> I read this as "person, 35-ish, stuck in a rut" which is a situation so common that automakers engineer cars like the Mazda Miata specifically for people in it.
This refers to people going through a "mid life crisis" who end up buying a Mazda Miata convertible to drive around town in an effort to look young, cool, stylish, etc.
Am Brazilian, can personally confirm. I used to do that too. I actually left the country with the explicit goal of shedding my Brazilian identity and becoming someone else entirely.
I think Brazil suffers from being a country where some segments of the population can’t find a relatable national identity. I feel very strongly about my state identity (I’m a gaucho from Rio Grande do Sul) to the point I’d probably support secession if that was a serious possibility, but I’ve never felt anything positive about being Brazilian.
Funny enough, 10 years later and now a US citizen, I don’t speak so negatively about Brazil anymore. Turns that that over time I found out I’m a bit more Brazilian than I thought, despite former efforts to not be one. Also, there are things I miss about living there, at least compared to living in the US. If it wasn’t for the still insane crime rates, I’d consider moving back for a season.
The ecosystem is nowhere near as mature though. I don’t work with either anymore but back in 2017 I made the switch from C# to Java and it felt like a breath of fresh air when it came to the maturity and capability of JVM tooling compared to what’s available for .NET.
Try JetBrains Rider, and be sure you are using a recent flavor of dotnet. When I migrated past 4.x to 6 of the .Net ecosystem, it dramatically improved my ability to work and deploy in C# with their rather delightful build system.
For example, in the Monogame game library, you can build a self contained binary for Windows, Linux or MacOSX nearly effortlessly with just a single command line.
The ecosystem is certainly more mature than many smaller languages, but it is still in a different league than Java’s. Most of it is not too great copies of the corresponding Java library, often being made by Microsoft only, with plenty of paid options while in the java world all of it is open-source and free, while offering a much wider selection.
Also, you will find a java library for that random new tech you want to use, while it is likely missing for .NET.
> Working on something with unrealistic confidence, even if that project itself is completely doomed to failure, is probably better for you than watching Netflix.
As someone who’s heavily biased towards just sitting on the couch (but reading a book, not watching Netflix :)), but married to an unrealistically confident wife, I have to agree.
I tend to panic whenever my wife comes up with her way-too-frequent ideas and goes ahead with them with minimal risk analysis, but at the end of the day she’s a much more accomplished and satisfied person than I am. I tend to look at every project from the most pessimistic angle possible and the end result is that I almost never actually do anything. I have a lot of book knowledge about a number of things but little to no experience, whereas she’s the exact opposite, and that tends to be more beneficial in real life.
Can you speak more on how you balance your persoanlities? How do you balance speaking from a pessimistic perfpective while also being encouraging and supportive?
I don’t have an answer to your specific question, but I just want you to know you’re not alone. I’m also quite excitable and love talking not just about technical stuff, but all sorts of things. I’m quick to smile and laugh, and I probably overshare at times (that last one I had to learn to control).
I’ve had the same worry as you at times, but so far I’ve been 15 years into my career as a software engineer and it hasn’t been a problem as far as I know.
I’ve been learning it for over a year because I want to be able to speak to my wife in her native language. So far I’m loving to learn it for the exact reason you said, the way sentences are pieces together is outright fun to me. I’m also amazed by how much information can be packed in a small combination of characters.
>These three grid patterns (due north, 32 degrees west of north, and 49 degrees west of north) are the result of a disagreement between David Swinson "Doc" Maynard, whose land claim lay south of Yesler Way, and Arthur A. Denny and Carson D. Boren, whose land claims lay to the north (with Henry Yesler and his mill soon brought in between Denny and the others):[2] Denny and Boren preferred that their streets follow the Elliott Bay shoreline, while Maynard favored a grid based on the cardinal directions for his (mostly flat, mostly wet) claim. All three were competing to have the downtown built on their land.
my favorite street layout in Seattle is that a part of it got named "Tangletown" (there's a rip in the fabric of the continuum of the big grid right there)
Queen Anne has a 7-way stop! The first time I encountered it I was thoroughly stumped. Actually, I'm still stumped years later every time I go through it. At some point, I just commit and hope for the best.
I pity all those coming from the right side of the screen (I believe that is southbound but I avoid that intersection so I haven't driven through in a while) at ground level that's the scariest direction to come from.
Ha, I pass through this stop on my work commute. Glad to see it getting recognition as being completely bonkers. It’s not easy to keep track of the order in which the six other cars arrived at the intersection. Most of the time someone just slowly inches forward until it seems everyone else agrees it’s that person’s turn and then they floor it the rest of the way through. I’m surprised there aren’t more accidents here. It’s on a hill, too.
Sounds like it used to function as something of a roundabout, and America forgotten how to navigate yielding to traffic coming from a relative direction (i.e. people already in the roundabout from your left) instead of someone always having the right of way, or the weird turn-taking stress of an all-way stop.
No, this area has a ton roundabouts, this was just poor planning. Supporting your point about Americans not knowing how to use them though, I see many people cut these roundabouts in this neighborhood. Meaning they will just turn left directly instead of actually going around. This is super scary when they're going fast and you're coming from the street they're turning into.
It has hundreds of traffic calming circles which are often confused with roundabouts, but are not in the same class. Roundabouts have dividers at each entry/exit point which are lacking in neighborhood traffic calming circles.
Technically you can go any way around a traffic calming circle you want to, because they are too small to accommodate delivery trucks going counterclockwise. It is highly recommended to go counterclockwise if you can, but not legally required. They have no more legal significance than a speed bump.
This stuff boggles the mind. Make a way to get around that's easier, realize it's too easy and causing problems, so then hobble it ineffectively— thus creating frustration but also retaining the danger. All the while watching ads about 300 hp luxury work trucks and "sport" vehicles. What a bizarre slice of modern life.
Roundabout; Cars in the roundabout ALREADY have the right of way. Everyone entering is yielding to the street they're T-ing into. Exit, in theory, is from right of way into a dedicated path.
Only self driving cars, or better licensing tests for drivers can save us from this. Every N years drivers probably should need to re-test, including a physical practical test in a standard unit (from the DMV) for parking and to see how the driver responds if driving a rental car that they aren't familiar with.
If they are talking about the intersection I think, a roundabout would not work because some inputs are major road offramps, others are side streets, and the intersection is basically super narrow as all of them merge together. There just would not be enough space!
The cameras can't take pictures of the driver or occupants and court time is accrued when anyone other than the registered owner committed the infraction:
(f) Automated traffic safety cameras may only take pictures of the vehicle and vehicle license plate and only while an infraction is occurring. The picture must not reveal the face of the driver or of passengers in the vehicle. The primary purpose of camera placement is to take pictures of the vehicle and vehicle license plate when an infraction is occurring. Cities and counties shall consider installing cameras in a manner that minimizes the impact of camera flash on drivers.
An officer has to actually review the photos:
(g) A notice of infraction must be mailed to the registered owner of the vehicle within 14 days of the violation, or to the renter of a vehicle within 14 days of establishing the renter's name and address under subsection (3)(a) of this section. The law enforcement officer issuing the notice of infraction shall include with it a certificate or facsimile thereof, based upon inspection of photographs, microphotographs, or electronic images produced by an automated traffic safety camera, stating the facts supporting the notice of infraction. This certificate or facsimile is prima facie evidence of the facts contained in it and is admissible in a proceeding charging a violation under this chapter. The photographs, microphotographs, or electronic images evidencing the violation must be available for inspection and admission into evidence in a proceeding to adjudicate the liability for the infraction. A person receiving a notice of infraction based on evidence detected by an automated traffic safety camera may respond to the notice by mail.
So automated cameras don't scale and are only deployed where they are most needed.
Oregon has a slightly different approach: the photograph has to show the driver. They then mail a notice to the registered owner. The last I knew, it was possible to say "no, that's not me" without being required to say who it was. You do have to send in a copy of your driver's license so they can (presumably) compare the two photos.
In Beijing, the infractions are attached to the vehicle, and you have to pay all your fines on the plate before you can renew your registration every year.
Seems like the solution here would be to station an officer at each major intersection permanently, and to fund it, take the operational cost and divide it out to those fined. So say it cost $100,000 for the day and 100 fines were given out, the fines are $1,000 each. This scales infinitely.
A ruinously expensive ticket is likely an effective deterrent. So what do you do when this works and you get zero dollars to fund all those traffic cops because nobody ran any red lights?
We do not have many red light cameras, although there is some recent talk of increasing them (and rolling out speed enforcement cameras). There are a handful.
> My experience in this world of embedded chips, is that many of the tutorials you read do not deal with power consumption really. They assume that you're playing with a dev board. Or that your application has copious amounts of power. But if you live in a battery powered world, your entire game lies around navigating between sleep and wake states on the chip.
This has been my experience so far trying to build my own devices at home. They all assume I’ll connect things to a USB port or have a power adapter. Material on how to deal with battery voltage dropping over time, determining battery level, etc. is really scattered. Makes me wish I was an EE major instead of CS.
I got into ESP32 hacking a few months back, and I'm glad I happened to start with a battery-powered device (an M5stack StickC) because it imposed this awareness very early - the device has an internal battery, but it's only good for about half an hour running flat out. So after building a little wifi detector the first patch was adding a battery meter and an auto-dimmer to save a few mAh. Now every project starts out with some ideas about what I'd like the device to do, followed by questions about how much temporal resolution I really need, when and how to dump or store data etc. as well as the more obvious constraints of tiny memory and storage capacity.
It's...kinda fun? Perhaps more so as I only have to please myself rather than an employer or client. You can just query the ESP32 about battery voltage/current/charge state/temperature which of course makes things very easy. On the assumption that specifications and quality vary a lot and that voltage doesn't fall off in a convenient linear fashion, I've just been experimenting with it like any other environmental variable to decide between performance, economy, or panic modes.
The key to low power is to put the micro in a sleep state as much as possible. You have to rethink running things in a loop and make it interrupt / event driven.
Set it up to wake from sleep on some interrupt, do your processing, then go back to sleep. You can setup a timer interrupt to wake periodically to do processing as well.
My experience programming for the Watchy (epaper watch on esp32) exactly. Basically the only way of programming it is being woken up every minute by the RTC, running as little as possible, setting up the next interrupt by the RTC and going back to sleep.
I got mine to last about a week on the stock battery, i know of people who have done better but being a minute-resolution clock helps a lot.
You speak of such truths :D. It's a seriously under-documented knowledge gap on the Internet. There are an infinite number of Cortex-M4 MCU's but only a few I would recommend hardware companies actually use, primarily due to power consumption of production work-loads (sleeping and deep sleep) and the software packages that are bundled, both of which are generally not assessed before choosing hardware.
Any STM32 L series or nRF can do very low power draw if used correctly. Gotchas include making sure other components on your board aren't drawing power.
So far... we've been pleased with our newer developments on the NRF52832 using Zephyr. It's the same chip (I think) that Apple used in their AirTags.
That said, we're still in that early-ish phase. Four-ish years from now, there's probably going to be a post where I start off with something like
"Ahh the Nordic NRF52832. Of all the chips to show up on HN today. This chip I know not half as much as I'd like to and half as much I wish I didn't have to..."
> I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.
I’ve made the mistake of saying that out loud during pre-pandemic lunch conversations and happy hours and every time people looked at me like I had two heads.
I think it's a perfectly healthy and normal attitude to have, but the thing is that it's only your perspective as the employee, and to avoid being short sighted and irresponsible, you have to also to some extent consider the perspective of the company as well.
I mean, in the extension if nobody cares a single f about being competitive, then maybe your whole company doesn't care about being competitive either, and oopsies some other company cared a bit more and now you don't have any jobs anymore...
As long as you are enjoying yourself it’s fine right? I enjoyed that for a while too, but just developing became boring, so now I’m also trying to play office politics. Not in the sense of some machiavellan scheme, but previously I’d just utterly ignore it.
Office politics can be amusing if you’re able to step away from it a bit and don’t care too much about the rat race. It’s immediately obvious who are the folks genuinely interested in building value and who are drones interpreting what their managers order them to do.
Eventually someone has to do the lowly business of actually implementing the value that those 10x ninja fullstack super senior software architects just created. God bless the drones.
It's a self-inflicted problem. They shouldn't have promoted those 10x ninja superstars out of development and into management roles (and apparently, "principal engineer" and even "senior engineer" is frequently just faux-management - all the responsibilities, none of the authority of a real manager).
I find it ironic that our industry trains up developers until the point they finally become competent at their jobs, and immediately force them to manage new breed of trainees instead of doing the work they're good at.
I’m exactly 35 and in the same situation as the OP.