Granted I'm not a software developer, so the things I work on tend to be simpler. But the people I know who are recognized for "knowing how the whole thing works" are likely to have earned that distinction, not necessarily by actually knowing how it works but:
1. The ability and interest to investigate things and find out how they work, when needed or desired. They are interested in how things work. They are probably competent in things that are "glue" in their disciplines, such as math and physics in my case.
2. The ability to improvise an answer when needed, by interpolating across gaps in knowledge, well enough to get past whatever problem is being solved. And to decide when something doesn't need to be understood.
Since I’ve worked on a lot of bikes for friends and family members, the condition of the front and rear brake pads tells me that many casual cyclists are afraid of their front brakes. The rear pads will be totally worn down and the fronts practically new. The advice I give people is: Don’t be afraid of your front brake, but learn to use two-wheel braking effectively, and find a safe place to practice it if necessary.
Yes, this is just the power for the joint, not the hinge.
How to do this in a tight space is a tough mechanical engineering problem. Tesla's Optimus uses a 4-bar linkage as the hinge, and some kind of cylindrical linear
actuator as the power drive. Can't tell much about the actuator from the patent for the hinge.
Boston Dynamics used to use hydraulic pistons in their legs, but that did not scale down well from their Big Dog mule-sized machine. They finally went electric, and their machines became far less clunky. Motor power/weight ratios have improved a lot since the early BD days.
Electrical linear motors would be a nice solution. They're rarely used, because they tend to have to be custom for each application. But we might see more of that as humanoid robots approach volume production. The technology has reached 15:1 power/weight ratio.[1] With cooling.
Similar story here. Sheldon’s site took the mystery out of wheel building, at least for my basic needs. I was motivated by acquiring a couple of ancient Sturmey Archer hubs and wanting to put them on modern rims. Those wheels have been bulletproof.
This is the thing that really baffles me. My kids went through K-12 when Common Core was a thing, and there was a huge backlash about it, so I decided to look it up and to see how it was being used in our school district.
A few states published their Common Core guidelines. I looked at one state, and the curriculum goals looked no different than the things that I learned when I was a kid. It seemed completely ordinary. I remain baffled about why it was so controversial.
Math education has always been a failure, or a "crisis." The number of people who come out of school with any functional math ability has been fairly constant over the decades, and depends a lot on family background and economic class. I'm not even sure that differences across countries are all that significant when people reach adulthood.
Don't get me wrong. I was one of the successful ones, but I think math education is in need of reform. In fact I would reform it quite radically.
I doubt obsolescence anticipation has anything to do with it. That’s how tech enthusiasts think, but most people think more in terms of, “Is this useful to me?” And if it’s doing a useful thing now then it should still be doing that useful thing next year as long as nobody fucks with it.
I would guess it’s more just consumer fatigue. For two reasons. First, AI’s still at the “all bark and no bite” phase of the hype cycle, and most people don’t enjoy trying a bunch of things just to figure out if they work as advertised. Where early adopters think of that as play time, typical consumers see it as wasted time. Second, and perhaps even worse, they have learned that they can’t trust that à product will still be doing that useful thing in the future because the tech enthusiasts who make these products can’t resist the urge to keep fucking with it.
Michael Jackson is another. And there were child stars in the movies.
One difference is how popular music is produced today. The members of the band are not just performers, and in fact, they're often mediocre instrumentalists and singers. They're expected to create their own material, which probably requires a certain level of social development and experience. The emphasis is on other skills such as creating songs that resonate with the audience, performing on stage, etc.
When I was in high school, calculators had just hit the scene. Some teachers allowed them, others didn't.
One of our teachers allowed us to bring a single page of notes to the exam. I wrote my notes on a photocopy of a slide rule. At exam time, I tore the sheet in half.
Of course the teacher thought I was being a smart-ass, and given that the tests were written when calculators were not allowed, they were never really all that useful.
In college chemistry, at each exam, they handed out a sheet that had the periodic table on one side, and a table of logarithms on the other.
I use one engineering app that has a "soft" license. It has a lot of failure modes, all of which are essentially administrative not technological. A fair number of departments have to work together: IT, purchasing, and accounts payable (in case the company is on credit hold for non-payment of a previous license renewal) across multiple corporate divisions. It can eat up a few days of my life, and sometimes I lose access to the software for a few days.
The IT department restructures the license server or it goes down.
The vendor changes their license technology every few years.
If you have a physical dongle, the vendor will beg you to send it in and receive a soft license. The few remaining users with dongles refuse. The hardware is more reliable.
We use Flex license server for so many pieces of software. It works well as long as everything is up and running. Several years ago, we merged with another company and slowly began to consolidate IT infrastructure. The license server was moved many times without giving proper notification to users until it eventually settled at the main DC we use. Then came the issue of renewing the license. Previously, license renewal was managed at the department level which means the users only need to go to their boss if there's an issue and only had to send one email to our local IT to apply a new license. Funding for licenses came out of a special budget so department heads didn't have to beg. Very simple and it worked fine for years. Now, everything is centralized which sounds great except that the people that manage the license server are so far removed from where we are that it can take months for a license renewal. You're not talking to people you have an email address for, you're submitting tickets to our central system where they forward it onto the license group somewhere. It used to be incredibly painful but has gotten better now that the license group is more aware of the entire division of employees that now require their services too.
1. The ability and interest to investigate things and find out how they work, when needed or desired. They are interested in how things work. They are probably competent in things that are "glue" in their disciplines, such as math and physics in my case.
2. The ability to improvise an answer when needed, by interpolating across gaps in knowledge, well enough to get past whatever problem is being solved. And to decide when something doesn't need to be understood.
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