Exoskeletons for Bricklayers
Ro.bert
here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌
a weekly list of goodies curated by Robert.
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fiery stuff I've been ingesting
1/ A Ukrainian who programs Falcon: Oleksii Pakhunov, senior flight software engineer at SpaceX
One of my favorite interview questions sounds like this: “Tell us in as much detail as possible what happens from the moment the network card receives the packet with the last piece of the HTML page until the browser redraws the image on the screen. This question allows you to talk about interaction with hardware, the process scheduler, network protocols, memory management, event processing, isolating applications from each other, JIT compilation, the graphics subsystem, etc.”
2/ Is Immanuel Kant still relevant today?
Immanuel Kant was either the most boring person who ever lived or a productivity hacker’s wet dream. For forty years he woke up every morning at five o’clock and wrote for exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly four hours, and then eat lunch at the same restaurant every day. Then, in the afternoon, he would go on an extended walk through the same park, on the same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time. He did this for forty years. Every. Single. Day.
3/ Why Apple Wants Your Old iPhone
Apple has heavily promoted their trade-in program in recent years, encouraging users to give up their old iPhone in exchange for a discount on a new model. Over a third of Apple Store customers now utilize this program, but it’s left many people wondering why Apple even wants our old iPhones. Also, see Why You Shouldn’t Close iPhone Apps. For many iPhone users, swiping up to close recently used apps has become second nature, assuming it improves performance and battery life. But that’s actually not the case.
In everyday life, the biggest obstacle to metacognition is what psychologists call the “illusion of fluency.” As we perform increasingly familiar tasks, we monitor our performance less rigorously; this happens when we drive, or fold laundry, and also when we think thoughts we’ve thought many times before. Studying for a test by reviewing your notes, Fleming writes, is a bad idea, because it’s the mental equivalent of driving a familiar route. “Experiments have repeatedly shown that testing ourselves—forcing ourselves to practice exam questions, or writing out what we know—is more effective,” he writes. The trick is to break the illusion of fluency, and to encourage an “awareness of ignorance.”
5/ An Old Hacker’s Tips On Staying Employed
If you take away only one thing though, take away the idea that job security doesn’t come from your job, it comes from you. The Buddhists have this philosophy regarding happiness, that you should not have any dependencies on external things to make you happy because happiness comes from within. Like job security, subscribing to this philosophy has the downside of, it means you are doing all the work. Nobody is going to make you happy but yourself, and no job or company is going to give you job security, you have to do it on your own. But it also means your fate is in your own hands. And that is a great thing.
6/ My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
I’ve tried to pick companies working on domains that seem useful: developer productivity, treating diseases, education. While my success in those jobs has been variable – in some cases, I’m proud of what I accomplished, in others I’m pretty sure my net effect was, at best, zero – I’d have a tough time saying that the cumulative impact was greater than my little side project.
7/ Where are the robotic bricklayers?
When researching construction, you invariably discover that any new or innovative idea has actually been tried over and over again, often stretching back decades. One of these new-but-actually-old ideas is the idea of a mechanical bricklayer, a machine to automate the construction of masonry walls.
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The Motor Mason, mechanical bricklaying machine. Shenfield, Essex. Various shots of the Motor Mason in action, C/U as it spreads concrete and pla…
LATEST HOUSE BUILD BY HADRIAN X®Chief Technical Officer Mark Pivac provides an update on FBR operations as Hadrian X® builds the first of several houses in t…
But the most interesting of these masonry assistant systems might be the exoskeleton in development by FRACO, just released last year. It was adapted from a model developed for the military, and has various passive and active lifting mechanisms designed to reduce the strain on the mason’s muscles when manipulating blocks. Read more… Exoskeletons for Bricklayers: Science Fiction is Now Reality
8/ You don’t need to work on hard problems
For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life. It’s a common refrain in Hacker News comments, job ads and interview questions. Why does this happen? Probably because that’s the only thing they’ve been rewarded for over the past 15 years. School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles (multiply these two numbers, implement this algorithm, write a book report by this rubric), your solution is evaluated on one dimension (letter grade), and the performance ceiling (an A+) is low. The only form of progression is to take harder courses. If you try to maximize your rewards under this reward function, you’ll end up looking for trickier and trickier puzzles that you can get an A+ on. The real world is the polar opposite. You’ll have some ultra-vague end goal, like “help people in sub-Saharan Africa solve their money problems,” based on which you’ll need to prioritize many different sub-problems. A solution’s performance has many different dimensions (speed, reliability, usability, repeatability, cost, …)—you probably don’t even know what all the dimensions are, let alone which are the most important. The range of plausible outcomes covers orders of magnitude and the ceiling is saving billions of lives. The habits you learn by working on problem sets won’t help you here.
9/ I closed a lot of browser tabs
I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of “holy cow, man, look at your browser!”) Nonetheless, I have long thought that it would be worth getting my total tab count down. I have tabs open for a bunch of reasons.
10/ Light phone
Light was founded by Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, an artist and product designer who met in a Google experimental program in 2014. They were encouraged to make smartphone apps and taught on a deeper level how and why different products were being built and funded. It became obvious that the last thing the world needed was another smartphone app fighting for our attention. The interests and nature of these ad-driven platforms will never align with our actual quality of life.
Latest YouTube Video
The Art of the Short Attention Span: The Most Underrated Skill
What if I told you that having a short attention span is actually the most underrated skill?
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Visual Theory
Here’s the evolution of one of my side projects — Visual Theory. I am re-learning how to see.
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➜ you can also contribute an idea!
Thank you for reading!
How’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment? I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message and telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been up in your world.
— Robert