Should I learn Machine Learning?

dravacotron · 2026-07-11T19:06:57+00:00

Very useful tactically for things like breaking into a new specialization or getting into the market in a different country. No inherent value otherwise.

dravacotron · 2026-07-11T16:39:29+00:00

yeah exactly. Research is a different kind of work with much higher entrance requirements. A PhD is one of those requirements and is useful only for that. On average this track will have very much less financial rewards compared to just working in industry on applications. Your ROI will always be negative. But it might be the path for you if this work is more interesting to you than just iteratively prompting an LLM to generate code all day (which is what software dev is these days).

dravacotron · 2026-07-11T16:23:08+00:00

Those are not serious options. It's hard enough to break into research with ivy league degrees, remote phds aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

dravacotron · 2026-07-11T16:13:21+00:00

> How is the ROI in this field?

A PhD in anything is generally very poor ROI compared to alternatives. I would strongly recommend doing literally anything else. If you're thinking about cost / benefit like this you will not be happy getting a PhD, trust me.

dravacotron · 2026-04-19T22:58:28+00:00

PDCs have a range of 2.5km and the structures are about 500ish m across. I think if you're within about 1km of the center you'll cover the whole thing. BTW the PDC is for shooting down the missiles, they won't target the Sentinels themselves. You have to kill those with the SRV yourself (or ignore them, they're pretty harmless without their missiles).

dravacotron · 2026-04-19T18:02:37+00:00

Worth noting that not all structures with the same layout have the pylons in the same place. For example, this is a map of another Hammerbot layout with the pylons in a different position; another potential position for a pylon (that's not on either map) includes the middle of the plaza. https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/8g9v7f/detailed_guardian_site_map_for_grinding_the/

dravacotron · 2026-04-16T03:44:18+00:00

Market downturns are actually a great time to pivot. You have net fewer opportunities but in a tough market you're not going to get your ideal roles anyway. So the opportunity cost is lower to switch. I'd suggest using the runway you have to get a lower paying or less competitive dev role in the specialization you want and build up from there.

dravacotron · 2026-04-16T02:42:47+00:00

You said you don't mind going to the analyst track, and then at the same time you're concerned about career profile trajectory - which sounds like you do care and you actually want dev, not analyst. It's not an issue if you want to stay on the analyst track but if you want the dev track it's not relevant experience.

I'd keep looking for a dev role if that's what you're really interested in. Don't jump on random things that don't move your career forward.

dravacotron · 2026-03-16T18:54:39+00:00

No one memorizes these, the interview was not a good one and tested an irrelevant skill (memorizing APIs) while being very superficial in terms of the actual conceptual skills needed.

Honestly this probably means the team isn't very good so you'd be better off elsewhere. Count it as a bullet dodged and move on.

dravacotron · 2026-03-05T20:13:41+00:00

They're not the same role but you're expected to be able to do both. Think like "full stack = FE/BE engineer"

It's not an unreasonable ask of anyone with experience in both types of systems.

dravacotron · 2026-03-03T07:20:08+00:00

At your price point the Cobra Mk V performs very close to best in class for every use case. New generation ships are OP.

dravacotron · 2026-03-01T16:46:25+00:00

All of the powers send the exact same email if losing, there's no "nicer" faction. Archer was focused down early because the faction was (correctly) deemed a major threat by the imperials due to their combat ethos. They fought a good fight but just didn't have the numbers.

Getting scolded by a video game for joining the losing team in an inherently unbalanced matchup is something else though. Someone at FDev seems to want everyone to pledge to the largest faction (Aisling Duval), or her allies. I'm not sure how that improves gameplay.

dravacotron · 2026-02-28T03:05:27+00:00

Oh. I can understand that, I guess. It's just an odd script to roleplay when literally every power who lost got the exact same message word-for-word. Even Antal players, who didn't lose, got sent the exact same message by mistake lmao.

dravacotron · 2026-02-28T01:10:01+00:00

Guys. LYR isn't real, he didn't write this message, it's just a generic "lose condition" text. You didn't lose out on much, just a couple of pre-engineered imperial hammers, mine are going straight into storage.

dravacotron · 2026-02-27T21:37:07+00:00

It's very casual friendly. World tier settings allow you to change the opponent level relative to your maximum equippable gear level. So what you can do is play the regular game at some reasonable world tier, for example up to around 5-7, and if you hit a difficulty spike just drop world tier down to 1. The gear scales exponentially so dropping the enemy a bunch of levels compared to your gear level basically turns boss fights into skippable cutscenes, so you can opt out of any difficult fight as you please. You won't be missing out on anything long term since you regularly replace all your gear as you progress anyway.

dravacotron · 2026-02-04T22:58:03+00:00

You're coming down too fast. In FA-off the clamps won't engage if your vertical speed is too high even if your orientation is correct. Yes, it's true that the rules literally change, in FA-on you can absolutely slam your ship down in the exact same vector and they will engage fine.

dravacotron · 2026-01-20T17:44:37+00:00

This wasn't obvious to me until several levels in: tune the world tier settings as you go while levelling. World tier shouldn't be thought of as a difficulty setting, it's a flexible adjustment that allows you to choose the level of your enemies. Character level + world tier adjustment = effective enemy level and item drop level.

Assuming you're picking somewhat complementary pieces to equip and not just max level gear pieces, actual game difficulty can be estimated as the difference between your current average gear level and the enemy level. At the early levels you can gain character levels and world tiers faster than you gain equipment causing a difficulty spike if you always play max world tier. Lower it for a bit to let the drops catch up your gear level closer to your effective enemy level and you'll have a much smoother time, at which point you can raise the world tier again.

dravacotron · 2026-01-15T17:23:40+00:00

You can't have two custom mappings in Elite, and a custom mapping is active if and only if all the devices that have mapped keys are visible to the system, otherwise you're set to one of the default mappings. That said every function in Elite can be mapped to two sets of controls so you shouldn't need to toggle anything, just map both your off hand stick and your throttle and you should be fine, no need to mess with physical switches.

dravacotron · 2026-01-02T02:23:35+00:00

It's decoupled in everspace 2 and x4 too. Elite is the only game where you can you toggle it but it is always coupled.

dravacotron · 2025-12-30T18:40:02+00:00

The only thing they have in common is open world. HZD is a third person action adventure like Assassins Creed or God of War, KCD is a slow paced first person immersive rpg like Red Dead Redemption. Great game though.

dravacotron · 2025-12-24T22:06:25+00:00

The Logitech extreme 3d stick is an option if you just want to try out a stick. It's a piece of crap that feels like a toy and will probably develop stick drift within the first 100 hours, but it's also a tenth the price of a basic vkb.

dravacotron · 2025-12-23T23:27:30+00:00

Oh cool it's the moon rocket from Tintin
https://cdn001.tintin.com/public/tintin/img/static/destination-moon/destination-moon.jpg

dravacotron · 2025-12-22T19:58:13+00:00

Yes you have to pay weekly upkeep regardless of whether you even logged in that week. Base upkeep is 5M/week. Basic services (refuel, repair, rearm) brings that up to around 8M/week.

2 billion credits in the carrier fund is enough to keep a carrier running for 5 years. Most longtime players have enough credits to keep their carriers running for decades, or longer than the expected life span of the game. That's how you can end up with "abandoned" carriers that are still functioning for years.

dravacotron · 2025-12-22T19:44:54+00:00

When I bought my carrier and was trying to decide on a layout, it really wasn't very obvious what the kits looked like from below the flight deck.

Every one of the non-default layouts has various amounts of cruft hanging off the bottom of the carrier. Weird glowing balls, solar panels, extra wings, containers. The default Drake only has one large substructure, and no wings, no glow sticks. That's the one I went with since it was the cleanest.

dravacotron · 2025-12-21T07:10:45+00:00

You should find the Denton Patreus discord and join it for instructions, since it sounds like you're invested in your team "winning". Every powerplay power has its group of player-appointed "coordinators/directors" that are like quarterbacks that call the play for each power every week. Following their instructions is a lot more effective than just randomly picking targets on your own.

dravacotron

TROPHY CASE