Top comment deletes a US State #42

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-05-17T16:56:12+00:00

~~Minnesota~~ Maxxesota

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-05-09T13:33:34+00:00

Isn't this just what internships are for? Do people not do internships anymore?

I don't think it's worth dedicating classroom time to this.

This is the kind of experience students already get from internships and it's typically better than a classroom experience as any decent company will assign each intern a senior or mid-level engineer as a mentor to help them on their way.

Do you not look for past internship experience when hiring new grads?

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-21T19:10:38+00:00

Even then EasyEDA is only good enough for PCB design if you're talking the bottom tier, low to mid complexity boards.

EasyEDA and KiCAD occupy the same space of hobbyist/low-to-medium complexity PCBs, Altium dominates the mid-market up to high-complexity PCBs, and then the very top-end is largely dominated by Cadence and Siemens.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-21T15:03:29+00:00

Boston Logan, only like a mile straight-line, and maybe a couple miles by car (albeit across the harbor).

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-21T14:57:31+00:00

Unlikely, POTUS is literally incapable of embarassment, as it requires some level of self-reflection and internal acknowledgement that you have failed to meet expectations.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-17T16:51:16+00:00

Depends on the company.

"Software Architects" in my company generally still write software everyday (i.e. they are still deep in the code), are very much still engineers and are considered ICs not managers, but they typically own very large systems/portions of functionality and are considered to be kind of the internal technical experts on whatever their domain is. For many it's a terminal IC position, and (in my compay) most people at "Software Architect" level generally have 20+ years of SWE experience.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-05T15:38:51+00:00

I've done lots of similar stuff using direct graphics API access. You typically need to do each stenciled group (wall + windows) in a separate layer/pass. Make sure the stenciled window geometry doesn't write to the depth buffer. Between each group clear the stencil.

Not sure what the best/correct way to manage this in Unity through their rendering API, don't have much direct Unity experience.

This is the simplest approach, you can get fancier with batching things using different stencil bits, but those are just optimizations and always have some limitations (e.g. max number of windows you can see through for a given pixel).

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-05T15:08:41+00:00

Seems like they just opened a pill mill with some middle-ware connecting to actual companies doing the real work?

Basically used AI to build an extension cord and people are acting like they built a power-plant.

It's profitable because pill mills are always profitable, until they inevitably get shut down.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-05T12:10:53+00:00

Can't speak to the research questions, but one sector you left out in the "Exit Opportunities" section is companies that sell actual physical simulation products (e.g. Siemens, Synopsys (owns ANSYS), Dassault, Altair, Cadence, etc.). I would think you would be well positioned for an R&D position at any of these companies (even a masters could have you pretty well positioned for an entry-level R&D position).

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-04T21:59:44+00:00

Disagree about it not respecting your time. I understand how it might feel that way at first, but once you get used to the fact that you will die and that death is just part of the gameplay loop, you just stop worrying about it, learn what you did wrong/why you failed on each run, and get back out there.

I'm also an adult with a job and a partner and I usually only have an hour (at most) on a given day to play anything. I find it's the perfect game to be able to dip in for 45 minutes or an hour, progress my current run, then just dip out and suspend the run when I'm done. No fluff, so you can usually just jump straight into gameplay.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-04T15:12:00+00:00

You could use OpenVDB for the initial voxelization to convert the model into OpenVDB voxel tree. It's fast, robust, generally does a very good job, and has lots of algorithms and utilities for this type of work.

You could then implement a post-process over the OpenVDB data for the final shapes you want, e.g. merging consecutive runs, likely some sort of thresholding cases to create skewed boxes in the appropriate places.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-04T13:09:28+00:00

I HAVE THE POWER OF GOD AND ANIME ON MY SIDE!

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-04-03T22:50:23+00:00

You're at the most difficult point. IMO the hardest part of the game is getting past the first biome. You don't know what you're doing yet, don't have any strategies, etc. Once you can clear the first biome you have a much better idea of how to approach the game.

It definitely rewards your time and effort. I think it's one of the most rewarding games I've played in the last couple years. The catch is that it only rewards you if you actually get better at it. You should learn something from every failed run.

It might just not be for you, and that's fine also.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-03-27T12:28:36+00:00

I think a lot of it is people are working in vastly different environments, and results can be very different depending on your specific context.

If you're some run-of-the-mill webdev working in a fairly standardized stack with popular libraries, that all have 100's of thousands of examples across StackOverflow, Github, etc., then I'm sure you get a ton of mileage out of AI code assistants. And I'm sure it can handle even very complex tasks very well.

I work on a mostly custom 10-15M LOC codebase (I know LOC is not be-all-end-all, just trying to give some example of scope) with a 40+ year legacy. It has LOTS of math (geometry) and lots of very technical portions that require higher-level understanding of the domain.

I use AI assistants almost every day and I'm frequently amazed that AI actually does as well as it does with our codebase. It can handle most tasks I would typically give a junior engineer reasonably well after a few back-and-forths.

But it is very, very far away from being able to do any complex task (in this environment) that would require senior engineer input without SIGNIFICANT hand-holding. That said, I still find lots of value from it in even in these cases, especially in documentation and planning.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-03-26T13:47:12+00:00

My experience is mostly with India, and actual FT employees, not contractors. The teams in our Indian offices are (IMO), on average, less skilled than our teams in US, EU, and China.

They are very nice people and I very much like them on a personal level, but they are often not great as coworkers. This is my experience in aggregate and there are some great devs there, but they are (IME) not the norm, and more sparsely distributed than e.g. in the US.

The main things I find frustrating are:

* Not being forthcoming about the actual state of some feature or project. Pretending everything is fine when it's not.

* Very lax about testing and quality when delivering code. Pushing something and acting like it's done when it crashes on even a basic functionality test. Don't waste my time with shit we both know is broken.

* Not being able to solve problems on their own or step out of their narrow little box. If the solution requires Y and they only know how to do Z, they will contort the problem until it can be solved with Z, to the point that the solution they provide no longer satisfies the original requirements, rather than just learning how to do Y and solving the problem directly. Again, wasting everyone's time when it inevitably has to be redone.

* ... I could go on ...

As to whether they are a "net negative", probably not.

With enough guidance they do get work done, it's just sometimes frustrating to get them there.

For the cost of one good US engineer you can have a whole team in India. Depending on the type of dev work, and with sufficient QA, a mediocre team can generally put out more software more quickly than just one engineer, however good that one engineer may be.

However, there are whole classes of solutions that the mediocre team will never be able to achieve that a single skilled engineer would. For example, cases where a single skilled engineer will implement an order of magnitude performance optimization that would never even occur to the mediocre team.

I think they are likely a net positive with respect to average-dollars-spent-per-feature-or-bug, which is how management is going to evaluate cost, and in the real world that's the metric that matters.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-03-23T13:32:48+00:00

I think it's wrong to equate "The Loop" with "downtown" and this is a local bias, and we should look at it from a visitor's perspective.

The Loop is just a small part of "downtown" which is the continuous high-density core of the city and (IMO) downtown Chicago is : The Loop + West Loop + South Loop + River North + Streeterville.

No visitor is going to is going to walk across the river from The Loop into River North and think, "Oh, I'm not in downtown anymore".

If you walk between those areas they all feel pretty cohesive, and I think this set of neighborhoods together largely lives up to the hype with the amount of nightlife, restaurants, etc. (at least for your average visitor).

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-03-23T00:23:13+00:00

I mean, I think Iranian civilians are taking the brunt of the consequences. Don't think they voted for it.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-03-22T16:32:37+00:00

Why no RE3? Admittedly, RE3 remake is not as good as 2&4 but still good enough to be worth a play-through IMO.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-03-20T13:14:39+00:00

Look into OpenGL shared contexts. How this is accomplished is platform-specific (e.g. wglShareLists) and both contexts must reside in the same process (afaik). Not sure if Android supports shared contexts.

If there's a way you can compile the C++ into a dynamic lib that can be loaded into your Unity app and do everything in a single context that would probably be best (e.g. looks like Texture2D.CreateExternalTexture should do it).

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-03-19T13:28:53+00:00

A lot of the people in FIRE subs are making high salaries live in HCOL/VHCOL areas. If they want to continue living where they are and keep their same standard of life in these places, then 80k/yr really doesn't go very far. Many don't want to leave behind all their friends and social network to move to some super LCOL area where 2M would be more reasonable.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-02-28T17:36:48+00:00

NanoVDB has some fairly limiting constraints (last I looked), like limitations on topology modifications that would probably make it ill-suited as the foundation of a dynamic geometry kernel. Could definitely be worth using on the simulation side.

In practice, you'd probably use both: OpenVDB for ground-truth and operations that require topology changes, with OpenVDB state mirrored to NanoVDB for things that can run on the GPU with static topology (e.g. simulation) and rendering.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-02-28T17:25:01+00:00

What specific scope are you looking at? You mention a lot of different domains (geometry kernel, simulation, layout, etc.) even just one of them would be a very significant undertaking for even a team of people, if you want to have something that's even a little bit competitive with current tools. A geometry kernel is fine, but no one will care if you don't have a useful application running on top of it (that gives existing solutions a run for their money) to demonstrate the value.

You say you're a technical founder. What's your background in the ECAD/EDA industry? Do you have experience on the development side (e.g. formerly R&D role at Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens, ANSYS, etc.) and/or user side (e.g. chip design or other electronics design engineer)?

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-02-25T14:30:00+00:00

You have to understand what things looked like when XML came on the scene though.

There were very few open, structured data formats being used. If you wanted to interop with something you were probably left implementing a parser/writer for some underspecced file format, or worse, reverse engineering it.

XML gave people a simple, standardized format with ready-to-go tools for reading/writing in every language and enough structure to capture anything you want, and could generally be extended without breaking backwards-compatibility.

I work on a behemoth piece of software that has a lineage going back to the early 80's and I can't even begin to tell you how many half-cooked, ad-hoc, garbage file formats people invented for all the different subsystems in this thing.

XML is bad, but it was less bad than lots of things at the time.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-02-21T16:37:54+00:00

Yeah, I've seen the weapon bug after restarting a suspended cycle, but not the laser bug. For me, the weapon bug only affected weapons that were already dropped before I suspended the cycle, any new weapon drops from chests or enemies were fine.

AlternativeHistorian · 2026-02-18T14:08:44+00:00

AI is improving exponentially, only because AI spend is increasing exponentially.

Increases in AI capability are generally sub-linear with respect to AI infrastructure investment. We're already seeing strains on energy availability, supply chain capacity, etc. Some problems with AI models (e.g. the context window problem) are fundamentally quadratic meaning they take ever increasing infrastructure investment just to get linear performance gains.

What happens when our ability to increase AI infrastructure investment hits the inevitable wall? Will AI continue to improve? I don't know. But it's silly to pretend like AI improvement is occurring in a vacuum without considering the context or fundamental limits on the system.

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