I've been a software generalist at a variety of startups, some in their earliest stages helping to craft their ideas into MVPs (PeerMedical, ClimaCell, Odyn) and some in their midpoints helping to refactor and upgrade legacy technology while planning and building new business-focused features (Viewpoint Government Solutions, Netra, AptDeco).
I'm comfortable in most corners of the rapidly expanding modern web development stack, but my hope is to also be a critical and collaborative partner in the business/societal thought processes required to successfully execute a vision.
During the pandemic I've been investing in myself and the ideas of my peers and am now producing a justice-oriented podcast, providing musical support to weekly pan-spiritual meetups, and growing a portfolio of film photography.
I'm less interested in high pay (though I need at least a pittance to survive) and more interested in worthy ideas that I can support and take to the next level.
Technologies and years of experience:
- JS (React/Angular) 6+
- Ruby (Rails) 3+
- DB (Mongo, Postgres, etc.) 6+
- Elixir (Phoenix) 1+
- Haskell 3+
- Cloud (AWS, DO, GCP) 5+
- Containers and other devops (Docker, Kubernetes) 3+
Humans have an incredible way of elevating their universal importance to hold the conviction that an alien species capable of receiving such a message and actionably responding would have any desire to do so, let alone that the loss of one observatory would leave the species thinking that they were being ghosted and that humans are assholes. We're really nothing more than flatlanders at this point and we need to work on our humility toward the situation.
In the context of this article and conversation, you are saying that companies that give away their product, for too low of a price, and too cheaply, in which consumers benefit too much is.... parasitic?
Giving things way to people for less than they are worth may not be good idea, but I don't think I would call that parasitic.
You make it sound like the companies who run this shit are penniless, they're not, they're making millions of dollars of actual cash. There's no charity going on here.
By force, eventually. Those daring to have their own interest in mind instead of the greater good should receive a healthy struggle session and their wealth confiscated. For all mankind!
Or its just a matter of not letting bad players to ruin all the game.
Too many greedy blood suckers will drain and kill the cow eventually.
The word here is balance to have a sustained long running system that can benefit the maximum number of people.
It doesn't need to be a false dichotomy between what it is now and stalinist Russia comunism.
Note: the blood suckers is not the whole of the capital market of course, they produce value. The problem is some players and some practices..
Factoring in that the prison population is a "good chunk" of the total population should elevate the scale of this discussion above statistical haggling
So about 25k people out of a country of 330M (0.007%)
And most of these are for trafficking, not just possession.
I still think it's too many people, but it's not a "good chunk." The amount of people that actually go to jail for mere possession is tiny, and that number is going down.
This is a world where giving money to a company is an inherently political act, even if you do not know it to be. Each dollar spent at Amazon is a tacit endorsement of its business, labor, and greater economic practices, and for one to detail why they choose to stop supporting a business is to enumerate the practices and side-effects of that business's existence that they find problematic or harmful.
This is meant to spark discussion of the thought process behind consciously decoupling from a specific product, not to look for kudos or get patted on the back.
Every time I see this blog I'm extremely interested in the content, but the stylized presentation is so jarring and tough to read. I doubt this is an original qualm and I'm fully able to switch to reading mode in Firefox to mitigate this problem, but frankly it's off-putting.
On the other hand I have zero issues with the design, like it aesthetically and find it a refreshing change to see a blog clearly designed to be functional and refreshingly different.
The US government routinely monitors purchase and search histories to prevent the active ingredients of something destructive like that from falling into nefarious hands, and you're posing a wholly disingenuous argument
Gp isn't remotely disingenuous, they are pointing out that 'probabilities ... are irrelevant [w]hat matters is the consequences' is a philosophy guaranteed to lead to stupid decisions.
To make a sensible decision in a risky context both probability and consequence are needed. There is always a (practically 0%) risk of any action leading to catastrophic global consequences.
In addition, the original Precautionary Principle paper linked is an idea that sounds nice but is actually a bit dangerous. If we applied the PP to the formation of the internet it should have been suppressed right from the get go - we never had and still have no positive evidence that social media won't cause extreme harm to the public (eg, it could have caused mass depression and disengagement with reality and maybe moral corruption :p). The internet is risky - did huge damage to existing industries and triggered the rapid rise of China through knowledge sharing and enabling remote management of industry (why else have we never seen anything like it before?). Impact of research into splitting the atom - did a lot of damage, much more risk.
Proving that something is safe without just doing it is hugely expensive. Technological advancement would not be a fraction of what we have now - the cost of trying things needs to be cheap to encourage progress. We couldn't prove most of the things we do are safe without being able to point to them and say 'seems to be working?'.
Not only that, the precautionary principle applies equally to inaction.
Should we research nuclear physics? The worst that could happen is global thermonuclear war, so forget about it. But what's the worst that could happen if we don't? We might need a nuke to divert an asteroid. We might need nuclear power to prevent climate collapse. It could save the world rather than destroy it.
"What you don't know can't hurt you" is contrary to evidence.
Life certainly has a good chance given the existence of deep-sea bacteria, tardigrades, and cockroaches, but the human species has a relatively narrow set of conditions that must be met for any sort of longterm survival.
When they opened a brick and morter store in Boston, I remember walking in with a real sense of excitement but walking out without any interest in becoming more involved in the 3D printing scene.
If anything, seeing the printers in action made me realize just how inessential their product seemed from a layperson's point of view.
For all of the potential 3D printing has, at the moment it is a solution looking for a consumer problem, and most consumers aren't looking to make custom figurines or embossed text.
A few months ago, I walked by the storefront and it was totally empty. Apparently I wasn't the only one disillusioned by seeing their product up close.
3d printing got oversold. "Print replacement parts for your washing machine" was total bullshit. 3D printer CEOs wanted to be like Steve Jobs and sell millions of devices to consumers. They could have earned a respected spot in the toolboxes of engineers, artists, scientists, even manufacturers. Instead they pushed trinket machines that didn't even work as designed. They could have been like Tektronix or Mori Seiki but they got greedy.
I read them as, enthusiastic promoters on the bleeding edge. They jumped into 3D printing despite the risks. Harsh to call that 'greedy'.
That said, 3D printing is still pretty lame. Cheap plastic parts are rarely the critical element in a device. And even knobs etc often have retaining clips or friction-fit holes with sub-millimeter tolerances, that 3D printers cannot achieve.
I think this is exactly it. I worked at a digital agency in London a few years back who bought a 3D printer (maybe a Makerbot one, I have no idea) because it seemed essential that a company working in that sector should have one - they were the new exciting tech phenomenon, and surely wondrous things would come of them. They were never able to work out what to do with it or how it could at all relate to their clients' businesses. In the end, the most exciting and interesting thing they managed to do with it was to print a miniature model of the tech director's head for use as a pair of earrings. On that basis, what hope does a regular consumer have of finding a purpose for them?
There are always going to be people who buy homebrewing apparatus - but their numbers will always pale in comparison to how many people just go to a pub or bar and buy a beer.
This is my sentiment too. I'm excited by the possibilities of 3D printing, but at the moment all of my friends who've purchased printers are using them to create shoddy little trinkets. The kind of printers that could produce practical items are outside the budget of the average early adopter.
Of course, it's a matter of time before tech advancement fixes this problem, but today there's little reason to buy one of these machines if all you are planning to do is actually print useful stuff, rather than experiment with 3D printers as a hobby.
That most people just print ready-made trinkets from Thingiverse that they don't really need is hardly an issue with the machines. Most useful things around us made of plastic can be done on a 500 USD FDM 3d-printer (which is a lot of stuff).
I've fixed our commercial (China quality) lasercutter using parts made on a cheap FDM 3d-printer. Fixed powertools like drills and drill-presses. Replaced parts on my bicycle. Made functional scissors, and a haircomb that I needed when no shop was open.
The issues are that for commodity items, in the first world, it is quicker to just buy them (if we don't have them already). They will also be prettier.
Or if it is a custom item, one has to actually design&test, which is something that requires CAD skills and some hours of work. Teaching this will take some time.
Most people just watch kitten-videos and play Farmville using their Internet-enabled devices. Does not mean the devices are low-quality and cannot be used for useful things.
3D printers are impractical for household repairs but I really think 3d pens like the 3Doodler are missing an opportunity here. I bought one with the original Kickstarter and we played with it for a while before putting it back in it's box and forgetting about it. A couple months ago I came across it and decided to try and fix the broken castor on a dehumidifier. The part was way to complex to be worth modeling in CAD for the amount of inconvenience it presented but it was ridiculously easy to weld the old part back together and reinforce it with the 3Doodler. Since then I've been using it in conjunction with an old soldering iron to fix things that I just don't trust glue to hold.
Also, if one needs quality not acheivable on current cheap machines there are still valid reasons to get one:
- Use your cheap printer to prototype/iterate/validate your model
- Then send it off to a printing service, to have it made in high-quality plastic/metal/clay
This way you can combine rapid iteration with high-quality production. When designing new parts, I often do up to 5 iterations a day. Sometimes engaging up 3x 500 USD printers at the same time, to keep iteration time down.
Call me archaic, but schools should teach proper spelling and grammar in addition to the process of reasoning. I can't take any writing seriously if it's done poorly. (I didn't think the essay was done poorly though, it's still better than a lot of writing done on the internet nowadays)
You are archaic. I _almost_ said 'your archaic' there. Grammar, spelling and punctuation are often arbitrary rules that are difficult to grok, except with extensive experience with them. One of the best ways to discourage that experience is to make everything about everything and mark down an otherwise-excellent essay due to spelling.
Note that I am not saying that we shouldn't teach those things (and schools do teach those things), but that teaching them in a lower-stakes fashion where people are able to succeed at the core learning goal (argument in this case) without bouncing off of the Wall Of Spelling is a much better approach.
Location: NYC | Remote
I've been a software generalist at a variety of startups, some in their earliest stages helping to craft their ideas into MVPs (PeerMedical, ClimaCell, Odyn) and some in their midpoints helping to refactor and upgrade legacy technology while planning and building new business-focused features (Viewpoint Government Solutions, Netra, AptDeco).
I'm comfortable in most corners of the rapidly expanding modern web development stack, but my hope is to also be a critical and collaborative partner in the business/societal thought processes required to successfully execute a vision.
During the pandemic I've been investing in myself and the ideas of my peers and am now producing a justice-oriented podcast, providing musical support to weekly pan-spiritual meetups, and growing a portfolio of film photography.
I'm less interested in high pay (though I need at least a pittance to survive) and more interested in worthy ideas that I can support and take to the next level.
Technologies and years of experience:
- JS (React/Angular) 6+
- Ruby (Rails) 3+
- DB (Mongo, Postgres, etc.) 6+
- Elixir (Phoenix) 1+
- Haskell 3+
- Cloud (AWS, DO, GCP) 5+
- Containers and other devops (Docker, Kubernetes) 3+
Angel: https://angel.co/u/stefan-cepko
Email: stefan@cepko.me
Photography: guccisilica.com