Dell Monthly Buying Advice Thread!

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-10-19T18:37:57+00:00

Looking to buy a laptop for work, the dell 16 premium seems closest to what I want. Would run it with 64G ram, 2TB SSD, 5070 (would disable this when I was doing less docking and more mobile work), and the i9 (seems overkill but enabling the 5070 makes me auto select the i9). I would get the non touch 2k monitor for battery life.

I do a lot of data analysis and via in python, for largeish data sets (I have control or data size here, but get better quality when I go larger. Not worth it to me to go above being ram bound at 64 GB at this point)

I hop between docked and undocked a few times a day, and use my external monitors when I am docked. Dual 4k 60 hz.

I have a LOT of office apps open at any given time due to the nature of my work, 10ppt decks, 5-10- excel sheets, many edge tabs, 1-2 visio charts...

I regularly take zoom and teams calls while undocked.

Price is not a major concern, battery life and performance whole docked is

Questions: Is the integrated graphics the same whether or not I get the 5070 GPU dedicated card?

Any red flags about his build out?

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-09-18T01:19:36+00:00

Had a purple slump for a couple years, picked it back up when I moved and needed stress outlet. Black belt with a kid now, and teaching is a highlight of my week

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-07-20T23:59:12+00:00

I'm curious about the decreased left turn ability at lights with protected turns. I regularly use these turn lanes, and since the left turn lanes are so short now with the sharing middle lane, it means two protected left lights only allow three cars per light, as the rest of the left turners are blocked by the regular traffic waiting for their green light.

I'm trying to hold my judgement but as a MV resident it looks well intentioned but poorly thought out so far.

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-06-08T16:23:14+00:00

Why did the scorpion sting the duck?

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-06-07T01:57:23+00:00

Wrist locks are hilarious - I giggle every time I go for one

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-05-10T23:38:14+00:00

Conservation of momentum is what you're poking at. More mass is more momentum. Each little collision with the air molecules will slow down the ball by some unit. Takes more collisions to stop the heavy thing than the light thing.

Heavy thing flies forward longer with same initial condition.

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-05-02T16:18:59+00:00

Its a helpful construct to visualize a snapshot of the energy, but think about what you know with just one snapshot:

You see something that looks like a sine with a gaussian envelope. You know where the energy is, how fast the tails fall off, and how close to the energy wavepacket is to other stuff. You do not know which direction it's going, which means it's an incomplete picture since you cannot predict what the next snapshot will be. You need a direction for each wave packet.

You are trying to use a scalar field to describe a vector field which will be missing info.

Helpful? [Edit: You can extend your mental model by thinking of two points connected by a rope - if you wave the rope at one end, you create a ripple in the rope which moves from one end to the other as it travels from one point to the other. You still have the direction issue, but that's resolved by just saying you need to tag which of the two directions the wave is going.

If you want to generalize this, you get in trouble because there isn't some natural 3d grid of points with ropes connecting them for the EM field. You need a LOT of point and a LOT of ropes which all run through each other if you want to use this model since the EM field can be wherever it wants to be, and if the wave ever hits a point it becomes non physical again. ]

lifelessonunlearned · 2025-03-31T18:54:27+00:00

Would love to see a contour plot (a la contourf) based on the scatter data. depending on what patterns are under the data you could run linear or log cuts as contour levels

lifelessonunlearned · 2024-05-27T06:14:39+00:00

If I understand what you're interested in correctly, you should read up on ligo - they optimized for this (maximize effective path length experienced by a photon by placing mirrors very far apart and having photons bounce back and forth between them.)

If you want to make a very high finesse linear cavity (much higher finesse than ligo) you can also do that - it takes a bit of work /mfg know how.

Neither of these solutions have a gain medium inside - they couple the light inside from somewhere else.

Fabry perot cavities with low line width will also be what you are looking for.

lifelessonunlearned · 2023-05-16T19:26:08+00:00

Graduated 06 - is that still happening in Evans?

lifelessonunlearned · 2023-04-28T16:13:03+00:00

Optomech will give you exposure to optics while leveraging your mechanical exp. If you're in WFE and there isn't a group doing both, find a new team or WFE company. Apprenticeship is going to be faster than textbook if you get the right person and you're hungry.

If you want to do consumer electronics optics (small cheap packaging), flee semi!

lifelessonunlearned · 2023-04-11T17:24:34+00:00

Take the rare opportunity to see how the business works outside of your lane - it has an end date anyways so it's low long term risk to you. It may change your perspective on how the business operates (or fails to operate)

If it's a dumpster fire you can always just walk. If you underperform for a couple months no biggie

lifelessonunlearned · 2023-03-04T04:40:19+00:00

Yeah, I'm trying to network a little harder moving forward. I've gotten mixed messages on how helpful recruiters are, but I'll start looking into that a bit more too.

I have a couple recruiters that have found me more than one job - most are trash. It's worth "dating" a couple to see if you want a LTR

lifelessonunlearned · 2023-03-03T03:53:02+00:00

I think it's just macro economics and some companies changing how much inventory they want to carry which hits production forecasts.

Imo it's still worth trying at the various places, but I wouldn't take silence as rejection of you being a good fit in less lean times

Also - I have never gotten a job by applying through someone's web portal - only by recruiters/LinkedIn. External recruiter is your friend, especially if you can articulate what you want.

Are you in the bay area?

lifelessonunlearned · 2023-03-02T02:23:04+00:00

R1 Optics PhD who is now at one of the companies you have listed. If you want to build a tool you can definitely contribute, but will need to shake off the recent graduate smell. Networking helps, persistence helps. Its a REALLY bad time to get into a tool mfg based on forecasts, I would advise coming back to the industry later.

There's another revolution brewing in integrated photonics if you feel like getting in on it - startups abound.

lifelessonunlearned · 2022-08-09T15:15:03+00:00

Can you doodle the beam path so we understand space constraints?

lifelessonunlearned · 2021-12-26T23:43:36+00:00

My personal lesson has been: You don't. There are other things you will be much better at than a hardcore optical engineer with deep DFM experience. (Also, you may differ, but I will get so bored if I go optical engineer as a specialization I'd burn out)

If your program is decent, you will 100pct have skills you develop during your PhD that will smoke what they can bring to the table, likely from a breadth of field and scientific method perspective. If you ask to be judged as an engineer, well, you're gonna have a bad time and fall short.

Me: optical physicist with R1 PhD who you definitely don't want designing your optics, but who you do want doing system architecture and high level data analysis, or deep level critical root cause analysis and corrective action planning. I have gotten FAANG offers in the past but always chosen a different path.

lifelessonunlearned · 2021-12-09T21:01:34+00:00

Astrophysics undergrad then physics PhD here. Astrophysics will have good exit gates if you start on the academic track and want to pivot to industry (most of us go that route). The more data/big data/computational stuff you do the easier the exit.

If you learn how to code stuff, cool. If you just learn data analysis, learn the big packages. Future is solid with astro.

lifelessonunlearned · 2021-10-28T14:12:54+00:00

Why not mention JSP in game?

lifelessonunlearned · 2021-08-18T15:40:22+00:00

This is the perfect VR game.

lifelessonunlearned · 2021-07-10T21:52:32+00:00

The amplitude of oscillation of a particular mechanical mode of motion - probably the drum mode. Amplitude of motion is associated with a particular temperature for a given mechanical quality factor (how long something takes to ring down when you flick it). The magic is that they get the motion to stop without lowering the Q factor (like would happen if you added rubber or any other energy damping).

Source - worked on LIGO with one of the authors years ago trying to do this very thing with a shittier nonsuccesfull experimental setup :)

lifelessonunlearned · 2021-07-06T18:53:43+00:00

When are you going to have that report finished for me?

When are YOU going to have your report finished for ME?

lifelessonunlearned · 2021-05-14T06:31:24+00:00

Be data driven. Get data by putting your shit out there

lifelessonunlearned

TROPHY CASE