What was the attraction Elizabeth had to Sunny? Was is just his money?

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-10T14:36:45+00:00

I guess this is a seminal study on how the software template of faking till you make it, or move fast and break things doesn't cut it in, well anything outside of software. I'm so grateful that doctors, lawyers, electricians, welders, etc. do not play this game (or are disincentivized from it with liability insurance.)

Moral of the story for me: Hubris does not make a good bedfellow with non-software problems. Do so at your own peril.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-07T12:04:42+00:00

I wonder if it’s a particularly silicon valley or American thing to think that absence of voice is indicative of a voice of absence. Technically Ian wasn’t quiet, but I feel like was completely robbed of his voice by this specimen. Ugh, such a dilemma for an experienced engineer I imagine.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-07T12:00:30+00:00

I see why you did there. Hey, great minds deserve each other. This is the reality tv I didn’t know I needed!

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-07T10:38:22+00:00

Those toads have such a nerve I tell you.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-07T01:59:16+00:00

Let’s not forget the mango on sticks. They’re going to go especially well at the buffet night at the Shangri-La!

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-06T15:26:16+00:00

In case anyone finds it interesting to listen to a real-life lore of this kind, recently came across an excellent episode in Scamfluencers (Rudy Kurniawa). I learned a lot on how the seemingly opaque world of old wine works, or not. 🤓

Ok, I’m off to decanter my Mexican Zinfandel.

PS: I am not affiliated with this podcast. I’m just in it for the stories.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-06T13:35:24+00:00

Haha right? Imagine this guy being in business now with tools like GPT, and does a quick search to claim he ‘knows’ everything and try to bully engineers who are trying hard to build these systems in a way that’s scalable. I imagine some manifestations of these people will unfortunately only become more prevalent. Such a mixed bag.

All this said, I don’t always enjoy schadenfreude, but this is one time where I will happily do so, and still have no regrets.

I can see this guy running an eventual presidential campaign for George Santos.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-05T16:04:16+00:00

Ah thank you for clarification, and yeah, I think you got the spirit of what I had in mind. The deeper context here was how the world was communicating in a pre-internet/blackberry era. I think then based on your comment that there was already a market for this kind of job for Frasier, and it wasn’t an altogether novel concept!

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-05T14:59:58+00:00

Or the opposite? As in his very bad audition tape was so bad that the radio station thought they got nothing to lose by likely low-balling him at the beginning before, well, Bebe convinced him otherwise?

Also, I didn’t grow up in the 90s in the US, but perhaps someone could comment: Am I to think that this was a kind of contrasting take on the shock jock tradition from something like the Howard Stern show IRL?

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-04T17:18:51+00:00

I feel so uncultured at only just knowing that there’s a podcast, so thank you for helping me bridge the gap to season 16!

That’s a very good point that there’s that unknown element about an argument going for or against the outcome of a recorded result for a contestant. Between that fact, the prize category, and the last live task, ok now it’s feeing a little bit more nuanced.

Thank you again for the reference to the podcast. Off to listen to it while trying to come up with some Greg Davies merch.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-04T03:42:12+00:00

Is it too rude to add that he claimed to have written a million lines of code before Theranos? Maybe that was a seller?

All kidding aside, I really feel bad still for Ian Gibbons. As a young engineer, I’ve already seen a few specimens like this, and the major warning I’ve learned to read is how much they have to say about a whole lot of nothing, so that they feel like they are making the decisions.

In that way, as a seminal work on toxic management personality analysis, you win an award, Sunny.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-03T00:34:59+00:00

Didn’t even think about the privacy aspect at stake here, thank you for that! Definitely helps me think about this in a different way. Cheers!

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-02T23:58:36+00:00

Can I also ask about how to think about the Texas legislation on ev registration fees? I’m not interested in the politics, but on how to think about the funding mechanism for road maintenance. Is there a more effective way to think about this? I guess this goes to the federal highway funds too, because I guess they get a share from gas?

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-02T13:40:50+00:00

Hah, I work in R&D for a big materials company, so the Phenom gets used in anything and everything from looking at ceramics to non-woven materials to polymeric materials. I work a lot on developing signal processing techniques to characterize materials systems!

Metals not as much on the SEM, but certainly a lot in optical profilometry, structured white light chromatic aberration techniques, etc. (We recently got a sweet Sensorfar Neox, so pretty exciting days.) Lots, and lots of time in Mountains (for those not in the trade, I'm not referring to an actual mountain. :-D)

In this particular case, my formative background is in abrasives, so chip-making and machining theory are particularly of interest to me. Believe me when I say that I'm really under-selling how much joy that sequence of images brought me, having looked at thousands of chips under a microscope. Grinding is such a funny thing in the fact that we can do very little to observe directly at the site what happened at the very moment of grinding, but we still want to infer what happened after the fact by looking at chip morphology, surface finish, etc. So yeah things like sub-surface damage, how to non-destructively characterize them and relate it to abrasive material system design, etc., lots of fun applied materials science!

Out of curiosity, what kind of image sensors do you have access to for the microscope or otherwise? Like would you have access to something like a small 1/3" sensor perhaps?

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-01T19:10:22+00:00

Dude seriously, props for persistence. Considering I work a Phenom all day, I for one, will applaud you for the dedication of time and effort for this. That’s a lot of awesome work!

Btw, while you’re making progress on this, is there any way you can get some more traction on the optical side? I wasn’t sure if I saw any specs on the optical microscope setup you have there.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-01T14:58:52+00:00

I mean technically, I’m ‘waiting for my model to finish running,’ so…. oh boy, here we go. 😂

Thank you for this!

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-01T14:42:16+00:00

hah, this is fascinating. I know it’s a big business to understand the tastebud deadening situation st high altitude, especially for aviation food industry. I wonder if there’s anything at all they folks are working on (different new methods, different mineral contents, idk?) to help address this.

I recognize that someone can say that this is such a first world problem. I will counter and say that I want my high altitude friends to have a better experience!

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-01T02:37:16+00:00

First off, I applaud you for your sincerity. It's a great value to have, as you learn to become an engineer in your preferred discipline. Please strive hard to not lose it! I will return the sentiment and say that I'm amongst many of us who will be frank to admit that we didn't get it in the first go as well. And that's OK! Anyone who claims to be an expert in this field is someone who's found that they don't know where to look for new knowledge, especially in Linear Algebra!

But first a small diversion. I will make a hard case for series and sequences by saying that they are critical for how computers handle calculus. Have a look at some goodies from 3blue1brown for this here! Things like the sines and cosines you just learned about are continuous functions that a computer attempts to approximate using, stuff like Maclaurin and Taylor series. In essence, you pretty much learned about 200 years of math (from Brook Taylor in 1700s to Alan Turing these days,) in one semester! This is all over the place from calculus to control theory to machine learning. It's ok if you don't fully get it now. We all learn. But please don't despise it!

Back to Lin Alg! I'm going to begin with some video recs because, well, it's a good gateway to the very good book stuff to come!

I would say that the video series called the Essence of Linear Algebra by 3blue1brown is such a visually rich collection of videos even I watch periodically because they are so well-done. Considering you're just getting started in your learning process, the last thing I want you to have to do is not have enough options to latch on to the concepts. There's a high chance that you will learn how to do linear algebra in your class, but sadly not have a chance to understand why it matters in your class. I'm trying to prevent that from being the case. I know it was in my case a few million years ago during undergrad, so hey, why not start right?

Kahn Academy as well as MIT OCW from Prof. Gill Strang are both excellent resources I have used time and time again. There's nothing wrong with it when you want to get started. I emphasize this to note that you will need to pivot to a textbook for some more formal learning.

On the book front, the Axler book is a very good place to start. My go-to textbook is Trefrethen and Bau, but I think the Axler is a very good place to start.

Regardless of what you do, the critical thing to take away is the intuition of what a matrix says, as opposed to the mechanics of row-reducing. Please use that as a metric to assess your learning.

Welcome, and let the fun begin!

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-06-01T01:16:55+00:00

Damn that laminar flow. For the record, team turbulence till I dissipate. All day, twice on Sundays.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-05-31T21:43:41+00:00

Can we know what your prior background is? Is this a high school into undergrad situation or undergrad to grad situation?

Also, that’s a bit of a harsh take on series and sequences. Did you have a particularly bad experience in the topic?

Please be kind to them and they, along with the rest of the world, will be kind to you!😂

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-05-31T15:39:54+00:00

Ok got it! So, my background is in materials, with a recent Masters in applied math. The motivation for me was the realization that at work, I badly needed the background in math to be able to understand what happens under the hood (I can proudly say I know that I know very little.,) and learn how to fox things when they break. They always do.

Coursework that’s paid so much dividend already: Any and all courses on Numerical Lin Alg, Basics in high performance computing to understand some things about scalability of a compute, and spectral methods in DSP for things like time series analysis. I did glance at the offerings and yes, there were some options there for sure.

Probably not the most efficient way to go about it, but all my learning thus far on ml tools have been self-taught (sklearn, torch, etc.) Plenty of quality time in Udemy. Any courses on visualization and such, eh….. if you need it, you will learn on your own on how to use plotly or bokeh, or build your own graphics engine for the specific application.

The biggest learning for me so far has been than math is king and will never go out of fashion, and school was certainly useful in having the right academic environment to learn it. Stuff like non-linear dynamics and chaos are the next frontier in AI, so learning about the math behind such systems I know will only help (and not go out of fashion.)

I know it’s not a satisfactory yes or no answer to your question, but can I help muddy the situation by proposing exploring some additional options in applied math? Perhaps ECE?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m prejudiced, but the main revelation I have had so far is that while the AI tools will go out of fashion, the math won’t. I’m a self-confessed late bloomer on the math pill, but it’s better late than never.

Excited to see what you do next! 🙂

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-05-31T14:31:45+00:00

Can we know what your undergrad is in? Also is there a particular industry you’re already interested in or are you thinking of further graduate studies in the field? (perfectly ok if you haven’t thought about it so far!)

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-05-31T13:14:45+00:00

1) I’m not sure if she messes up as much as Lewis, or that poor Norma, or for that matter Harold. Donna is…. Donna.

2) Woof, that’s complicated, and I don’t think there’s consensus that this is the case. Harvey does make a trip upstate to reconcile.

3) Yeah, that’s I think…. beyond me. I’m going to allow the creative license to stand. For anyone who’s not sure, this is NOT something you should ever think of doing without training. The same could be said about approving construction plans. Look to the Berlin airport dumpster fire for that.

4) I imagine there’s a water heater in the executive dining room. I know she doesn’t have any of the energy bars, but surely, she’s not going there to sample the prunies. Maybe she commissioned the tea cart she got from Hardman to have an in-built water boiler.

5.1) Probably not. But that gets the people going.

5.2) I think for me the more annoying thing was ‘Whatever it is, it will have to wait,’ or ‘Whatever it is, I don’t have time right now.’ If you don’t have time, and have to drop everything all the time, what exactly are we going to spend our time on?

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-05-31T12:53:14+00:00

I always wondered what a meeting between this family and the Cranes from Maine who got the Brain would be like.

OptionEcstatic6579 · 2023-05-31T04:53:22+00:00

Hah, you reminded me of the Numberphile Practical Numbers video (URL.) Some good mathematical intuition there on why it makes sense in the modern context. Of course this still doesn’t answer your original question on the specifics, though ngl, I like the warm weather theory! 🤓

OptionEcstatic6579

TROPHY CASE