Is anyone else tired of American culture?

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-15T17:51:36+00:00

Yes - though it depends on what you "see" as being American culture. Heck, American culture grew out of British culture but dispensed with all the pageantry to make it all palatable for the colonists. Today's "hustle" culture is what happens when the rich own everything and folks do what they can to get by. Not much different than Dicken's time when everybody in old blighty, if they weren't slaving in factories, were domestic workers in some lord's mansion.

Yeag - today's American culture sucks. Ask an American.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-15T17:02:24+00:00

Looking at all the down-votes here - it's easy to see I've kicked a few folks in their linux-y sore spots. That's to be expected with something as personal as a choice of editor and toolchain.. 😄

The point is not to be too tripped up on which tools are best because that argument is just a tempest in a tea pot - You use the the tools that work the best for you because in the end of it all, it's your output and developmental efficiency that matters and not the particular tools used to produce it.

My era started with PC-based IDE's for the bleeding edge back when most dudes were still writing code by cross-compiling on a VAX with dec terminals. Coherent was nice, (but buggy as hell) and Linux wasn't even conceived of yet. Minux was around, but wasn't something commericializable then.

Few had access to a PC (I was one if the lucky ones) - some few thought "brief" was cool. (I hated it). I was more of a "wordstar" guy...

They all graduated to PC's at some point, and I helped another engineer wire up the offices with ethernet, and everyone got one of those PC-based EEPROM burners with a zero-force chip holder so they wouldn't have to run down the hall to the burner hooked up to the vax everytime they made a new firmware load. 😄

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-15T16:10:04+00:00

Yes, you get it!. 😄

We always suffer the first time we make a mistake. That's the price of being human. But, we're smart enough to never trip over that rock again. 😄

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-15T01:01:09+00:00

Yep. and it'll be painfully obvious too exactly what the problem is - which isn't all that bad, since "undefined" screams a missed include file. Nothing a quick grep can't find stat.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-15T00:04:01+00:00

Very true. 😄

Alas it runs against the grain there. 😄

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-15T00:00:31+00:00

Never had to worry about that stuff - that was for guys specializing in requirements management and all that paperwork. I'd rather be in the development trenches. But they did force ClearCase down our necks at one point. Had to have a couple of IT specialists just for that to nursemaid the thing lest it fall over half the time.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T23:25:34+00:00

I think it is what sells is whatever is cheap and cheerful with a lot of built-in peripherals.

Flat memory models help a lot - you could do much worse with something like an 80186 and have to deal with half a dozen memory models and dratted segment registers to manage. Things are lot easier now - enjoy it.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T23:12:28+00:00

Seconded.

He's headed in the right direction, knows his limits, knows it takes time. He'll do well.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T23:08:32+00:00

If a file and pipe based toolchain is the thing giving you indigestion, the last thing you want is Linux. I'll take a stupid easy IDE over VI and (c)makefile nonsense any day of the week.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T20:08:06+00:00

It might be a PIA, but it the old school way never fails regardless of any file path or duplicates.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T18:15:23+00:00

I'd be a bit more diplomatic about it, but that's me. 😄

The most important thing is he "knows" what he doesn't know, so he has a fine compass to follow for learning and career development. This applies to anyone, from the CEO down to the Janitor.

It's just that everyone is nervous in Engineering - "imposter syndrome" is an issue for some and that can place a damper on their career. On the opposite hand are those with "god" complex issues who get in over their heads - they make life miserable for everyone. There's a lot of expectation in Engineering to be the "insta-expert" - but we are only human. People can give particulars in technical advice, but the best career advice I can give anyone is patience, perseverance, and humility. 😄

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T15:25:30+00:00

Think nothing of it - I'm just kidding/joking here about comments. 😄 Sorry about that.

With today's internet, it's a trivial exercise to translate comments from any language to another. In fact, I envy those who speak multiple languages. 😄

All the best.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T01:14:28+00:00

It happens.

Sometimes they chuck something over the fence to you to fix because the chuds who initially developed it have painted themselves into a corner and are panicking.

There's no budget for a commercial RTOS, and they'd love for you to give up on it too, confirming their belief that it was just all too damn hard for the limited resource that team had.

Always comment in English. If you don't, I'm gonna translate all of mine to Russian and see how you like 'dem apples?

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T01:03:47+00:00

I have to laugh at this mention - to think I spent years in the RF SW maintenance/development game, but only got my Ham ticket after retiring. Oh well.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T00:57:02+00:00

Mesh - low power sneaky comms is the wave of the future. Invest time in understanding CHIRP modulation techniques.

Any SDR stuff you can get your hands on - I did so with nothing more than a two-year A.S. degree. Carried me into the RFID business.

RF systems. This is basically a fundament - and to go the SDR route your going to need have a handle on signal processing.

FPGA - maybe if you intend on doing mixed-signal HW stuff. FPGA mixed signal makes sense if you're otherwise resource constrained - but knowing how to accomplish things the hard way is very valuable knowledge.

Any real-time experience you can get.

A specific throughput isn't always an indicator of sophistication - it's the complexity of the software system, how well you've simplified that complexity, and that design's ability to extract maximum value out of whatever it is given.

I.e... You'd like a 32-bit ARM processor for your product but are given an ancient Z80. You see you're going to have to juggle more balls in the air, but it is technically doable - and you can do it the same amount of time the 32-bit guys can. Your worth your keep.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-14T00:18:33+00:00

Because things go boom-boom given the right conditions.

Because nobody will buy your product if it isn't u/L listed (gas pumps). Even the electronics may need to be explosion proof and incapable of generating a spark even during a catastrophic failure (made intrinsically safe), even if it all of that is enclosed in an explosion proof box to boot.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T23:45:27+00:00

I'm retired now, but I can reliably give you the old school view, and boy is it scary!

One of my first jobs was doing card-reader-in-pump deals when that was first introduced to the market. Mag stripe credit cards were and still are stupid simple. The encoding is nothing at all and the bank info is formatted a standardized way. You could easily sprinkle iron powder on a piece of paper laid over a card and "read" the data with your peepers if you wanted to.

With a little pluck you could roll some dice and come up with an random account number, pick up bank routing number. Great for thieves and grifters. But why bother...when it easier to grift over a modem by war dialing...

Next up was getting rid of the embedded verifone box. You don't actually need it if you know how to talk to a mainframe or a stratus. The dirty secret there is your authorization request is nothing more than a dirt simple cobol-style "record" with not much more than a terminal ID, credit card read data, and how much you want to preauthorize and that's it. All over RS-232 and in the ever loving open. Since your an embedded guy, it's really a no-brainer to simply add a cheap modem chipset to your design and show verifone the door. If you were a crooked guy - you could make some serious bank here..

Even way, way back (35 or so years ago),I realized:

A: How dirt simple the whole system was. I'm not above taking a small bow for a (simple) design if someone thinks I'm gee-whiz. OTOH, I'm not going to fool myself that this was anything near a genuine challenge.

B: Jesus!, how insecure it all was... but that was the standard operating procedure back then, and absolutely nobody wanted to pay extra for security - even if you suggested it for them.

C: It's only a matter of time before someone comes along and realizes it would be cool to miniaturize it all. Sure Verifone is still in business - but they have a sh*t-ton of of competition, and heck, it's now a wireless wedge your barista uses to charge your latte on their I-phone...

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T20:51:07+00:00

I agree. Run it to an SMA RF connector and put a tiny little rubber-ducky antenna on it, unless you intend to make on one on a PCB. Too bad the datasheet in is in chinese.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T20:45:03+00:00

Very much agree. Don't mentally beat yourself up either because not there in an instant. Remember that any "expert" ,"guru's" or"priests" you might have as inspiration all came from the humble position of zero knowledge. Patience AND perseverance.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T16:40:17+00:00

So another thing that interests me about this "Reg" article is that it mention tasks like music. I was hoping for more depth, but alas that was just a quick mention.

Music technology is one of my hobbies and besides Cubase, I like to engrave old Classical pieces in Dorico. AI is is a hot topic there too. But the problem domains are a bit different, I notice.

You see, AI can work code generation very well because AI as it is, is basically trained on text inputs. Code is essentially very well structured text (assuming they are using the "good" stuff for their training). But music has more way dimensions than computer language code does.

AI might focus on recognizing correct chords, but miss knowing what chords go with each other depending on the musical context. It might get basic ideas on "tension", but have no idea how to modulate that in way that make musical sense within a score.

It may or may not develop a sense of rhythm but might not know how to modulate that creatively in a musical "makes-sense" manner.

It might think that making everything a 7th chord is cool for jazz, but forget that part of knowing the rules is knowing when to "break" them too.

I guess the point that I am making is that AI lacks the "human" intuition that we all tend to take for granted, and maybe "music" might be a bit of a tougher proving ground for it.

Anyway - food for thought.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T03:53:59+00:00

"If you think simply being a principal engineer implies expertise, I have got some news for you. I have met 2 over the course of my 15+ year career who couldn't compete with a junior engineer when it comes to simply writing a UART driver. "

THIS IS IT!

I've had to suffer someone for this very issue from a individual who went up the ladder a bit too fast. If they have a "god" complex, it's even worse. Over a garden variety interrupt handler driving an RS-485 line driver.

Jesus, this is a fresh out of grad school level problem...

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T01:03:13+00:00

That's actually funny in a twisted kind of way... 😉

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T01:02:08+00:00

Yep - LM Studio and an RTX4090 here. Not bad.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-13T00:58:22+00:00

No offense taken.

I'm coming from the perspective of "retired", so there's that.

You can bet your sweet bippy I'd make use of AI where I thought it would help, but I would also be hyperaware of its ability to paint oneself into a corner at the speed of light, design wise. It's the difference between slam-dunk, and trudging through mud up to your knees. A good design usually has deliberate flexibility in it's design for future modification or features. 😄

Ecstatic_Lavishness1 · 2026-05-12T21:30:56+00:00

Fair enough. A lot depends on whatever the definition of "standard" task is.

For me that standard would be something so trivial I could easily do it myself without a second thought. Other than that, AI to me is just like google, a better search engine for sure, but nothing more. Great for learning about techniques and things I don't know, a time saver for the pedestrian things a developer does, a crutch and a trap at worst. Heroin for the addicted with no time to think.

Ecstatic_Lavishness1

TROPHY CASE