Oh yeah I've made some designs for a custom Eurorack style synth, but I quickly realized how expensive it would be to make a full rack.
A synth scales exponentially, to get even some usefulness requires getting a lot of modules. Maybe one day.
hell yeah, I have tailed my T-shirts before but nothing else, making my own sound like a nice challenge.
How do you source materials?
I'm usually very picky about the material, especially if it touches my skin, and usually the heavier the better.
The best T-shirts I ever owned was a military surplus made from organic cotton, and was more than twice the weight of my other T-shirts, but I couldn't find anything like it anywhere.
This sounds like a cool mix of genetics and gardening, I like that.
Maybe I should ask some local non profits whether they need help with IT infra, because I don't exactly think "google drive and onedrive folders" is going to be an outlier.
also I came back here after three days, how did this get 713 comments all of a sudden???
This reminds me of [0], basically just inviting the most interesting people I know (also transitively the most interesting people they know), and just getting to meet people.
I would really like to do this, but half the most interesting people I know are PhD professors I rant with because I'm next to them in a lab. Maybe once my network gets bigger.
But I would still like to know more about how you do this, as other people doing this accidentally made me some good friendships, and I'd like to repay this favor to others
Easy two-part process: First part is putting our "feelers", ask/tell a bunch of people "You know, I'm thinking of maybe hosting a dinner party/barbecue/beach day" and see what reaction you get from people. If sufficient people (sometimes just 2) give somewhat interested vibes, ask again what dates people could do it at, then you send out an invite.
You'd get a bunch of people who say yes but then don't show, this is normal and don't take it personally. Secondly, maybe the first 2-3 times it'd be hard to get people to commit, but once you do it more regularly, people will find it easier to commit to something they know you're already committed to.
How I do it is context-specific. I used to live in a place where it's undoable and I was very lonely there. I moved to a place where people are much more open to it culturally and there's enough population to +/- bring in a constant flow of 4:1 regulars to newbies.
I advertise on local meetup platforms and in local social media. And I go to so many meetups myself that when people ask me what my hobbies are and I tell them, they get curious and self-invite.
I do boxing as a form of cardio so I'm not weightlifting all the time.
So I've just invited a friend for a 1v1 and he accepted, time to start training both properly I guess.
I do want something related to computers because that's where I'm skilled the most, but it being mixed with something else is fine (i.e., biohacking).
But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel.
Maybe the next frontier is becoming an electrician?
> But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel
I feel like it depends, there are many sorts of projects which are still low hanging fruits. you might not get appreciated to do things anymore because of the amount of competition but you can feel proud of yourself.
Breaking NATs without root permissions (try searching dropbear without root and building it and running it with something like pinggy to then make a minecraft server beneath a nat work), making a free crypto chain have data embedded within a loop of transactions to embed data on crypto for free, recently using single-file to somehow archive archive.is pages on archive.org* anonymously using piping-server.
I have used AI/LLM assistance in most of these but I feel like aside from being frustrated at the code aspects, I had some good ideas and even with everyone else having AI, I didn't see anyone else doing these things (the reason I say this is because if they did, I would've just used their services :] )
Not sure if a lot of these things sound novel, programmatically not, but idea-wise I think* they might-be novel.
A lot of my novel ideas come out of proving things. Can I prove that I can run minecraft on a free intel server that me and my friends can play on? Can I prove that I can save archive.is pages on archive.org anonymously-ish since the issue with archive.is
So my point is, out of personal experience, there are so many novel-ideas within things which seem obvious but nobody has really implemented them and to be honest, everyone is just creating yet another chatgpt wrapper with AI. Much of these experiments are prototyping/proving these ideas and I believe that there are some low hanging fruits in such sense of these ideas which can be interesting to think about.
So I don't suppose that you have to go bio-hacking to find things which pique your interest, there are some practical things too in my opinion which can pique your interest.
Not sure if this might be the answer you are looking for, but I hope this helps within the context you asked it. Sometimes two normal things combined together can be the novel thing to do.
My opinion is that people with money chase money oriented things, the people with passion/hobby-tinkering will do things that chase passion and so sometimes you have nothing to worry about :-)
So are there any things that you feel is similar to this for you, perhaps?
What you're doing is interesting but those are side-projects.
I have plenty of random side-projects, just now after reading Gibson's Burning Chrome, I'm making an OpenBSD server where you can only log in using SSH keys in my implant, and logging in makes you a completely new but very restricted user with 1GB of free storage. Kinda like Johnny Mnemonic.
But I feel very disorganized when most of my attention is on distinct one-off side projects, I want to work on something novel and big.
But thanks for your suggestions.
It is true that most industries begin when passion oriented people finally meet money oriented people, but most time they are separate.
No, but they are replacing bad ISPs.
I have a relative in Brussels, while there is 10gig fiber on a nearby street, he's stuck on 100/10 coax, and to add insult to injury, Starlink is cheaper.
Coax is an old tech, but it is surprisingly innovative and pushed limits a lot with right equipment. Newest full duplex and extended spectrum models could potentially reach 10/10 Gbps and all they require is changing some passive splitters in the cable plant and RPD plus CM supporting new modulation. Which are way way cheaper than satellites.
What I'm saying, is as soon as there is a real competitor pressure, ISPs can upgrade their deployments in under a year or two, even without touching buried copper. Of course they can also choose not to do that too :) .
I mean your relative is maybe a member of the tech elite who needs amazing bandwith but
100 Mbps/10Mbps is not going to be limiting for most people. Coax is already pretty fast considering it probably takes its source from fiber at street level and mostly constrained in uploading. I just went from coax to fiber and I cannot tell the difference when browsing, streaming or sharing. Maybe it is because my devices are stuck on wifi 5 but even then I have my doubts.
On the other hand :
"Starlink users typically experience download speeds between 45 and 280 Mbps, with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100 Mbps. Upload speeds are typically between 10 and 30 Mbps."
That doesn't sound meaningfully different. What is the price difference ?
You are quite right. Also in practice Starlink has random jitter and packet loss at unpredictable times, very visible when talking to my colleagues in Ukraine when they are on backups or in the country. It's fine solution, but landlines are for now superior. Also Starlink's bandwidth depends a lot on the majority of people staying on the landlines. Starlink is nothing short of miracle, but it has limitations. Interesting to see the if the v2 and v3 will upend the status quo.
I don't know how to put it into words, but this aesthetic of computers just looks sooo good.
Makes me want to try making my homelab/experimental hardware look like it.
Any ideas how to source parts that look similar in low quantities?
Yeah, eBay has tons of them. Use them for movie props all the time. If anyone is in LA there are plenty of surplus electronics shops that are overflowing with them. I used to search "cannon connectors" IIRC.
The steel ones ("Cannon connectors") are indeed very expensive: the only ones I have were removed from industrial equipment. However, for hobbyist use, I'd buy CPC -- Circular Plastic Connectors. Those are available in the same variety of pinouts and cost an order of magnitude less.
You can. GitHub is about to hit zero nines of uptime[0].
But feedback like that is far too late to be useful.
Maybe (principal or senior) engineers should be the ones to judge, and be trusted by management that their foresight is worth pushing the deadline?
You can't. You can hypothesize about the counterfactual in which you shipped a "steaming pile of complexity," but you definitionally cannot measure something that does not exist.
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