I work as a software engineer and a manager in a medical devices company, but also as a hobby, whenever I'm at the doctors, I always ask them to show me the systems they're using.
A few observations:
* software for medical devices is obscure, usually still done with 90s/00s technologies, people in the field are underpayed too. The result is you get bad code and most of the time you're just maintain it, instead of implementing new stuff,
* this applies to both software and hardware - amount of often useless paperwork is ridiculous. You're bound by a lot of standards and regulations to make software/hardware compatible with those regulations. Which means engineering is not doing much engineering, but rather fillout those docs, do countless reviews of them, spend a lot of time on testing and QA. I know a few of those standards by heart, and often the work is not about implementing a standard but rather about being complaint with the standard - aka interpreting and stretching them that whatever you do is kinda complaint, but not really following the rules
* software to manage these docs/requirements is also from 00s/90s, super not intuitive
* med software itself, like stuff used by a doctor or folks in a hospital has really terrible user experience, sometimes it takes years to master it. Then once people master it, they get used to it, they don't like upgrades, cause then you have to master them again,
* in my country you can do a lot of med stuff via email, what they call "encrypted email" - it's not PGP, and it's not encrypted with x509 certs etc You get like an email with a page embedded there that only works on Edge or Chrome, and to "unencrypt it" you need to put like data of birth or something like that.
This market seems really miserable from software/firmware perspective. Happy to ask some more questions.
I don't find it rude or pretentious. Sometimes it's really hard to express yourself in hmm acceptable neutral way when you worked on truly cool stuff. It may look like bragging, but that's probably not the intention. I often face this myself, especially when talking to non-tech people - how the heck do I explain what I work on without giving a primer on computer science!? Often "whenever you visit any website, it eventually uses my code" is good enough answer (worked on aws ec2 hypervisor, and well, whenever you visit any website, some dependency of it eventually hits aws ec2)
It’s super complicated and anecdotal topic. I have phases: a) “good phase” - I can compete in ultramarathons, I can run 100km a week, I can lift some insane weighs,
b) I cannot. Temporary burnout. No physical activity, gain like 10kg.
Then I need something that motivates me again and move from b) to a).
Long term fat is bad, but if you are able to burn it, it is the fuel
I live in a small Swiss village. We have two churches, they ring their bells every hour (number of dong-sounds is equal to the hour). But, they're slightly out of phase, so you can hear two separate churches' bells.
And one of the churches also rings their bells every 15 minutes (1-ring for each quarter). On top of this at 6:00am it rings a whole rhapsody of sounds for whole 5 minutes - "wake up people, time to go to work on a field!".
Initially it may be annoying, eventually you just get used to it, in the end you actually learn to figure out the time from the bell sound and make use of it.
I live in a neighborhood in Boston with a couple of big churches. The hourly bells are useful to teach the kids how to tell time. Especially when out and about. Thankfully none of the bells wake us up but I do appreciate them.
ClickHouse is a completely stand-alone binary that doesnt rely on any linked libraries. Not sure how much of this explains the large binary size, though.
These pictures are great - maybe it's time for me to get a new desktop background.
Kinda related: some years ago NASA published all the Apollo missions pictures. I downloaded all of them (hundreds, maybe bit more), acting as a photo editor then I selected "good ones", cropped them to 16:10 format and made a background picture pack - I'm using it on all my devices since then. If someone is interested, they're published at [0] - feel free to use.
I did something similar with their lunar libration videos captures by the LRO [1], using the frames from the video with the Windows desktop background 'slideshow' functionality (desktop background changes once a minute).
I moved some years ago from Dresden, Saxony, Germany to Rheintal, Switzerland - looking for some bigger mountains. In Dresden-area there was a nice 4-people day ticket for the whole area - <20EUR for 4 people total. Switzerland? Every guest spends at least 50CHF per person per day, wild.
This brings back memories. Szymon is/was also active in minimal/experimental music scene [0] back in the days. I think in my hometown (Poznan, Poland) back those 10-15 years ago, there was some self-made small art-hacker community. Great to see his work again!
Isn't it pretty niche to not want discussions of winter or alignment? I guess you can go read Nick Land? If there's not at least a mini-winter or alignment some time soon it's going full Nick Land, right?
What I mean is, Nick Land is the only person I know of who can at least sort of credibly claim to have a theory for why alignment isn't just not guaranteed, but is in fact impossible, and there's ~no chance of a lasting winter.
Even then isn't it irresponsible to avoid talk about progress from other labs vs the probability of winter? Either way you could get wiped out hard, investment wise and product/startup wise.
A few observations: * software for medical devices is obscure, usually still done with 90s/00s technologies, people in the field are underpayed too. The result is you get bad code and most of the time you're just maintain it, instead of implementing new stuff, * this applies to both software and hardware - amount of often useless paperwork is ridiculous. You're bound by a lot of standards and regulations to make software/hardware compatible with those regulations. Which means engineering is not doing much engineering, but rather fillout those docs, do countless reviews of them, spend a lot of time on testing and QA. I know a few of those standards by heart, and often the work is not about implementing a standard but rather about being complaint with the standard - aka interpreting and stretching them that whatever you do is kinda complaint, but not really following the rules * software to manage these docs/requirements is also from 00s/90s, super not intuitive * med software itself, like stuff used by a doctor or folks in a hospital has really terrible user experience, sometimes it takes years to master it. Then once people master it, they get used to it, they don't like upgrades, cause then you have to master them again, * in my country you can do a lot of med stuff via email, what they call "encrypted email" - it's not PGP, and it's not encrypted with x509 certs etc You get like an email with a page embedded there that only works on Edge or Chrome, and to "unencrypt it" you need to put like data of birth or something like that.
This market seems really miserable from software/firmware perspective. Happy to ask some more questions.