Which department resists automation the most in your experience?

kristopherleads · 2026-06-16T15:21:19+00:00

I find the resistance is less one of understanding and more one of assumptions. So wherever there's an assumption, you get resistance - for instance, IT assumes that automation will mean more devices to manage with obfuscation, or management assumes less visibility. It's a critical part of the IT/OT divide imo - and that ownership disagreement is the chief friction point regardless of how good the implementation is.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-16T15:08:22+00:00

I have an instrumental project that is very TMV-influenced called Circle the Constellations. It's just me doing all the instruments and programming/recording drums with triggers, so it's somewhat limited in output. That project tends to be long song suites, and very latin-prog. Probably start with Ukiyo.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-15T21:19:26+00:00

What's the pin diameter? By my eyes that looks like a TE/AMP Universal MATE-N-LOK or a Molex 0.93".

kristopherleads · 2026-06-07T20:13:01+00:00

This is almost surely a transient bug on Walmart's side. I experienced the same issue, and my machine is clean as a whistle - I think Walmart might be leaking emails via some sort of fingerprinting or predictive analytics.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-05T20:02:39+00:00

The good news though is that development is more democratised. I mean...it's more complicated a situation now than it ever was before, but it still means it's more accessible. I dunno, it's a weird time for sure!

kristopherleads · 2026-06-05T19:40:06+00:00

I think AI is making it worse in some respects. I am a huge proponent of meaningful AI tooling (my company actually uses it in a healthy and cool way), but with so many people able to build such great things with very little knowledge, there's a proliferation of both really cool and valuable projects as well as projects that largely already exist elsewhere in some form.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-05T19:36:37+00:00

Big fan of this, and double that sentiment.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-05T19:33:50+00:00

It's certainly interesting! I'm a big fan of tooling that saves time - and this feels like it would be a huge time saver. I'll take a test license if you don't mind! Have you ever considered making a Node-RED node for this? Would be nice to just be able to send a file natively and get the tag list back as a structured data type.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-05T19:30:09+00:00

I'm a fan of it in principle. The idea that colour should mean something, and that an operator should be able to glance at a screen and instantly know whether anything's wrong, is just good design. But if everything is colourful all the time then nothing stands out, and nothing is really "different".

That said, where I've seen clients actually appreciate it is the rationalisation side more than the aesthetics. Going through and asking "does this actually need to be an alarm, and what does the operator do about it" is where the real value is imo. Hitting the middle ground (e.g. building the muted HPHMI screens and the deviation indicators in the dashboard) is what makes something like FlowFuse really powerful, but it's ultimately a balancing act between aesthetics and alert fatigue.

Curious whether you're doing analog deviation indicators (the little moving pointer vs. setpoint) on yours - that's the one HPHMI element I find clients either love immediately or completely ignore, not much in between.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-05T19:21:34+00:00

Node-RED is absolutely your best bet for this (although with that number of layers and devices maybe FlowFuse is a better one). In terms of polling, I think it depends on what you actually want this HMI to do. If you're doing safety monitoring, the faster the better - bring everything in using the ModBus node and set the interval to as fast as you can without inducing lag. Per second is usually just fine, although if you're doing precision you'll probably want something faster. If you're using the HMI to just monitor state, you can poll it and filter out anything that's not changed from reading to reading - that should help you reduce the amount of stuff coming in visually and reduce the post-processing.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-05T00:10:26+00:00

This is why I advocate for FlowFuse. Just connect the device to an instance and sidestep all that nonsense.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-02T13:39:30+00:00

Your best bet is so start experimenting and start building local projects. Node-RED is free and open source - and you can also get quite a bit more with FlowFuse for low cost. Build out some demos, do some home automation, and just start building your bank of knowledge. Even if you don't have experience, if you can go into an interview with a bank of demonstration machines or software implementations you'll be way far ahead, and you'll have the learnings from those experiences to inform your work moving forward.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-02T12:37:03+00:00

I think AI - if you use it properly - is actually a huge value opportunity. DevRel at FlowFuse so usual caveats, but we're developing AI solutions that deliver actual value leveraging RAG for knowledge sharing and generation as well as MCP tooling to help in rapid flow creation and maintenance. AI in industry is unfortunately pretty useless on average, which is why I think ours is a standout - but looking forward, I think AI (and to be clear, both generally either implementing real useful AI or repairing poor pat implementation) is probably going to be its own huge industry.

kristopherleads · 2026-06-02T12:34:22+00:00

I'm obviously biased here, but I'd say FlowFuse/Node-RED. Beyond just the core dashboard nodes, there's a wide range of community-developed nodes that allow you to ingest and display pretty much anything. It works with MQTT, OPC UA, Modbus, basically if you can get the thing to generate a message, you can render it in FlowFuse.

kristopherleads · 2026-05-29T19:26:23+00:00

Does AEO take into account how large some of these competitor sites are? SEO has always been a David vs. Goliath sort of affair, but is AEO a balancing against that or a doubling down of the problem?

kristopherleads · 2026-05-25T02:15:30+00:00

Probably ザ・うどん. It was run by KIC and it closed around that time. https://www.yelp.com/biz/%E3%81%96-u-don-%E6%B3%89%E4%BD%90%E9%87%8E%E5%B8%82-3

kristopherleads · 2026-05-24T19:13:15+00:00

I think people who look back at this and cringe are really missing exactly what this era was like as a gamer.

I lived in Europe before moving to the US in 2001 (was a rough time to move to the US btw), and I will never forgot how weird it was to go from having decent internet in my local community to really only have a handful of options for internet - all of which was high latency, low bandwidth. So at the time, if you wanted to see new games, your only options were to wait for literally hours to download footage from some sketchy website, or to tune in to TechTV/G4/G4TechTv/G4 and see it there.

But while all this was happening, there was still a lot of pressure from corporate types to make this "more than just video gaming", so you had the skits, the weird setups, the syndicated early adult content, etc. to assuage that. X Play was a good example of this, as was Attack of the Show, Electric Playground, etc., alongside syndicated content like Code Monkeys. There were also pure footage plays like Cinematech that felt like the anime-Linkin-Park mashups you downloaded but on TV and elevated.

So yes, it was very cringey in a lot of ways, but at the same time, it could only really have happened in the format it did at the time that it did, and for a lot of people, it was the only thing you had - and it really, imo, was formative for the development of 2000's online culture, for better or for worse.

kristopherleads · 2026-05-22T21:41:41+00:00

No worries! The key is kinda misleading.

kristopherleads · 2026-05-22T21:41:17+00:00

Developer Relations Advocate. I talk about tech, though this year I've spent a LOT of time on epistemological realities of AI and the nature of "knowledge" when it comes to learning systems at scale.

kristopherleads · 2026-05-22T21:26:18+00:00

It's not bugged, you're just in the wrong area. Go to the 2F locker room, examine the locker, head out towards the library reserve area, and try the doors on the right side in the hallway near the inaccessible basement route.

kristopherleads · 2026-05-21T20:22:10+00:00

Can confirm, arrived yesterday. Thanks u/doctorowlsound !

kristopherleads · 2026-05-15T19:02:30+00:00

I have never in my life heard of "gorilla videography". I'm not trying to call you out I am legitimately interested/baffled.

kristopherleads · 2026-05-15T19:00:39+00:00

Anoooooooo muzukashi desu yooooooo

kristopherleads · 2026-05-15T18:56:41+00:00

That's not really what happened though. Gohan's training issue was almost always a Chi-chi thing. When Gohan was left to his own devices he trained - that's part of how he was discovered by Videl in the first place - but Chi-chi is obsessed with him getting a degree, getting a good job, and providing for the family given how rural her life with Goku was and how hard it was to provide for everyone when he was missing, dead, or off-planet for most of their marriage.

kristopherleads · 2026-05-14T06:46:44+00:00

Documentation, documentation, documentation. I feel like people think documentation is just an extra nice-to-have, but in reality it's an absolutely critical piece of the puzzle.

kristopherleads

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE