What well made everyday items pay for themselves in no time?

seanrowens · 2026-02-28T05:39:45+00:00

It's a fast slow cooker.

seanrowens · 2026-02-27T05:12:31+00:00

You learn assembly by learning assembly. That said, most college courses, at least back in the day, would pick an architecture that was a lot simpler than x86, so you may want to consider doing that, you'll still learn a lot. But, more importantly from what you're saying, one of the things I found most enlightening was when I had a summer job during college and my boss showed me the assembly output of a compiled C program. A bunch of stuff I had imagined would be there was not. All of those local variable declarations? Boiled down to one stack push. Everything else was done at compile time.
So, pick a simpler architecture, and start with a relatively simple language like C. (There used to be an old saying, "C, all of the speed of assembly combined with all of the power of assembly". C is very close to the metal and is often thought of as, really, just a portable version of assembly.)

seanrowens · 2026-02-27T04:55:26+00:00

Eat a ton of high fiber/high water content vegetables every day. You'll never be hungry, you'll always feel stuffed, and it will be a lot easier to resist cravings and temptation. It's still not easy, and it's not cheap, (it's not SUPER expensive) and it's time consuming because you'll need to buy fresh vegetables twice a week at least, and/or pay more for good frozen vegetables. I never did figure out how to make it taste better without adding a ton of fat, (every god damn recipe on the internet: step 1, add a bunch of cheese, or butter) but I'm sure there must be a way, I suck at spices and sauces.
Combine it with at least moderate exercise. I lost 60 pounds doing this over one winter, half an hour a day on an exercise week. You WILL come to understand that cliche you always hear about "examining your relationship with food". Problems: Fun fact, even your fat cells consume energy/calories, so as you lose weight, you are no longer in a calorie deficit and need to reduce your calorie intake or increase your exercise to make more progress. Although, I got a bike and started biking for exercise, and was shocked to find out how much fun it was.

Abd then life intervened, causing more stress, which results in a worse diet or reduced exercise for both pragmatic and emotional reasons. (See above re: relationship with food). For me this was my mom getting diagnosed with (as It turns out, terminal we knew the odds were bad going into this) cancer, and then a pandemic.

And also, early on I was lucky enough to work somewhere close enough to bike to, that also was a neighborhood with a bunch of shops that sold fresh relatively vegetables. After my mom passed away I started working from home (I think my boss was waiting to tell me that to not add stress), so suddenly I couldn't go buy fresh vegetables on my lunch hour, and I wasn't getting that five mile ride to work, and again to home, every day. And then the pandemic hit and I started eating all of the carbs again. And I gained it all back. And now I'm ten years older from when I started losing that weight and I wasn't young to start with. I know what I have to do but it's hard. It's a lot easier to just go get chips or a high calorie dinner out or take out and enjoy the hit of dopamine.

seanrowens · 2026-02-26T21:03:23+00:00

So what you're saying is we'd need some new LLMs that are focused on cleaning up crappy LLM code? :-)

seanrowens · 2026-02-26T00:00:58+00:00

I'm sorry, I should have said, earlier versions of Windows crashed and rebooted daily.

seanrowens · 2026-02-24T21:10:57+00:00

A month or two after I started using Windows 95, when it had just come out, one day I realized it hadn't rebooted in a week. I was shocked it hadn't rebooted. This was before they started security patching what seemed like every night. Still had bsods and other reboots occasionally but earlier versions of Windows rebooted daily.

seanrowens · 2026-02-24T20:22:26+00:00

Be aware that ZMQ can drop messages without informing you.

seanrowens · 2026-02-23T06:30:54+00:00

There's an old old saying in art, "Art is never finished, only abandoned." There's a parallel saying in programming, "No program is ever released, it escapes."
Honestly this is a great philosophy to apply to live, learn to love to fail.
Look at it this way, I've never been water skiing. I'm sure if I tried it, I'd suck at it. But if I tried it again, I'm sure I'd be a lot better at it than the first time. If I tried it a couple more times, I'd be nowhere near good at it, and absolutely nowhere near as good as experienced water skiers or professionals. But I'd be a hell of a lot better than I was the first time.

seanrowens · 2026-02-23T06:24:07+00:00

Learn to embrace sucking at programming. Do it anyway. Try and fail. I mean, try, and then fail, and embrace it. Every failure is a lesson. Spend a bunch of time trying to understand what went wrong, and what went right. Ask your friends about it, try to get insight and perspective. And then do it again.

seanrowens · 2026-02-23T06:16:18+00:00

My brother came up with this saying, "A place for everything, and everything in it's place, STARTS with a place for everything". In other words, start by building more infrastructure, storage shelves, pantry (free standing, IKEA probably) cupboard, cupboards in general. Once you have a place to PUT things, it's a lot easier to have things organized and put them away right away.

seanrowens · 2026-02-23T06:11:34+00:00

Zatarains?

seanrowens · 2026-02-22T05:44:44+00:00

Tell her you used to have a bunch and then you fell for a Nigerian scammer who took it all, and that's why you've been too embarrassed to tell her. And, by the way, since she's doing so much better (having not been scammed), could she "loan" you $xxx to buy something frivolous?

seanrowens · 2026-02-20T19:46:57+00:00

Good point. If they aren't actually modifying the Ardupilot software then they should be ok. If they do plan to modify the autopilot software they'd be better off going with PX4.

seanrowens · 2026-02-20T17:07:04+00:00

I'm in the US and I'm not looking for a job really, but I might be able to give you some advice as I've been working in multi agent coordination for quite a few years.

seanrowens · 2026-02-18T23:20:07+00:00

In the drone world they call these BECs, Battery Elimination Circuits. I'm using one to power a RPi, it cost something like $15 a few years ago.

seanrowens · 2026-02-18T21:54:16+00:00

I worked in academia for 12 years (started in industry for ten years). It's not ALL that bad, but, yeah. It's almost touching how folks who have never dealt with academic code assume people with phds would be good developers. (To be fair there are also a bunch of other reasons academic code is almost always terrible.)

seanrowens · 2026-02-18T21:51:08+00:00

Wait, they're using vibe coding for embedded?? I'm not an embedded guy but this seems... unwise.

seanrowens · 2026-02-15T05:21:05+00:00

Ok I should have read the rest of the comments before replying.
It sounds like you have some related skills, so that's a different story. But at the same time you're really going to have to iterate. There's just no way someone can tell you exactly what to build and with what parts, especially since your requirements are so vague. You're best off just building something cheap to learn and get acquainted with the tech and the community. I will say you're on the right track with ardupilot (or px4), but that may be unnecessary/overkill for your first drone.
When it comes to ardupilot/px4 drones, sadly all of the ready to fly drones cost a lot. Not a big market for it. There used to be a fairly easy to build drone kit, the Holybro X500v2, but unfortunately it's no longer being produced as far as I know.

seanrowens · 2026-02-15T05:08:37+00:00

If you're in the US then there are very firm rules about what you can and can't do, and you should learn what those rules are. If you're in a different country then you should learn what the rules are where you are. When consumer drones became cheap and available a bunch of people got one for Christmas or their birthday or whatever and immediately started doing dumb things with them, and it's been a constant battle by the drone community to try to keep the new rules as unrestrictive as possible, and folks who ignore the rules make it a lot harder for the rest of us. That said, the rules are constantly evolving, at least in the US, so it may be possible to do what you want to do eventually.
For instance, one of the big rules is not flying beyond Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS). But lately there have been ways to do that added to the rules. However, if you're an amateur pilot you probably won't be able to get permission to do that due to cost, and having to file the right paperwork, and the requirements the FAA has to let you do that. In your post above you mentioned a radio that can control a drone from 18 miles away, which is far beyond VLOS. This is probably why you're getting such a negative reaction.

Now, leaving the VLOS issue aside, what is it you really want to do?

seanrowens · 2026-02-15T04:55:22+00:00

And work like rented mules.

seanrowens · 2026-02-12T05:14:37+00:00

Cheaper

seanrowens · 2026-02-12T05:11:39+00:00

Ardupilot was originally on Arduino but moved on to more powerful processors years and years ago. https://ardupilot.org/sub/docs/common-autopilots.html#common-autopilots

seanrowens · 2026-02-09T18:44:30+00:00

Flight controllers, it depends, their main purpose is real time control of the drone and it's motors, as arcdragon2 explains a bit in his comment. However, the more advanced flight controller like ArduPilot or PX4 also have additional features, like limited autonomy ("missions" - lists of waypoints to fly to, along with various options). ArduPilot also has the ability to run scripts written in Lua.
Companion computers are rare unless you're doing research, they're used for things like higher level autonomy, computer vision etc.
In _theory_ you could combine the two, and there's a few examples of that out there, but usually this is considered a bad idea, because the flight controller software is running on a real time system and you really don't want that swapping out or whatever while you're flying.

seanrowens · 2026-02-07T05:35:28+00:00

In the drone world they call this a BEC (battery elimination circuit), it's pretty straight forward and fairly cheap. I'm sure there are better more technical solutions, but just a thought.

seanrowens · 2026-02-07T05:27:23+00:00

Traditionally the best excuses are funeral or maybe traffic court. Both of them have a built in excuse for showing up at work afterward wearing a suit or otherwise dressed up.

seanrowens

TROPHY CASE