
I've worked with an accelerator that helps founders write the required pitches and plans for this program. And while the majority don't make it (because they mostly realize their idea won't actually hold up to business planning scrutiny), some do. And those don't become hyperscaling unicorns, they become normal companies, growing organically as stable, solvent employers in the region.
Every once in a while a VC would stick its head in and encourage the startup to take on VC funding, and for an even smaller percentage (one in my time doing this), this worked. But for me, the organic growers are the best success story.
It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:
- People experience their thoughts very differently
- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.
I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).
It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.
That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?
Interesting read. It puts into context the importance of luck in life. There is a group of people who become oppressed to the point that it becomes unbearable and they have a choice either to die by revolting too early without critical mass, or by letting themselves starve from the increasing weight of the oppression. In the case of the opioid epidemic, people have been/are driven to insanity and commit suicide by drug overdose.
You really don't want to be in that early oppressed group.
IMO, it's because human systems are over-systematized and over-regulated. It always causes oppression. Some group of people has to pay dearly for all the structures that are imposed on them. Laws and social structures essentially never work for everyone equally; at scale, many laws systematically steal wealth, power and opportunities from one group and give it to another.
Even the most well-meaning laws basically end up stealing from certain groups of people for the benefit of others. Especially on a complex global playing field. Just look at Africa. It's not their fault that they're stuck in poverty... Western powers keep installing corrupt dictators by sponsoring coups. The dictators then saddle their citizens with debt. The people have little say. Then basically they become so poor that they are forced to immigrate to the rich countries which are causing the problems... And for the most part, join the lower class of that society where the oppression continues under a different form.
They get to be oppressed in this slightly different way while also contributing to the continued oppression of their people back in their home countries through the gift their cheap labor to their oppressors in their new country, which enriches them. This is made possible by a combination of ignorance and intergenerational low self-esteem inflicted upon them by their oppressors as a result of manipulation of the political systems of their previous countries.
IMO, US leftwing politics are extremely short sighted with their approach to immigration because they are building a critical mass of oppressed people in the US. Some people will be grateful initially but the gratefulness will soon turn to disdain once the new reality sinks in.
For anyone who hasn't tried local models because they think it's too complicated or their computer can't handle it, download a single llamafile and try it out in just moments.
They even have whisperfiles now, which is the same thing but for whisper.cpp, aka real-time voice transcription.
You can also take this a step further and use this exact setup for a local-only co-pilot style code autocomplete and chat using Twinny. I use this every day. It's free, private, and offline.
Hyakujo, the Chinese Zen master, used to labor with his pupils even at the age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the trees.
The pupils felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools.
That day the master did not eat. The next day he did not eat, nor the next. "He may be angry because we have hidden his tools," the pupils surmised. "We had better put them back."
The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."
> Espressif claims it can also capture subtle movements caused by small movements such as breathing and chewing of people or animals in a static environment.. works with all ESP32 series microcontrollers including ESP32, ESP32-S2, and ESP32-C3, and does not require any changes to the hardware
2024 AI/NPU laptops with Wi-Fi 7 from Intel and Qualcomm can combine RF radar and on-device inference to identify human activity.
It's the same as the problem of finding a good cleaner. If someone is responsible, thorough, turns up on time, has attention to detail, can handle delicate objects, is trustworthy around children and has good manners - then that person is already too good to be an ordinary cleaner and will get hired elsewhere, become a manager or a business owner.
> developers are like "machines working in a factory"
After I worked a few years in the industry, I came to the following conclusion: The main difference between a factory and a knowledge business is that in a factory, the smartest, most knowledgable people are at the top (not completely the case, but mostly). In knowledge work, the smartest (=experts) are at the bottom. If you move up as a smart person, you will for sure lose up-to-date knowledge.
This has a few consequences of course. In knowledge work, managers should not say "First do this, then do that". Managers should be at the service of their team, making sure they get the focus and freedom to work on their stuff.
Now back to the factories: I'm no expert, but one of the key elements of Lean Manufacturing is that the people on the floor are able to provide feedback to the upper layers. Why them? Because they have the hands-on knowledge and see things management can't. So even in factories, either you listen to the lowest level employees or you're not optimising your process.
And finally, if users and employees can be replaced, so can companies, products and services. The thing is that having great retention in users saves you a lot of investment on acquiring new ones. And having great retention in employees saves you a lot of investment in hiring and training. The leaders that realise this will outperform anyone that doesn't.
I know exactly what you mean. I worked for years in research in a problem I was not sure it could be solved. Here is the advice I could offer you:
- Determine what is the problem. Easier said than done. You most likely don't understand the problem. Finding the right abstractions to understand what is the problem is half the work. Focus on that a lot early on.
- You will not solve the problem by sitting for two hours and trying to think of a solution. Accept that. If it is a hard problem, it will take you months of thinking, writing prototypes/solutions, trying different angles. And then, at a random moment it will click, and the solution will feel obvious.
- Iterate a lot. Start with something small, solve it, and do it again and again. Accept that you will fail hundreds of times until finding the right solution. Try to make the process enjoyable. If it is a research project, break it into parts, where the solution of each small part provides value (a paper), so that you can enjoy some success that keep you working. If it is a startup, build products that provide value and are in the road to solving the big product.
- Some problems can be solved in a phd, some in a career, some in a generation. If you are targeting poverty, accept that you will spend your life on that with the hope of making small progress.
> They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time.
I think you meant hoard incredible wealth?
There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what to do with your own time.
Other alternatives have more potential. Educational content could lift some people out of incompetence and help them build actual wealth (say a very good programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software could also create wealth, even more so if it's Free (and free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care not to deplete our resources or burning up our planet…).
We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they extract money. Hopefully this money is actually earned in proportion to the value they actually injected into society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair and square). But never forget that the people who "make" the most money generally do so by taking it from other people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders… who get most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from what they own.
You want to learn about business? Pick up the biographies of successful businesspeople. Even then, beware of survivorship bias.
Note that these successful people will never write a book titled “how to be like me” but instead just write books narrating their stories and allow you to choose what to learn from it.
To add, I think there’s just something about people wanting the easy path that causes them to fall for these grifts.
Years ago, very early in my career, I rotated among a few teams at the company, and even then, one manager stood out as different from the others. I straight-up asked him if he had a philosophy or something, and this is what he said:
"Yeah, my job as a manager has three parts. First, get the right people for the job. Second, get them the resources they need. Third, get everything else out of their way."
Decades later, this still rings true. That team was the most productive I've ever seen.
My time to shine as someone who's pretty deep in this game.
There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.)
The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutting you on price, etc, when you can CREATE YOUR OWN entity, get that ranked and then SELL the leads to that plumber. You're the one with 100% control and if the plumber isn't happy, there's a dozen others who'll gladly take those leads.
Advanced lead gen owners use software such as MultiLogin along with mobile proxy farms to have hundreds of separate Chrome "entities" saved, all using different proxies, their own cookies, etc. This along with an infinite amount of other tools for call tracking, CTR manipulation, etc.
Mobile proxies have really changed the game, giving these lead gen folks an advantage. Because of the nature of mobile proxies (where multiple people can "share an IP address"), it's more difficult to detect. Since EACH GBP entity can bring in thousands/month, it's miniscule in terms of cost.
Reviews? Laughably easy to purchase and outsource, starting around $5/review. Combine this with fake Dalle images to attach to the review and/or GBP itself, and things can only get worse from here.
Google has actually begun VIDEO verification where you literally have to facetime with a Google employee to verify you own the business you say you own... even this can be gamed since any type of manual verification will be outsourced.
Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.
I am so sorry you feel bad. Want some advice from an older engineer turned entrepreneur? Be proud of what you have done. Not many people take risks in life. You did. Being the 'man in the arena' is enough. I read this quote from Teddy Roosevelt often:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
The above are only the open source ones with a descent number of GitHub stars. I can't think of another time when I found so much competition in one product category. Or am I mistaken and this is not special?
Be clever but be humble too. There's not a lot to it. The first will propel you very far and the second will help when the first doesn't suffice anymore.
It's taking a cloud-based product, de-clouding it, and then connecting it to your own private 'cloud'. Pretty cool all things told.
[0] https://kazlauskas.me/entries/tailscale-doesnt-quite-suck
[1] https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-sucks