if something doesn’t exist in this world, no amount of money will guarantee that you will get it.

if it exists in abundance like the air that we breathe no amount of conspiracy will be able to monopolize it.

finance only works in a very narrow band of environmental conditions. we are very well past that.

employers that demand long hours do so because they have no other way to appraise employee ability.

they cannot judge a brilliant insight from a slacker that would have saved thousands of man-hours rushing the wrong way.

do you really want to work for such a company?

I was like the author of the article, then I realized that I was solving problems that were created by other peoples' incompetence. Sure they were challenging, fun but they didn't bring anything postive overall. The incompetent people are still there - causing more problems.

So I decided to find a worthwhile problem that deserved my talent. And I did. And I am now even more happy than before.

Sometimes it's useful to just solve the problem at hand and sometimes it's useful to solve the root problem. Sometimes solving the root cause is knowledge sharing or mentoring. Sometimes the entire task is just not what you want to be doing with your career.

Part of becoming more senior is learning when each is appropriate.

This is exactly where I am now. I had fun solving problems for the sake of solving them for the first ten years of my career. But the last couple of years have burnt me out as I realize this is not worth my time. I’m in the process of trying to find a worthwhile problem to solve, but it’s difficult to not just be jaded.

Mind sharing what that worthwhile problem is?

I have purposely omitted the specifics as I also have given up trying to convince others interested in my worthwhile problem. If interests align, we will naturally meet.

I usually tell them it is more important that they should take some time (6 months - 1 year) to reflect in isolation to find their own worthwhile problems, and not get distracted by fads and drama.

"Convincing others" is a serious problem on its own, and it's okay to let someone else handle it full-time.

Are the incompetent people your coworkers? Ideally you can be solving your customers problems, which is a nice terminating lens of “always useful”, tho you may still want to pick and choose.

I’m from the self-replicating self-reconfigurable systems side.

The problem with this is not about making the machines but the human intervention to make use of them effectively. You really need end-to-end automation to solve this.

If i don’t remember wrongly all this started due to john deere implementing DRM in their equipment. this is a political problem because the issue can be resolved by just buying chinese equivalents and changing patent/ip law.

it's already obsolete.

for USD699 (no ram and no storage) you can get this

6 SATA, 5 NVME drives, OCUlink and much more.

https://aoostar.com/products/aoostar-wtr-max-amd-r7-pro-8845...

Guessing you just read the first sentence? The build the article is about is a 200 DIY, not the N5 mentioned in the intro.

$200 + board/CPU, the $699 Aoostar includes board/CPU.

The intention is to get one of those ~$100 N100 minipcs for the guts. Still coming in under budget vs the commercial option.

All that being said, there are more affordable NAS cases that would eliminate the labor. This is both an art piece and a because-I-can kind of venture.

Thanks for posting this. I have several family members & friends at work who can use this AOOSTAR unit. I’d love to install TrueNAS SCALE on it, Jellyfin, tailscale, docker and perhaps some VMs via Promox. I’ve been looking for a product just like this and the price is reasonable.

Thanks for posting this, it looks like an amazing value. I need to rebuild my home server/nas soon and finding removal sled backplane is hard enough by itself. I’d prefer a 1U layout, but this is pretty good.

even at 100% tarriffs US is still not competitive.

probably will come out within the next 5 iphone generations.

POC already out...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8404918/

People have been making production hyperspectral sensors for decades, including hobbyists in garages; we're well beyond the proof-of-concept stage.

NK is more of a russian client state, not chinese.

There are two parts to education. One is to impart knowledge, the other is to filter the students.

The third is to challenge students. With unusual concepts, preferably.

How else to create students capable of solving problems we cannot anticipate today?

Not to mention, that understanding strange problems is a very efficient way to broaden horizons.

You're missing general problem solving. If all people do is encounter problems they've already seen before, well, we have lookup tables for that kind of thing.

Not entirely wrong but it's a little too easy to use that argument for squashing any criticism for education content.

how far is the deep learning stack close to replacing them?

They were already “replaced” by the internet decades ago, but people keep calling. As the article explains, there are still people in the US without access to the internet or knowledge of how to use it, as well as a lot of people who just want to talk to a human being.

You can call 1-800-CHATGPT if you want, but there’s clearly still a place for this service.

By definition, it will never replace "them."