When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?...
When I was 26, I looked at my career and realized I would wake up old one day having accomplished nothing – largely due to government spending cuts in my original area of expertise (biology / forestry). Oh well, no hard feelings. Governments need to do that sometimes.
So I quit, sold all my possessions, immigrated to Vietnam, and spent literally every dime to my name setting up a company (I had the equivalent of $0.025 left). Then I cram-studied software and electrical engineering every spare moment for 3 years (meanwhile I survived on low-value, high effort contracts that no one else wanted). I also met my wonderful wife at an engineering club while doing this.
Looking back, it was an unreasonable, absurd, dangerous journey. Maybe there is something about those qualities that define actions I value? I used to wonder if I was entirely sane at the time, until I had the chance to visit my home country recently. I saw the economy hadn’t changed, and I would still be in the same dead-end job at 40 if I was lucky. Is accepting drudgery really more sane than taking a risk?
Maybe there is no sanity, only the ways we are mad together, and the ways we are mad alone. I don’t know which is better.
When I have spare time, I create things. Music boxes of exotic wood, robots, particle detectors. Lamps that shine in colors that are hard to identify (via optical illusion). Artificial plants that quiver in anticipation of rain. Nightlights designed to last forty thousand nights. A Lemmy bot that does I-Ching divination with a hardware TRNG. Machines that try to detect if the Universe is a simulation. Those musical greeting cards that no one likes. Anything, so long as it is strange and new!
I never regret time spent this way, and all my days are unplanned at some fundamental level.
I suspect not many people go and buy religions texts. Most people seem to get them for free or as a gift, so I’ll skip that.
Dictionaries and reference books like encyclopædia don’t get read much, but that feels like cheating, because that’s not really what they are for.
I’d guess something from classic children’s literature? I bet a lot of adults have never read Robinson Crusoe but buy it for kids. Or they pass on the copy that someone bought them as kids, that they never read. As a kid I managed to get through some classic literature, but I’d sometimes encounter one that was actually less interesting than just… doing nothing and waiting for time to pass.
As an aside, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having books around that you haven’t read! It seems most of the value of a library is in the books you haven’t read yet. Or refer to, without fully reading, to inspire you as you need. Or even just have because you think they are interesting or contain ideas of value, and hope to get to someday. The books I’ve actually read just get shoved in boxes somewhere dark and dusty. On my shelves or on display are all the things I haven’t gotten to yet!
For example, I am terrible at Super Meat Boy, but just playing it has really improved how I play platformers and games that need faster imputs overall.
Eve Online taught me that math + leadership are effective ways to win. Also the importance of thinking strategically and weighing risks.
World of Warcraft taught me that many people are willing to craft items all day, if it earns more in-game gold than actually doing anything fun in the game (actually in hindsight this was true of Eve, and real life for that matter). I sort of… ran an exploitative in-game sweatshop producing things for the in-game markets (e.g. not involving real money or anything that violated the rules of the game).
These two groups of realizations made me pretty good at online games for a little while! My gaming hobby came to an abrupt end when I realized I could just… start a company IRL and be paid non-virtual money.
Oh man, that brings back memories. All my Dwarf Fortress games were horrific dystopias. Full-on police states optimized for the production and export of lead children’s toys (they are enchanted by our more ethical works).
Then new unskilled arrivals would wait in a room with retractable spikes before they met anyone. It was someone’s job to pull a lever all day. Then the clothes would be exported (they are enchanted by our more ethical works).
Everyone left was either in the army or a skilled worker confined to a 2x2 room containing a bed, table, chair, and statue of the mayor. The doors locked from the outside.
Newer versions have made this strategy less productive I think – I haven’t really kept up. At the time a single death could send your fortress into a fatal spiral of depression and it worked pretty well though.
Yes, I suppose so! Technically with child labor too!
We just call them factories here though, not sweat shops. They have varying levels of working conditions, and child labor has been more or less eliminated.
Some are awful, and others are quite OK! I’ve personally had worse jobs than the OK ones. Some have integrated housing too, I knew someone that designed it. The ones they designed looked quite reasonable, at least – I’ve unambiguously lived worse places. You won’t save much money working for an OK sweatshop, but you will accumulate a small pension, eat, have a place to live, and get 2 weeks vacation a year (usually accompanied with a bonus equal to a month’s pay). Most people I know see them as a sort of always-available job that’s the closest thing we have to a social net right now.
I run a small tech company though, not a sweat shop. Just recently, an opportunity to help open one did come up though!
A client is looking at setting up backoffice work in the countryside, so far it looks like we’ll be able to offer decent working conditions and wages. I’m slowly building the management software – fewer managers means we can pay workers better as well as be more profitable. If it works out, it would probably pay about double the regional minimum wage, which amounts to a decent job, certainly better than a lot of people have currently.
It’s not perfect, but it’s progress. There’s still a hundred ways it can go wrong and fail. So far we only have 10 staff, but it’s going steady.
For about 3 years though, I earned less running my company than the workers in the worst sweatshops. Even with all my video game experience! That was hard. Still, video games were my first experiences with management, accounting, economics and so on. It was better than nothing.
Anyway that’s a slice of life for you, fresh from Southeast Asia.
Thanks! The truth is, such plans rarely work out. My life is a series of hundreds of such schemes, most result in nothing (or less). Only as handful work. Only a handful have to.
…but just like in video games, you can just try again and again.
While moving from one nest to another (we’re lemmings here; RP it a bit) I realized I still have all computers I ever bought or assembled, except for those that literally broke beyond any hope of repair....
When space, time, or power it requires is no longer a good trade in exchange for the task it completes.
I live in Asia, so the space something physically takes up is often the biggest cost. The footprint of my house is like 25 square meters, so if I want to keep a bunch of older computers around, I’m going to need to rent a bigger house.
My time has also grown more expensive over the years.
Oh damn, that is now isn’t it. I always lose track of the Lunar calendar. And also the Gregorian calendar. Actually come to think of it, it’s 50-50 that I know what day of the week it is.
Anyway, I don’t observe it personally, but I better bring something to the in-laws this weekend. Normally we construct houses with a room on the top floor for the family shrine – it’s a bit like a balcony, I guess! We use that room for this kind of thing. I see people put things out on the street too.
I think last night I saw someone offering a whole boiled chicken. That’s a common one. You eat it after – so it’s very practical :)
Cigarettes and rice wine are pretty common things I see too. Or beer – you pour a glass and leave it. Then you drink it after too, if you don’t mind flat beer that smells like incense :)
You know, that’s an interesting question. It looks like the answer is probably 1, but it might be 2.
It’s not entirely clear to me, but it looks like Ulysses S. Grant may have been arrested in 1872, while he was still in office. For speeding. On horseback. The practice of taking mugshots on arrest began in the 1850s, but the officer apparently did not take the president into the station, so while I bet no mugshot was taken, I haven’t been able to completely rule it out either.
Then after traveling for some time, Grant did attempt to run for office again, but failed to obtain the number of required number of votes for nomination, and a compromise candidate was chosen (Garfield, who got assassinated), but he did technically run.
Apologies if I’ve used the wrong terms or gotten some bits wrong. My knowledge of the US political system is vague at best, I’m nowhere near you guys, I’m just having a terribly slow day and work and wondered if this particular situation actually had happened before. Then I found an unexpected rabbit hole of weird historical half-truths.
One neat thing is ancient Chinese coinage has a square hole in a round coin, I always thought that looked cool. Civilization is old in this part of the world, so there are tons of old coins. Song dynasty coins are about 50k VND locally (2.50). Want something older, from the Three Kingdoms period (over two millenia old)? That will be… the same price. They are so common that no one cares.
Ancient Vietnamese coins are a bit harder to find, and look pretty similar too. I have one of the first coins minted in the country, found it in some scrap metal recovered while dredging a river or a shipwreck or something. It’s worth… about 50 cents.
Great coins to collect for someone on a budget. Watch out for fakes – but they are pretty easy to spot.
Ok, I’m having a slow day… so I’ll try and summarize some possibly useful knowledge!
You can find them on eBay and various sites. Search for “Chinese cash”. I wouldn’t pay more than 5$ a coin. Here in Vietnam, 2-3$ for Chinese coins in good condition is normal (Vietnamese ones cost extra). In Singapore, maybe 5$.
Be advised that online vendors probably buy in bulk from antique shops who have picked out anything actually rare from their stock. So claims of “rare” are almost always false, and claims of “ancient” are irrelevant – so many hundreds of millions of these coins were produced that anything less than about 2200 years old is super common. There are a few exceptions, like coins produced by weird factions and rebels and stuff.
There are a lot of fakes. Some of the fakes are also ancient – those are interesting. Some depict “fantasy” dynasties from legend that never existed. Like if it reads “dragon phoenix eternal dynasty” or something, it’s fake, but might still be hundreds of years old. Also some temples and whatever issued coins for visitors. This type of fake often goes on family shrines (at least they do with my in-laws).
Then there are modern replicas (I won’t call them fake as they are not produced with the intent to sell as the real deal). These are mostly for divination (e.g. I Ching), feng shui good luck charms, or for religious use. These are usually pretty obvious as they lack any real patina.
One way people collect these coins is to try and get one from every emperor. Or to create N-emperor charms, I think the most common is the 5-emperor charm (Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong, Jiaqing). These are used in traditional feng shui – since China was prosperous under those emperors, their names bring prosperity or something like that. You hang it somewhere specific.
Personally, I’m an anti-feng-shui practitioner. I optimize my life for the worst possible feng shui, so I get cheaper stuff superstitious people don’t want. It’s worked pretty well. Can maybe apply to these coins too – the coins for 5-emperor charms are probably more in demand. By this logic, I would make a 5-worst-emperors charm to save money (I am notoriously shrewd in matters of finance).
Next, to date the coins, you normally read the text from top-bottom-right-left (there are a few exceptions that are clockwise too I think). These symbols form the historical period when the coin was minted, which usually won’t be an exact date, but often will be within a decade or whatever unless it’s one of the ones that was produced for centuries. Sometimes there are mint marks on the verso you can use too.
You tell which part of the coin is up, by looking for the character “Bao” (寶). This is almost always the leftmost character. The character ‘Tong’ (通) is a common right-hand character, but there are several others.
Complicating matters is the occasional use of old imperial seal script instead of traditional Chinese characters. You’ll know it when you see it :D Some coins have a version in both. Knowing these things, you should be able to ID a coin on Google within about 30 minutes if you can’t read Chinese (I know this because I can’t read Chinese).
All the above applies to the Tang dynasty (say 621 CE and later). These are the more interesting and diverse ones. Earlier coins are harder to assign dates to. Wu Zhu coins (going back to 118 BCE) have some small differences over time you can sometimes use. Then before that, you’ve got knife money – little dull bronze knives that were used for trade as they could be melted down into real knives and tools. These get more expensive though, if you stick to Wu Zhu and Tong Bao coins it’s pretty affordable.
If you get a coin you can’t ID, or think you’re getting ripped off, ping me and I’ll give it a go!
Also as a shameless plug, if you message kong_ming on my instance, a Byzantine maze of technologies will set into motion, resulting in a I Ching reading sent back to you. Unless some part of the Rube Goldberg machine is down :D
(It’s a prototype hardware random number generator sitting on my desk, sending data over MQTT to the cloud, where a python script calculates yarrow-stick divinations, that then get sent to a Lemmy bot)
No worries! I’m just glad to share a neat thing :)
Oh one more thing I just remembered – ancient bronze coins were made with a fair amount of lead. If you go to a dealer, sometimes it’s a huge pile of dusty coins… that dust is like 10% lead. So resist the urge to lick your fingers, and instead go wash your hands :P
I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you’ve got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you’ve got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least – or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.
I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you’re the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.
Ah, some context – I live in Vietnam. We don’t get tools or books from the 70’s and 80s from the trash. New Chinese stuff is pretty good and not a fortune, although at the start I really couldn’t afford even that. I was making like 240 US dollars a month in those days, and working 60 hours a week, so I had no free time to do labor-intensive things (or pursue hobbies at all, really). That’s why I wanted tools so much I suppose : to do fewer labor intensive things so I could use my mind more.
AVRs are my favorite chips! I use the Attiny10 all the time (USD 0.36 per chip). AVRs have really nice assembly language and datasheets, they are a joy to work with! Attiny10 is maybe a bit difficult to do with the sharpie method. I bet you could with some practice and a very fine pen though.
I etch PCBs by hand at home sometimes these days, because I almost exclusively use SMT. I can usually do a board start to finish in 45 minutes, for iterating rapidly a few times before being satisfied with it. Toner transfer works really well on a gas stove + a big metal plate! However, I can also get boards made at a factory for 15-20$ with a 3 week lead time. That’s usually much cheaper than a few 45 minute runs, so recently I’ve just been sending it off to the factory without etching + testing first.
The main cost is time, overall. I’m not wealthy, time is still super expensive to me right now, I’m in the finishing steps of bootstrapping myself out of poverty. An engineering company was a tool to monetize my interests, so that I could pursue a middle class life, without giving up the control I insist on having over my time and work. Really, it was the only way I could have pursued all this tech stuff at all.
Actual physical tools to do more work faster and more reliably was also really important. Having a company also gives me a 30% discount on tools – no 10% VAT, and no 20% corporate income tax on the amount of profits it ate up (only if I’m legitimately using it for client work though).
Yeah, I’ve tried that! It was more of a journey making my work more presentable, than it was making it more functional, if we’re being honest.
I invested some proceeds from an early client work to buy an SLA printer. It uses acrylic, with good dimensional accuracy, but it’s very brittle. It was a painful expense at the time, nearly 800$.
I considered it a marketing cost – I can’t present things to clients with wires hanging out. Prototypes have to look awesome. I also sometimes use it to print basic clockwork, board game pieces, whatever I might personally consider fun. Mostly client cases though. I’ve had very good success with black plastic, which I polish down to a very smooth matte finish using fine emery paper soaked in water. I also emboss the client’s logo on the case. I rarely paint it, but do sometimes add labels.
Another good investment was a decent used DSLR (135$) and some antique lenses (because they were very cheap and better than midrange modern ones). When I deliver physical prototypes, I also deliver product shots good enough to use professionally e.g. for marketing or to show the CEO / investors. A high-end ancient macro lens cost me 10$ and has paid itself off many times.
Finally, I also bought a rugged waterproof plastic suitcase filled with foam. Similar to a “pelican case”. These are used to deliver prototypes to meetings and demonstrations.
I would classify this as ‘theater’ more than ‘technology’ – but generally the management understands the former better, and they are the ones making purchasing decisions. So I give them a show, and the detailed documentation goes to the engineers only.
For my own stuff, I design it to fit in standard engineering enclosures. One of the local retailers has a quite good selection of aluminium and ABS ones. This is much more robust than any form of 3D printing I have access to (and it’s cheap – a nice ABS box starts at like USD 0.50). FDM printing would be OK, but I don’t have the budget or space (actually space is the expensive thing in Asia) for a second printer.
The other thing I like doing for my own stuff is using solid and thick brass sheets, for no reason at all. Family ancestral shrines use a lot of brass here, so it’s less expensive here. It’s heavy, and chromed industrial buttons on brass panels looks glorious. Makes for great robots too. At least when I have an extra 15$ to spend (I’m quite stingy – being poor in the past will do that to you).
Yeah, but not for anything Unix-like or Windows. More like small operating systems for some piece of specific hardware. One that comes to mind is some custom OS for a small robot that maps rooms.
Probably the longest technical document I know very well is the datasheet for AVR microcontrollers (the full one, not the summary). Those are 170-300 pages long, depending on the exact chip. They detail how every feature of the chip operates and is accessed. It’s pretty normal in my occupation to know one or two chips really well.
Hey! I’m in a similar boat. I also do electronics design and can’t deal with the 100% pay cut that a PhD would incur. At least not yet.
My current solution is just to research things on my own, without a university. I design things I think might be interesting, then get the boards made at a factory (cheap these days), then populate them and test it out. Cost tends to be quite low per project (under 100$ even for fairly advanced things like particle physics). Then I write it up online or do a conference talk if people think it’s interesting enough – and if they don’t, I really don’t care: I’m already all about the next project!
If I strip away all the “publish or perish” nonsense as well as grant applications and teaching requirements, it turns out I can do a satisfying amount of research in my spare time. Equipment costs are not a disaster either – maybe a 1000$ oscilloscope (which I need for work anyway), but very ordinary other stuff otherwise.
A good side effect is the stuff I work on keeps me sharp at work, and on rare occasions produces something commercially useful. It also forms a body of work that I use to advance my career, as examples of neat stuff I know how to do. I’d have a hard time putting a number do it, but I’d estimate my research has a negative cost.
Right now, I’m trying to do audio processing in 16 bytes of RAM and under 500 bytes of program. So far, it looks like it will work, but I don’t know yet!
Your dreams and imagination evolved as a view into another universe. As with the current beliefs, you cannot decipher technical information – no words in books, no details of how devices work, so even if you can describe things you see from another place, you could not reproduce a working version....
Oh, I’ve got something unexpected for you. I got bored listening to people going on and on about the Universe being a simulation, so I built a machine that can check if you’re in some (but not all) classes of a simulated Universe. Take that, Plato!
It works using Bell’s Theorem and the limitations of Turing machines. The former shows that for some types of measurements, the outcomes are purely probabilistic, and do not contain hidden deterministic variables (seems like a dumb way to design a Universe for simulation!). Then Turing machines are capable of computing anything that can be defined as an algorithm (but only things that can be defined in an algorithm!).
Since the former provides a non-deterministic measurement that the latter cannot model, you make a machine that produces those measurements, and ties them to something on a bigger scale (stock market purchases, social media posts, whatever). Then you keep the measurements, and attempt to determine whether they were actually generated with an algorithm (this is very hard but possible in theory – sort of like reversing a hash). Meanwhile in the Universe upstairs, for the results to appear random enough so that analysis is nontrivial, it must consume extra computation in whatever device is running the simulation. In short, I’m doing a thing that consumes extra processing power.
So logically, if this Universe is being simulated, and someone is observing the machine closely that is doing the simulating, I can pass messages encoded in CPU activity. Just like in computer security where you can extract encryption keys by looking at a video of your power LED!
So if I’m not actually typing this on my laptop right now – but really am sleeping/dreaming with some equivalent to an EEG monitor or MRI or whatever in some other Universe – someone may be able to conclude whether this Universe is being generated by my mind or not. In the former case, they may have their answer, but have not woken me up yet. At that time, regrettably, your continued existence is not guaranteed. Sorry about that, but there was science to do!
If you would like to use the device I have built, you can do that. Because of course it’s sitting on my desk, connected to a server via MQTT, and subsequently connected to a Lemmy bot. If you message kong_ming on my instance (with a non-blank message), it will use the device as an entropy source to generate an I Ching reading. You know, to help you answer personal questions with only a vanishingly small likelyhood of causing the Universe to cease existing. Sometimes it is down for maintenance, although I just checked in on it now and it seems OK.
I also have a second such device, at an undisclosed location, that is designed to work with a coffee machine. You know, for those times you want coffee that’s simultaneously caffeinated and decaffeinated until you drink it.
Anyway, there you go. I’ve added a feature to the fediverse, I guess.
If we assume a malicious intelligence simulating a universe with goal of not being detected, all bets are off – this technique only works in a few cases, and that’s probably not one of them. Also if it’s true, I think we have bigger problems :D
There are a whole bunch of other assumptions too – like the universe running the simulation has entropy and time that work the same way as ours. It’s no magic simulation-detecting bullet – but it’s the only technique I could think of to make any progress whatsoever on the underlying philosophical question! A mote in the eye of a fictional God, so to speak.
In the hard sense, there are no such thing as random number generators on computers. With sufficient starting entropy and computing power, you can generate a mostly reasonable approximation. However, this must use more computing power than not doing it, which is the “signal” we’re sending out to be detected by a fictional observer in the scenario the OP presented.
Interestingly, this technique is used to exfiltrate data from secure computers – e.g. by making the CPU do slightly more work sometimes and modulating that to send data e.g. by radio emission, hard drive noise, power LED brightness changes, and so on. Here’s a generic one for you, if you’re curious: thesai.org/Publications/ViewPaper?Volume=9&Is…
Also, there are sometimes interesting and strange artifacts even with our everyday “random” number generators. I read a really neat paper about that ten years ago, comparing the artifacts of random number generators across operating systems, which sadly I can’t seem to find for you presently. There’s an OK example for you here though: www.random.org/analysis/ under “simple visual analysis”.
That kind of weird pattern is pretty typical of most ‘random number’ functions used in software that aren’t security-facing (and sadly sometimes even ones that are). For cryptographically secure random numbers (more like the image to the left than the image to the right on that site), they are more computationally expensive to produce.
I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I’m honest I’m probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
I spend all of my day working, but the catch is that maybe only 3-5hrs a day is doing work for my clients. A lot of that 3-5 hrs is spent automating client work, so I can spend less time on it tomorrow.
The rest I work on or study whatever feels important or interesting at the moment. I’d say I spend an additional 3-6 hours a day on that. This is the secret behind always being able to say “Oh, I have a thing that works a little like that (but not very like that – so I’ll need a budget)” whenever a client wants to do something new.
Often it’s little sequential puzzles I invent and then solve in my head. For example today, my goal was to find the way to take the rolling average of a certain number of bytes, with the minimum number of CPU cycles (and no ‘divide’ instruction). If this and 2 or 3 other puzzles have decent solutions, I’ll be able to do realtime audio analysis on a cheaper and smaller chip than “should” be possible – although I have no practical implementation in mind at this time. If it comes up one day I’ll look like a real hero though, surely :D
In principle, I work 7 days a week, because I have a hard time remembering what day of the week it is. I just track the day of the month. This is much less stressful because there’s always tomorrow to get something done. When I don’t have “work”, I just solve puzzles mentally all day or try to build random things.
I also allocate about an hour a day to answer questions on Lemmy / Reddit, mainly about engineering (I classify this as a from of “work”). That exposes me to new problems that I might not encounter in my formal workplace. Also it helps me learn to be patient with people that want to do something technical, but have varying levels of ability.
The biggest lesson I learned is to take control of my time and decide how to spend it. An 8-hour workday in a vacuum mostly gets filled with questionable tasks, it’s almost like a theater filled with actors going through the motions of work, without really doing any. Life isn’t too short by itself, but activities like that make it too short.
It’s not something I can do for another person. You’ll have to adopt yourself.
Well, there was the harrowing part in the middle where I was bankrupt in the developing world and nearly died of cholera. That wasn’t a super fun few years.
…and if we’re being honest, my level of obsession with engineering stuff would be considered a mental disorder, if it wasn’t so productive. Like, if I had the same level of interest in 90s sitcoms instead of machine learning or assembly language, I’d surely be considered mentally ill – but it’s just one subject instead of another.
Oh that’s easy. Corporations would pick up and move to a jurisdiction without that law, and then just not comply. Or I’d make a lot of money running obfuscations services to technically meet publication requirements.
Personally, I’d try to find a way to use it to compel speech in the USA (I don’t live in the USA but recall compelled speech being protected by the First Amendment). For example, your mind contains an algorithm that uses your phone to push content to your friends. In many cases, that algorithm contains a PIN code to your phone. Now publish it as open-source so the police can have it. Hopefully the pushback from this will result in the law quickly being repealed, but who knows.
I’ve been toying with the idea of having a little hobby computer store for years and I’ve reached the point where I feel I have nothing to lose in trying it....
Honestly the best thing you can do first is probably to learn accounting (and maybe tax law?). A business selling computers is a business first. I use GnuCash, it’s very good enough. It’s not that hard to learn from the manual:
In terms of choosing products to sell? You can’t compete and win with large companies – you will only lose money. You can only create a new game that you can win at. For example, specializing in something specific – retrocomputing, DIY kits, weird cooling, or maybe high-end commercial hardware produced for the Asian market, but sold to the US prosumer market. For example powerful embedded routers for hotels make fantastic home routers. I have one running OpenWRT and it blows any US-made consumer stuff out of the water.
Overall I’d choose an ‘evergreen’ product – something neat from Asia that doesn’t get obsolete fast at all – that’s why I chose routers as an example. Very generally we get a lot of neat stuff in Asia that you don’t. “Store that sells cool stuff from Asia” sounds like a lot of fun to run :D
That brings me to the third thing – establishing supplier relationships is pretty important if you’re buying products.
Finally, B2B is way easier to make money that B2C (and less time consuming and more chill). So if you look at my commercial router example, you’ve got a cost advantage, it’s a good product, it doesn’t get obsolete fast, and some businesses need quite a few of them. So setting it up with some security cameras sounds at least like an OK ‘lifestyle business’, although maybe too boring for a hobby business.
Sadly I can’t think of any solid course on these last 3 things, maybe there’s a ‘small business 101’ out there somewhere.
If you’re running a repair shop from home, the economics are bit easier, as you don’t have to source product, just some tools. You need some decent Chinese tools (ping me and I will remember good brands for you), and some experience using them. It requires a lot of specialized skills, and doesn’t make much money, but can be a lot of fun and can make a difference in people’s lives. Learn at least how and when to desolder and replace capacitors, how to replace a laptop screen, and a bit of data and password recovery (personally I’ve required photo ID to do this last one). A good way to get started is to buy broken stuff and attempt repairs. Avoid microwaves, CRTs, and mains-power in general until you know how to deal with these safely.
Learning to repair electronics is an uphill battle these days. Most things are not made to be repairable. In a sense, that’s what creates demand for your business if you can do it anyway. It requires a lot of creativity and knowledge, so there’s a lot of cool stuff to learn. Learning to build electronics is as good a place to start as any, I guess. Adafruit and Sparkfun are good companies that offer lots of introductory material:
Well, I’m from a neighboring country (Vietnam). We have the CVP. I immigrated here a bit over a decade ago to start a business. I do speak and read Vietnamese, but poorly. It’s not 100% on topic, but I can share my experience for what it’s worth, in case you don’t get tons of replies from our Chinese colleagues.
In practice, most of my interactions with government bodies have been positive. They’ve helped me figure out the tax system, granted me legal status and various licenses here, some tax cuts, and so on. I got married at a People’s Committee (UBNQ), which is sort of our equivalent to a town hall.
At the start, most other non-nationals I knew told me it was impossible to do anything legally (full stop), or without constantly paying bribes. I ignored them, filled out forms and submitted them without ‘extra fees’, everything worked out just fine. So I mostly ignore “what people say” about bureaucratic processes, and just call my lawyer for advice – they usually tell a very different story.
It’s not a carefree paradise, we’re a developing nation and life has it’s difficulties. However on a daily basis, my main concerns are traffic, workplace politics, air pollution, and occasionally neighbors singing karaoke. Top things I struggle with on longer timescales are things like home ownership, maintaining my health, and planning for retirement. I live in a slum, but it’s safe and people seem “big picture” fairly happy and decent. Except for one mean lady in the market who gossips all day – there’s a good term in Vietnamese for this kind of person that roughly translates to “many stories”.
Oh I also have to mention the big red propaganda posters! Most of them say things like “don’t do drugs, kids”, “don’t drink and drive”, and “try to eat less sugar / salt”. Or “don’t spit in public, that’s gross”. A few pertain to upcoming national holidays or anniversaries of historical events too. They’re sort of like the “public service messages” we used to get in Canada, except with nicer artwork. Also if we’re being honest, I probably should eat less salt.
So that’s a slice of my life. My thoughts on the CVP remain moderately positive, but I’m not particularly political – this describes most people I know here. I suspect it’s a lot more ordinary than what you might think from all the angry politics online. I imagine it’s similar with my Chinese colleagues (my main client is a Chinese company), but don’t really know since we really only talk about work.
The Air Quality Index in my town is currently 260 (very unhealthy) due to a surge in wildfires in western Canada and the northwest US. There are additional smaller fires not shown on this map at this zoom level....
I make them in a factory. I buy the raw bits at a bulk discount, and then workers assemble them into numbers by hand. Then we export them to people who need manufactured data, like elementary schools and consulting companies in North America.
This is becoming quite a thing here in Vietnam. We are starting to get quite a few undocumented migrant workers from the USA. It’s slowly becoming problematic. I expect my compliance paperwork to increase in cost and complexity if the trend continues.
Also I see them die on the roads sometimes, maybe one per year. That’s not an outcome I’d wish on them, but it’s not surprising either.
Driving a motorcycle unsafely in mixed traffic without a license, registration, insurance, experience, or the ability to read the road signs. Saw two doing unsafe stuff on my way to work today. Not sure specifically where they are from, I didn’t stop to ask. I can infer non-compliance from the license plate types with decent accuracy though. Generally plates that say NN (foreign resident), NG (foreign organization), or LD (local enterprise) are compliant and others are not. There are a couple of exceptions beyond that, but they are quite rare.
One nearly got hit by a bus as they cut across the road at an intersection. The other was just being pushy but didn’t outright do anything that would get them killed – not really out of the ordinary, just ‘somewhat unsafe’.
I like having better control over what content people can push at me. An issue on other platforms is they all want to force things on me – things that they make money from, or things they think will annoy me (to keep me “engaged”). This makes them really annoying for me to use, and generally results in me giving up on the idea of sharing the things I study with others, and maybe also helping people with their projects.
I’m really mostly here to share science and engineering stuff, and maybe help other immigrants to Vietnam (I mean, there will probably be another one eventually…).
So really, I don’t think it’s a problem. I’m already painfully aware of the various weird things people think about me in daily life (yay, being an immigrant!). I don’t need that to define every single thing I do. Sometimes I just want to log on and post some nice words about optimizing assembly language, without having to deal with a bunch of strange and often inappropriate requests from strangers.
One of the sad aspects of my job (in IT) is building tools to eliminate less stressful jobs, especially ones that pay well (usually management or accounting, in my case). Design has definitely been a specific target in recent years though – off the top of my head I could at least imagine two approaches to writing a tool that automates color and font selection with results comparable to human expertise.
This is one reason it’s a good idea to regularly study new things (IT or otherwise). I have to retool every few years as whatever I know becomes obsolete – this used to mainly be a frustration in IT, but is rapidly becoming a necessary process in other fields. It won’t be necessary to become an IT expert, but I would keep up-to-date on how to use the new tools technology provides… especially if I wanted to keep a job in say, graphics design or copywriting!
(Incidentally, my first job in this country was in marketing! It was high-stress and I did not earn 130k. I recall font and color choice processes vividly :D)
Yeah… I couldn’t cope with that unfortunately (I’m a bit jealous, it sounds nice). I need to work long hours and make things, it’s a compulsion. “Taking it easy” can stress me out to the point where I end up in a hospital.
So I sold all my worldly possessions and immigrated to the developing world on an investment visa (where things are made). My timing was a few years early, but I had no path to a decent life left except having my own company in a growth economy – my entire industry vanished twice overnight in my home country due to changes in legislation.
Nowadays, looking at the local economy, there is no path to home ownership except for people who own companies, and maybe senior executives or senior software engineers. An average university-educated couple would have to save 100% of their income for their entire adult life to afford a nice home – if they don’t have kids. I think this kind of cruel equation is slowly coming to the West too – although you guys have more land so I guess it takes longer.
Perhaps ironically, I live in a nominally Communist country that went through decolonization quite a number of times. It doesn’t change much in my daily life (I’m not really political), although I arguably own some tiny slice of the means of production these days. So maybe in retirement I’ll provide public access to those for working class people. That would be really fun, I think. Who knows what we might create together? Certainly if the machines are sitting unused in my retirement, they are creating nothing, and I would feel sad for the machines.
I don’t do the whole 9-5 thing. That would stress me out! I work as long as I feel like, any day of the week I feel like. Generally, this is really nice for both managing stress (there’s always tomorrow!) and steamrolling over any competition.
I’m just a mercenary (and a bureaucrat) though. You pay my fee in filthy lucre, and the job gets done – legally, and reliably. If someone annoys me with politics at a client, I just try and replace them with a computer program. The result is that several of my best coworkers are machines these days. I foresee that trend increasing with time.
Very generally, you use the central bank rate to control the money supply. You increase it to remove money from the economy.
Even money is affected by supply and demand. Too much money in the economy is one of several things that can cause inflation – for example because a surplus of money means people value money less and goods/services more. As a result, the value of goods/services as measured in money goes up.
Sadly, these are macro-level problems. Personally having a surplus of money sounds great, but the actual amount of extra money I made during Covid was not that much – but give that much money to 100 million people and you’re going to have inflation (I live in Vietnam where the economy was not seriously impacted).
Me too. I seriously go to The Onion for news. I started doing it as a joke, but then realized what people want to laugh about gave a much more honest picture of what people actually cared about on a daily basis. I live outside the USA so it’s not otherwise obvious to me. It truly is America’s Finest News Source.
The court jester is the only one allowed to tell the truth about the king, I guess.
No, but mostly for very boring reasons that have nothing to do with the technology:
I… don’t even know two people outside of family I would trust with a deposit (any deposit, in any amount) – e.g. pay me 10% in cash right now or I’ll claim you breached the terms of use, keeping your deposit hostage.
Wonder if someone can find a way to do something vastly illegal with the cloud resources that makes me more money than the deposit? Or just blackmail me? So I’d need a normal legal contract with the other party’s real name to avoid this liability. At which point the whole smart contract is arguably superfluous.
There ARE normal legal tools that handle this. You can put money in escrow at a bank, or use a lawyer. It’s… actually a pretty normal thing to do in many industries. It’s not particularly expensive as far as I know. There are problems with it, but none of them are of the form “Oh no, if only we used a trustless system with no middleman!”
Finally one technical point: smart contracts are only trustless if I’m a programmer and the smart contract source code is provided (in which case there’s no money to be made providing the service, as I can just copy your work and it’s a race to the bottom). Or if I’m familiar with assembly language (which I am), in which case it’s an unproductive use of my time and a lawyer or bank is much much cheaper than my time spent as an auditor (I could be working on other things). So it’s a bit hard to come up with any sort profitable enterprise, and most programmers I know strongly prefer to be paid for their time.
NB I’ve written various smart contracts for amusement (on various testnets only). I haven’t found anything I’d want to use them for in production. It was a fun academic exercise though.
Well, my first strategy has apparently been to sell all my belongings, immigrate to the developing world, lose every dime to my name.
A wiser person might have focused on doing a less harrowing (but still difficult) thing. If we can excel at something difficult, perhaps the world can forgive our mediocrity in other matters, and if it doesn’t… well, at least we have something useful to focus on. For me, that thing is engineering.
I do own and operate a business. Owning the business means I get to invent my own job (which mostly amounts to ‘mercenary science hermit’). I’m reasonably good at it, and have the correct legal paperwork to continue doing it, so it’s hard to displace me – I can just go find more customers. If that fails, maybe the problem is me :D
All that being said, I do use a variety of figurative cudgels on people who forcibly inconvenience me with their opinions (although almost entirely offline). Some of these tools are emotional, some are financial or legal, and many are technological in nature. I do this to defend my freedom to think freely about subjects that interest me, which sometimes people feel entitled to encroach on.
Mostly this pertains to ‘people who don’t want to pay me for work’, or ‘Asian superstitions’, because I am nowhere near North America. The current political situation over there is puzzling and fascinating to me, although I am sad to see it causes so much harm. Maybe come visit Asia someday for a vacation from it?
Oh also I mostly avoid social media, especially for political stuff. I sign on primarily to answer questions travelers have about Vietnam, and help hobbyists choose components for electronic circuits (although Lemmy is not super active in these regards yet). I approach it as training to learn to be more patient with people, and in this sense it has been a rewarding activity.
Anyway, those are some of the habits I’ve cultivated to try and make peace with the modern world. Hopefully some are useful to you as well.
Oh, thanks for the reminder! I’ll add that to the ‘to do soon’ list. Check back in a couple of days and maybe gently remind me if I still haven’t done it.
I still need to get around to enabling registration, but enabling outbound port 587 for the registration emails causes the datacenter to grumble and complain. So that might take a bit longer. Well, at least we’re not a spammer-friendly jurisdiction.
Ach, I build a lot of things. It’s been a busy couple of years. I sort of had a lot of free time during Covid. It’s a little embarrassing, I’m not specifically proud of anything, but here goes in the hopes you find some of it amusing.
I made a music box out of cut, etched, and painted brass inside a wooden box. It has a bit of custom clockwork, and I designed a sort of magnetic-friction drive so that the dancing figures on top are hot-swappable risk of damage to the mechanism. It plays traditional Vietnamese music (MP3), and the porcelain dancers have costumes from the different ethnic groups.
I’ve also designed and manufactured a sort of night-light for children that activates by turning it upside-down for a few seconds. The electronics are rated for 100 years, and a CR2032 coin cell can power it for 6 months of normal use. I got power consumption low enough that it does not need an off switch. I hate e-waste and thought maybe electronics could last long enough to be heirlooms, if we made different design choices. I also had autism in mind, where maybe it’s comforting to have things that always work according to the same rules, never break, and will last from childhood into adult life (although maybe it is just comforting to me, when things work this way).
I also wrote an algorithm that plays (4,6) Mastermind that beat the record in the primary literature by 0.5% with a slight modification to the MaxParts strategy. So I might or might not have the world record on that one – I never got around to publishing it except as a school assignment. Which oddly enough I received a rather poor grade on, which I thought was really funny.
Oh also I made a quantum hardware random number generator that lets you conveniently make various other electronics into a Schrödinger’s Cat paradox. It takes one signal input, then presents one of two outputs to control the other electronics. This was part of an elaborate practical joke – the nature of the device makes it impossible to accurately simulate, so it presents an unusual problem for whatever poor grad student gets tasked with running a simulated Universe.
I also made a device for recording tiny variations in the 50Hz (60Hz in North America) signal in main power lines. The original idea was to correlate the microsecond timing variations to space weather and use the power lines as a sort of radio telescope for space weather. It didn’t work. I was able to track what was going on in the power plants though, like when they are turning on and off turbines.
Finally (and most recently), I wrote a Lemmy bot! If you message @kong_ming on my instance, an early prototype of my quantum random number generator will generate an I-Ching reading for you (the Book of Changes, sort of an ancient choose-your-own-misadventure fortune-telling book). It’s literally a thing sitting on my desk in Vietnam held together mostly by my irrepressible optimism, so sometimes it takes a minute to get to your request or ah, takes a break from functioning correctly.
I guess there were a few robots and whatnot too. Those were pretty standard rover builds though. Not sure what I’ll do next. There’s a particle detector I’ve been meaning to get to. Also someone on Lemmy suggested a way to progress in my experiments making a CPU clocked by chicken bone (bone is piezoelectric) for Halloween.
What makes your life well-lived?
When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?...
What is a popular book that everyone buys but nobody reads?
What are some video games that made you a better gamer?
For example, I am terrible at Super Meat Boy, but just playing it has really improved how I play platformers and games that need faster imputs overall.
What determines a computer as obsolete?
While moving from one nest to another (we’re lemmings here; RP it a bit) I realized I still have all computers I ever bought or assembled, except for those that literally broke beyond any hope of repair....
Anyone participating in the Hungry Ghost Festival?
I’d love to hear about your personal experiences and traditions!...
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We need to stop memes about Trunp.
I was scrolling on Lemmy and I saw at least 5 Trump mug shot posts. It’s just annoying at this point.
What are the coolest coins in regular circulation from around the world?
cross-posted from: lemmy.crimedad.work/post/14038...
What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?
Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough....
TRUTH TIME! How many of you have actually read a user manual of an operating system completely?
[Mention your Sex if you are comfortable, I want to see the breakdown between the sexes here]...
I have an itch to learn more and research. PhD is an option, but comes with either a financial or physical/emotional burden. Should I pursue a PhD, or scratch the itch in some other way?
cross-posted from: discuss.tchncs.de/post/2444019...
your girlfriend gets an unencrypted copy of all your files. What happens?
Your dreams are a gateway into a parallel universe -- Can you prove it?
Your dreams and imagination evolved as a view into another universe. As with the current beliefs, you cannot decipher technical information – no words in books, no details of how devices work, so even if you can describe things you see from another place, you could not reproduce a working version....
How many hours a day do you actually work?
I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I’m honest I’m probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
What would happen if a law was passed that said all content determined via algorithms had to be open source?
If 'carbon negative' and 'carbon positive' are terms used interchangeably to mean completely opposite things, what are alternative terms that clarify the difference without confusion?
For example, could alternative terms like “carbon reducing” and “carbon increasing” make it more clear and avoid misinterpreting which means which?
Where can I get some good courses/resources to improve my tech skills?
I’ve been toying with the idea of having a little hobby computer store for years and I’ve reached the point where I feel I have nothing to lose in trying it....
Users from China! What do you think about the CCP?
Soaking in the worst air quality in the world (sh.itjust.works)
The Air Quality Index in my town is currently 260 (very unhealthy) due to a surge in wildfires in western Canada and the northwest US. There are additional smaller fires not shown on this map at this zoom level....
Are Terminal Multiplexers a Fad? (sebastiancarlos.com)
People who were fired on their first day at work/saw somebody get fired their first day at work: What happened that led to the firing?
Is Blocking Users Problematic to the Platform?
There was an issue on Reddit a while back where people would post some hateful stuff, and of course lots of people blocked them....
Another good reason not to open port 22 (lemmy.world)
In the past two weeks I set up a new VPS, and I run a small experiment. I share the results for those who are curious....
What's your natural talent?
Something you’re just good at with minimal effort and/or you learned much more quickly than average....
Why *is* everything going to shit?
Was just trying to explain to someone why everything is going to shit, specifically companies, and realized, I don’t fully get it either....
What are your favorite news sources?
Just wondering your preferences
How long does it take for you to fall asleep?
How would you feel about signing a smart contract? (details in description)
As a foreword, yes I am very aware of resources like web3isgoinggreat.com You don’t need to spam the comments with the link....
[Serious] How can a person "rejection-proof" their life?
To extrapolate:...
Is there anything creative you've made that you're particularly proud of?
Can be any form of creativity, whether that be drawing/painting, music, photography, writing, game design, video making, ect.