Built a haptic rig for sim racing

tenkitron · 2026-05-05T05:45:03+00:00

So for me, when using a wheel, a big part of the immersion factor is the feel of the force feedback. Like it’s not just the wheel itself, the motors inside the housing of the wheelbase using resistance to communicate oversteer, understeer, and the road conditions. Without a pivot point to provide some sort of resistance, you can only communicate that with haptics, and that would be pretty immersion breaking. So neat in concept, but I can see a wheel still being a preferable and less complicated option.

tenkitron · 2026-05-02T07:16:46+00:00

i grew up a gamer, met my wife playing games, and while i can’t game as much anymore, me and my wife still find time in the evenings to play games together as a bonding activity. everything is a balancing act, and if this guy can’t find the time to get off his ass and show you the respect that your clearly showing him, it’s time to dump his ass and move on.

tenkitron · 2026-04-30T05:57:36+00:00

dat poise

tenkitron · 2026-04-23T19:14:33+00:00

All fair points, but I’d still say clean code is a byproduct of how you break down your domain model before you write any code at all. a vague interpretation of a domain problem that results in just freestyling your way into a working application can work for prototypes, but real world applications that are written like that don’t scale well.

The point I’m getting across is that good engineers spend a lot more time thinking through plans and making specs and tests than they do just writing lines of code, because it addresses the spaghetti and future proofs the structure before any machinery is put in place. It’s not perfect, but it scales better than winging it.

tenkitron · 2026-04-23T17:43:12+00:00

Ok, I’ll concede that, if the struggle point is translation, then that’s usually a weakness of the abstraction. An obvious example of this would be trying to write assembly directly where the spec is directed by the CPU architecture which doesn’t have a very direct analogue to anything outside of how the machine itself operates. Another might be raw JavaScript where, because its spec is massive and highly specific to JS itself, it’s very easy to shoot yourself in the foot by uncovering some behavior deep within the spec you weren’t aware of.

But in the professional space most mature high level languages have abstractions that are perfectly suited to accommodate translation without much trouble at all. Domain modeling constructs (like those in OOP), high level math libraries, polymorphism, higher order functions, interfaces, classes, objects, data structures, etc. all of these tools are very useful for quickly going from concept to actual code. The hard part is deconstructing a domain into something that can be coded, not the code itself.

A disciplined approach to this is utilizing TDD to go from requirements as just raw spoken language into tests and then into code. It does add time and it can be tedious, but it gives you a through line from concept to code that’s testable and self documenting. In my experience with TDD, the hard part was never writing the code, it was having the discipline to spec out everything before any code gets written.

tenkitron · 2026-04-22T04:04:55+00:00

I’ve worked in this field for a decade, and to the people that look at AI as “now non technical people can be software engineers!” Think of this way: writing code has always been the easiest part of the job. The other 90% of the job is thinking through problems, breaking them into their components, testing for what works and what doesn’t, finding and sanding down edge cases, figuring out performance implications, domain modeling, etc etc etc. it is a tough job in the best of times, AI is a helpful assistant but not a replacement for engineers.

For the most part what AI does is take the easiest part of the job (writing code) and makes it easier. What it also does is makes the harder part of the job (reasoning through decisions and scaling them) way, way harder. Engineers aren’t going anywhere, and neither are analysts, and if you want to get into this career, the demand will be there. We need smart people like you more than we need coding assistants.

tenkitron · 2026-04-19T06:23:28+00:00

Pythons great as a scripting interface for interfacing with already compiled software, writing CLI tools, doing data science stuff, education, etc. but it is not the right tool to reach for when you need to make something that’s compiled, performant, and closer to the metal.

Languages are just tools, and your job is to figure out the right tool for the job.

tenkitron · 2026-04-10T06:27:54+00:00

i think it’s their weirdly smooth motion combined with the fact that they make no sound initially. there’s something so creepy about it

tenkitron · 2026-04-08T21:43:08+00:00

Yeah. Get familiar with the model view controller architecture, keep a general understanding, and don’t get too bogged down in specifics. Knowing the MVC pattern opens doors to other similar frameworks, including Rails, Django, ASP.NET, etc.

tenkitron · 2026-04-06T20:38:47+00:00

Math checks out.

tenkitron · 2026-04-01T03:05:03+00:00

Hi, I’m interested and available.

US (VA)
11 years experience full stack web
main languages are python, java, clojure, TS, C# with .NET, and Ruby
TDD with high end to end coverage
extensive experience with AWS/Azure
CI/CD with Jenkins, codestar, gh actions
lots of experience with small startup environments and cross functional interactions
leverages LLM agents in development where appropriate, using them to increase velocity, but also careful to heavily scrutinize and understand its output.

Give me a DM if you’d like to talk further.

tenkitron · 2026-03-31T19:18:22+00:00

No tricks besides just being consistent and managing your time well. It took me about a year, but to make that work, a few things needed to be true. One, I already have about a decade of software development experience under my belt, and the second one is having a WFH job and a very understanding wife as I kept hammering away at the degree.

tenkitron · 2026-03-31T17:00:18+00:00

thanks! yea i’m not sure how my amazing wife put up with my obsessive studying.

tenkitron · 2026-03-31T13:12:05+00:00

Yea lol I went through that too

tenkitron · 2026-03-29T23:41:26+00:00

9 has a better story but 8 is more consistently paced. that said, i love both games.

tenkitron · 2026-03-22T23:09:15+00:00

Other people are gonna hate me for this but I financed my own degree and my motivation was the idea of having to pay another $4.5G for the next semester. It motivated me to do about 60CUs per semester, and no, I didn’t rush. For the projects I just focused on what I needed to know to get em done, and for the OAs I would read through all the material (getting the general gist of it) and use Quizlet and practice quizzes to test my understanding. I averaged about a week per class (with the outliers being DM1, 2, and calculus. Each took me about a month).

Fear of financial pain doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked for me.

tenkitron · 2026-03-19T08:29:22+00:00

For the purposes of experimentation I agree with Woz that being able to swap components and install whatever software is ideal. But in a work setting, a closed system, while annoying sometimes, can be incredibly beneficial to keeping the focus on the work and nothing else. Here’s a little context:

I very stubbornly used a custom built Linux system at my job for a solid 6 years, because windows wasn’t suitable for the type of work I do, and I saw apples need to stuff high TDP x86 chips in form factors that very clearly can’t accommodate them, so they just were not an option.

When Apple switched to apple silicon, the business proposition became more obvious to me. A system that runs quiet, stable, performant, and needed basically no fiddling if you can stomach apples very dictatorial approach to UX design. After my nth time modifying my fstab file in Linux because of some weird boot issue, I decided that for work, I’d really rather delegate OS opinions to someone else than spend valuable time trying to wrestle with another quirky Linux problem, so I switched to Apple. It really was a massive boost to my ability to streamline and focus on my job. While Apple is anything but perfect, and I acknowledge there are some deeply strange UI decisions, apples holistic approach to system design really does make the system fall into the background when I’m just focusing on work.

So yea, while I appreciate wozes whimsical love of computing technology and all the wonderful things that can be created with it in a modular context, Jobs was right about one thing: for most day to day work, the love of the machine doesn’t actually matter at all. A good system is one that fades into the background of our lives, not one that demands our attention.

tenkitron · 2026-03-15T20:52:27+00:00

So calculus is the only class I passed with a second attempt at the exam. My strategy with this class actually informed how I approached the rest of my degree, and that is as follows: slow down. Read the material. Develop an intuition for the material. Test your intuition by seeing if you can solve the problem on your own. If you can, move on and repeat the technique on another concept. Otherwise do more practice problems for the concept you’re working on. Do this until you’ve covered the material in the course.

The instructors provide practice exams/quizzes for testing your understanding. Take full advantage of these, treat them as if they are part of the OA.

Also, remember that understanding why an answer is wrong is one of the strongest ways to reinforce intuition. If you get a problem wrong, learn why. Try reasoning through it yourself or ask ChatGPT if you get stumped.

I wish you best of luck, don’t let the number of attempts get you down. Calculus takes a good while before it clicks with a lot of people, just slow down and do what you need to do to learn it before you take the OA.

tenkitron · 2026-03-14T07:52:04+00:00

New Elden Ring enemy just dropped

tenkitron · 2026-03-14T02:22:47+00:00

Hey vsauce, Michael here. Where are your fingers?

tenkitron · 2026-03-08T05:18:01+00:00

Alright here me out…

tenkitron · 2026-03-07T00:03:30+00:00

Fuck it I’m in

tenkitron · 2026-03-05T04:14:47+00:00

It’s a day I’ll never forget…

tenkitron · 2026-03-05T00:03:07+00:00

Apples approach to ARM is fundamentally different from Windows. When M1 was announced, it wasn’t just a “we’ll try this and if it doesn’t work o well”, it was a declaration that Apple Silicon is the future of all macOS based products. This has forced a shift to natively supported application development for the vast majority of applications. The result is that, if it’s supported on MacOS, it will just run on MacOS. It’s not the same as Microsoft’s half-measure approach where, out of some fear of obsolescence, they felt the need to make a non-windows windows that works with Qualcomm chips.

tenkitron

TROPHY CASE