Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang. A really enjoyable story about people on Mars and Earth after their societies and cultures diverge. Definitely felt like a new perspective to me.
I worked with ROS1 professionally for a few years. My big takeaway was that the middleware got a lot more attention than it deserved. There are tons of hard research problems to work on in robotics: reliable navigation, object recognition, planning, manipulation, etc. I felt like a better contribution to open source robotics would be some great class libraries for those things. But let your users wire them up however they want, rather than requiring them to fit into a predefined architecture.
It would also cut down on the amount of code in those packages significantly. The overhead of gluing things into ROS is enourmous (and mostly makes everything worse: a robotic control system running through 3-4 unsynchronised nodes communicating over a network-based pub-sub system on commodity hardware has very little hope of working if everything is well written, let alone with the average quality of a ROS package).
Exactly, the first question when somebody suggests using ROS should be: Do you even need it in the first place? Your code may be much simpler if you forgo the networking communicating nodes model completely.
This was exactly my experience. We used DDS for our non-ROS parts but ROS2 was experimental at the time so we ended up needing to build bridges for everything that was ROS. Brining in even a single ROS package to not have to reinvent things was a huge pain point and ROS had issues where it couldn't be used across everything.
There's probably not that much overlap between people who are good at writing communications middleware and people good at each of those research problems; there's not even that much overlap between people good at each of those research problems.
It was a real shotgun shot to the face. What ROS 1 needed was to modernize ros_comm a bit so it doesn't crash when the network changes and it would be a far better solution, plus integrating multimaster_fkie.
Now we've got this bullshit with multiple slower RMWs with vastly larger overhead and none of them work reliably, clogging the network with multicasts. Not only that but some packages only work with some RMWs or just one, fracturing the ecosystem even further, because breaking everything every 2 years wasn't enough to reduce compatibility.
Like the whole point of ROS in principle is the standardization, grab any two packages and they will work with each other if you remap the topics because the message types are the same. The effort should be in the direction to further this standardization, not actively prevent it.
There is an end! I think the hardest step is the one where fast black ants attack every two seconds. and after that if you're able to play for 30 more seconds, the princess will be saved.
Absolutely true. The layoffs appear to have been 100% random. Lots of loafers and do-nothing types on my friend's team who did not get laid off, but other people who consistently do great work did get laid off.
There's no incentive to excel. Either you'll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work.
Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there's not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.
In my experience, the biggest impediment to this goal of always hiring the best people is what I call "good talkers". People who are good at talking, good at convincing, but not good at technical work. The bigger an org gets, the more likely some interviewer will be fooled by a good talker. Once there's one, they like to hire other good talkers. Good talkers don't know as much about tech, so they are more easily convinced by other good talkers. Good talkers strive for positions of power where talking is more important than the technical work they don't know how to do. Before long, your company is run by professional managers who don't know how to do anything but talk. Once those people are in charge, any kind of technical meritocracy is impossible. Like they say, "the turds always float to the top".
That's a topic for another blog post, but I use these as servers, so don't need direct HDMI/display connectivity - but one reason is to reduce noise. And I don't have a garage!
It might be their spare/basement bathroom that they're not actually using. In the background you can also see that they're using it to store their luggage cases.
Remoovit.com does this exactly. They pick up your stuff, then either sell, donate, or dispose of it. If they sell it, you get 50%, or if they have to pay to dispose, they charge you for it. Works great.
