Ah, I thought you were trying to solve the broader bottleneck of testing which would require approval. But as a hobby just for fun, I suppose you could do anything you want...not sure how useful it would be (would you trust your result? Would health agencies take your result as evidence?)
NCAA literally has the slave model and most likely has origins in that mentality. Just like a race horse can't ask for money because it is a property of its owner, student athletes are not any different from NCAA perspective. It is strange to think that such rule existed for so long in the "free" society.
I'd say this is confusing where we've ended up with where we started.
In the beginning, the "amateur" in "amateur athletics" was taken quite seriously; college athletics was seen and treated as part of the education system.
There's been considerable erosion of this ideal, and at this point it's better to treat college athletes as minor leaguers who happen to be affiliated with colleges.
The history of how we got here is very odd. The NCAA's worship of amateurism has it's roots in Ivy League gentleman amateurs, and for many, many years was explicitly racially segregated.
The roots were very much more in the public's insistence that college students had to stop dying while playing football. Lots of players were paid in the old Ivy League days. Those like Theodore Roosevelt who "saved" the game did so mostly by not letting students handle the payments. Only much later (1940s and '50s) did NCAA take on the form it has today.
VR headset lens already require software chromatic abberration correction -- I'm curious what constraints if any would limit the application of this new result for VR spherical aberrations. Would love some thoughts from an optics expert on this. I also wonder if this new knowledge could contribute to a software corrector.
Hopefully it leads to software-based spherical aberration correction too, which may mean better perceived quality with the same lenses, or even thinner/cheaper lenses over time.
Or maybe they'll find a way to apply it to make better lenses that need less software-based corrections. They struggle a lot not just with clarity at the edges but god rays and glare too.
Could you please elaborate on how it changed your life? I am interested in learning Elixir and wondering if you can give some words of encouragement, assuming it changed your life positively :)
Falling in love with Erlang led me to create a Twitter account to share information about it, which helped me find and land a job with Basho, which was by far my favorite job, even if the company ended badly.
So, that part is difficult to replicate.
Setting that aside, Erlang finally helped me understand what functional programming is about (I'd tried and failed to grasp Lisp on a few occasions), taught me the value of immutability and asynchronous message passing, really opened my eyes to the fact that there's a vast world outside the tired Algol family tree.
Sadly, pattern matching and immutability have made it very hard for me to enjoy programming in other languages. Most of my development work after that has been in Python, which is not only the least exciting language I've used in a very long time, but also lacks most of what I came to appreciate about Erlang.
Erlang's constraints (primarily immutability in this context) makes it so much easier to reason about and troubleshoot code.
It's also a good language for helping get opportunities to talk at conferences. People keep hearing about it without knowing much about it, so those talks tend to be well-attended.
Elixir is a perfectly acceptable language, although the syntax and other design choices turn me off, personally. Erlang is a very concise language and helps me think in Erlang; anything that looks like Python/Ruby/C/Java/etc just feels wrong now.
There's definitely something to be said for the rate at which you can learn to be a strong developer in SV / similar tech hubs, because there's a lot of good mentors in the area to absorb knowledge from.
SV is not the only tech hub in the country. Others are also expensive, but not that expensive. And if you're willing to tolerate commutes as long as SV, then it can be much cheaper.
I've started a new job twice in the last 6 years working remotely from North Carolina (after already having been established here in NC), and not in one of the tech-heavy areas (RTP / Charlotte).
In the first remote job I worked nearly 3 years at a Santa Clara, CA startup. I've been almost 3 years at a large 10K-plus employee Mountain View, CA company now ... first non-startup in 20+ years. It helped that both jobs came through my network.
The short answer is no. I find people that attempt to do this without having worked in the valley always end up with some milquetoast quality to them that people in the valley can always pick up on. You could maybe fool people who are not from the valley, but you will never fool the valley.
The much longer answer is yes, but I do not have the time to explain it.
