People just blow my mind sometimes. I just love seeing these DIY projects that seem like they apply a collection of skills that would take me 10 years to learn each.
Writeup was very refreshing to read, felt like someone actually wrote it.
You have to get nearly halfway from the surface of the sun (photospere) to its core before the density of the sun’s material is equivalent to that of the earth.
>Quote: "The Overhang consists of the unrealized capital gains of past mathematical creativity, the latent value from connecting the dots in the existing corpus. It is a dividend of canonization. Mathematician X states problem A, mathematician Y crafts concept B, then mathematician Z notices that B trivially solves A and “captures” the social reward.
I've made an entire career out of being 'jack of all trades, master of none'. Being able to synthesize connections from relatively trivial knowledge in a bunch of domains is SOP for many humans as well. I think AI just has deeper knowledge and better pattern matching to make up for it's (at least now) lack of strength in cognition and 'ex nihilo' creativity.
(Which probably isn't 'ex nihilo' at all, and has more to do with the plethora of modalities that humans live in vs. large language models. For example, why do we pick the color red for notating important things and why do we say a schedule 'slips'...these are informed by a shared human experience borne of distinct physical sensation deep in our wiring that LLMs can only infer from what we write.)
A college advisor I had 20 years ago was a firm believer that interdisciplinarity was the future, that generalist skills and the ability to make connections between different fields would be paramount in advancing science. I suppose he was right in the big picture, even if the career prospects for human generalists aren't looking so rosy.
I'm actually still quite bullish on generalists. Specialists advance every front but build the supply lines between them.
In favor of the generalist, I think AI is also quite limited in its scope of how it generalizes. I'm mowing through hundreds of mythos-generated security findings right now for work and while it's amazing that it can build an exploit chain 20 steps deep, it's completely lacking in all of the external layers that render it's speculation moot.
How do you thrive in an environment of specialists? That's is the problem I seem to have. I'm spread a little across a few of the domains involved with what I do. Because of that, I have a bit more insight, so am very often the person pointing out relatively fundamental problems, usually caused by either not understanding the problems from a "first principles" perspective, resulting in, or being caused by, categorical type errors, where they've boxed a problem into a tiny space it doesn't belong.
I've been trending "quiet" lately, because I don't like the "friction"/convincing aspect of it all. It's hard to get people to see things from a different angle, or even convincing them there's a problem to begin with!
The last project required a complete redesign from a problem I pointed out during the first review, and second, and third, but now I'm seeing even more friction.
Maybe this is just corporate life, after a group gets large.
You don't really say how long you've worked with these folks so I'm guessing here, but in my experience you have to build credibility and trust first.
Focus on the opportunities rather than the problems, connect people doing similar things in different areas and jump in when they are solving problems after the fact. The last part, for me, has been key to building it in my career (30 years in infra/tech/security).
Eventually, you will be seen as a party breaker, and all that will be seen as negative. You are the bringer of the bad news; nobody likes that, no matter how reasonable you are. Shitty products are the norm when profit is in question and doing what is right is not and will be in most places taken as inability to be a valuable team member. There might be some slight chance that you will be in good environment, but even that is usually temporary as business owners, goals and incentives change.
I tinkered with gnuradio back when rtl-sdr just took off (2012ish?).
I had no background in dsp or signal processing and found it so opaque as to be unusuable, even though I saw more skilled folks do amazing things with it.
I've tinkered with SDR some and did a bit professionally. I always found GNU Radio to fall into the uncanny valley - too GUI to scratch my programming itch but too low-level to be useful for exploration. Between libraries like `pyrtlsdr` and desktop apps like `sdrangel`, I can't seem to find a niche for GNU Radio.
I worked with GNU Radio quite a bit at one point a decade+ ago, even writing a custom C++ block, but I almost exclusively used it via Python rather than the GUI toolkit. I found it much quicker to mess around with flow graphs in code than their various UI frameworks, spawning windows as needed when plotting waveforms / spectra etc. The GUI as you said was too cumbersome.
I understand that they were trying to make a pretty complicated topic more approachable, but I always felt the push to GUI was misguided. Maybe they would have had more luck embracing the “S” in “SDR” and making programming languages the primary development paradigm.
Run through pysdr[0], which I found has the right complexity gradient and the right levels of abstraction for people with technical chops but who aren’t familiar with SDR
I have to say having just done a very tricky project with a long DSP pipeline in gnuradio, that LLMs are a godsend for getting up to speed on gnuradio blocks. I too found it historically impenetrable, but was able to get a pipeline completed. That said, prepare yourself for a lot of debugging and work to diagnose problems if you’re doing anything of sufficient complexity.
At the end of the day, DSP is a lot of math and a lot of hardware. A lot of GNU Radio's code is a monster unification of so many different choices into certain interfaces (or duplication of the same choices) for, presumably performance reasons? Or just keeping every single DSP technique ever in the God Library for the super power greybeard to use.
If you have a certain DSP goal in mind (say, RF comms), and you want to do stuff but not absolutely balls-to-the-walls processing (at that point, presumably you'd move to hardware), you can design your stack in fairly modular and composable ways. The field is pretty mature and the techniques just work.
In a software context, you can decompose the abstractions fairly cleanly. You won't get 5G high performance networking but you can get good enough results.
We hired a new guy at work that's leading a specific platform initiative.
In person he's very articulate, able to communicate abstract thoughts clearly, states clear goals and how he's learning about the business to develop a plan.
But dear lord everything he writes in email and slack reads like it's copy paste from chatgpt. It's unnerving.
Had a similar experience when my talented lead engineer, who usually grunts in monosyllables and writes terse responses to my apparently intellectually frivolous questions, started adding flowery emojis to his email.
I've gone through several cycles of religion in my life. In various parts of that spectrum I've wondered why humans invented it. Five decades deep it's becoming more and more evident to me that there is some kind of deeply ingrained need for it in wide swaths of humanity...regardless of what it actually looks like in practice.
I don’t understand what your question has to do with op but I’ll explain it to you.
Religion and language are very similar, both in how they are transmitted and how they shift.
The latter systematizes thought and the former emotions.
Language is encoded by vocal utterances, characters, hand gestures, etc…
Religion by rituals, stories, customs. The purpose of it is to handle the common emotional needs of man. The starting point is the grief that comes from a dead person -> you need a ritual to handle the body and process emotions.
Next you need to handle who has sex with whom as that is another big area of emotional turbulence in man.
Then relationships between parent and child. And so on…
Write it down and get people to follow it, you have a religion. Which will shift and split over time as does language.
It can be completely distinct from the origin of everything though many choose to incorporate deities into their stories to give weight and meaning, this harnesses the inherent respect for father figures people tend to be born with to achieve this.
Love this idea! Any time I visit a place that specializes in a cuisine I'm not familiar with, I tend to struggle with what to order because I don't want to commit to just one entree. Having a curated tour of tastes, so to speak, targeted to folks exploring the cuisine would be absolutely perfect. Wonderful!
Thats the goal! A little taste of what tells the story of where we are traveling that month. Sometimes restaurants will make off menu items for us, which is a lot of fun and usually something a little more adventurous.
Writeup was very refreshing to read, felt like someone actually wrote it.
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