There really is. We designed a redundant system (software, hardware and mechanisms) a couple years ago. And the problems around figuring out who's in control and how to keep things synchronized across a number of potential failure modes gets really hairy. Sadly, the project was cancelled before we could complete the implementation.
That actually sounds like a lot of fun. I have lots of various kinds of trees ranging from very soft to extremely hard and dense (juniper!) woods. I think I'll try that sometime.
You've probably already discovered this, but in case you haven't: watch out for the black raspberries if they're in the ground. They spread at an astronomical rate and are practically unkillable after they're established.
We moved into this house partly bc it had an extra ~acre of space beyond the main "yard" which was starting to turn into a forest. We cleared it of woody stuff but left some black raspberries, maybe 10 plants?
2 years later, it turned into an impenetrable ~1/4 acre thicket of mostly black raspberries with some wild blackberries and wineberries among them. We paid to have it mostly cleared again, and now we are occasionally mowing whatever is not intentionally planted or mulched.
That said, I do remember once introducing a new engineer to our project and I demonstrated how on closing the door, the machine ingested samples. When the ram started to move, his response was "Oh, Danger Will Robinson! I always wanted to work on a robot" Til then I hadn't thought of our instrument as a robot, but I guess by a loose definition, any "intelligent" electromechanical assembly could be...
I'm all ears:
1. Feel free to share why unmasking Banksy was in the public interest
2. Whether you feel all other public interest priorities had been served by investigative reporting prior to commissioning his unmasking.
I have no idea, nor care, whether or not unmasking Banksy, specifically, was in the public interest. My only point is that it's not limited to topics that you consider important.
As for your #2, that seems reminiscent of "why are we going to space when there are so many problems here on Earth."
I knew someone who got a master's in nursing and did this. She ended up really liking the population that she worked with and stayed there past the required number of years.
And there will always be people who think that driving around in a heated/air-conditioned truck with a big claw that picks up and empties the cans is a fun job and will happily do it at any reasonable pay level.
Not everyone wants to work in an office; some people really like working outside and being indoors is like prison.
Those jobs require some physical handling of the garbage. That big claw doesn't always work as expected, and when things go wrong, they have to get out and clean up the mess. There's also items that don't fit in the can and have to be manually handled.
But you're right, the job isn't as bad as it used to be.
Well, my point wasn't really that the job has gotten easier, it's that some people simply prefer doing that kind of work.
I remember being in a meeting once when a manager looked out at the guys on a scaffold cleaning the windows and remarked "at least we don't have to be out there like them." My first thought was that they were probably thinking "at least we don't have to be inside like them."
While I can understand the sentiment, I think most of this is fantasy. A lot of people vastly underestimate the toll manual labor takes on one's body. It may be nice to ponder "Wow, it must be so great to work out in the sunshine all day!", compare anyone doing physical labor (and I count extended driving in that) age 50+ with any office worker 50+. Sure, anyone 50+ has standard aches and pains, but I've seen many physical laborers dealing with constant pain and a lot of degenerative diseases at that age.
And perhaps they'll get that convenience from an application that they don't even know came into existence because they asked their agent to do something.
I completely agree. Just going through the beginner & hobbyist forums, the change from "can you help me with code to do X" to "I used ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot to write code to do X" happened with absolutely startling speed, and it's not slowing down. There was clearly a pent-up demand here that wasn't being met otherwise.
People are using AI to get code written. They have no idea what code quality is and only care that what they built works.
AFAICT, every time technology has allowed non-technical people to do more, it's opened up new opportunities for programmers. I don't expect this to be any different, I just want to know where the opportunities are.
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