This is orders of magnitude more complicated and risk prone than wire wrapping due to the possibility of cold joints, but as I understand it, this look is what people dig these days (just watch any EE youtuber). I too used to think that soldering on porto board was a great way to go about prototyping sans SBB, but you can't ignore the bomber connections that wire wrapping gives you.
Might be a dumb question, but isn’t the risk of cold joints proportional to your skill in soldering in general? Important context: I am definitely a noob to soldering
It is, yes. After some practice, you will not get cold joints. Or when there is a danger of a cold joint due to massive heat sinking around, you will know and be extra careful
I'm curious as to what kind of control stack Waymo uses for their vehicles. Obviously their perception stack has to be based off of trained models, but I'm curious if their controllers have any formal guarantees under certain conditions, and if the child walking out was within that formal set of parameters (e.g. velocity, distance to obstacle) or if it violated that, making their control stack switch to some other "panic" controller.
This will continue to be the debate—whether human performance would have exceeded that of the autonomous system.
From a purely stats pov, in situations where the confusion matrix is very asymmetric in terms of what we care about (false negatives are extra bad), you generally want multiple uncorrelated mechanisms, and simply require that only one flips before deciding to stop. All would have to fail simultaneously to not brake, which becomes vanishingly unlikely (p^n) with multiple mechanisms assuming uncorrelated errors. This is why I love the concept of Lidar and optical together.
The true self-driving trolley problem. How many rear-end collisions and riders' annoyance caused by phantom braking a manufacturer (or a society) is going to tolerate to save one child per N million miles?
Uncorrelated approach improves sensitivity at the cost of specificity. Early sensor fusion might improve both (maybe at the cost of somewhat lesser sensitivity).
Yeah, if a human made the same mistakes as the Waymo driving too fast near the school, then they would have hurt the kid much worse than the Waymo did.
So if we're going to have cars drive irresponsibly fast near schools, it's better that they be piloted by robots.
Maybe we should not only replace the unsafe humans with robots, but also have the robots drive in a safe manner near schools rather than replicating the unsafe human behavior?
One argument for the robots is that they can be programmed to drive safer, while humans cant.
But that depends on reliability, especially in unforseen (and untrained-upon) circumstances. We'll have to see how they do, but they have been doing better than expected
Depends on the school zone. The tech school near me is in a 50 zone and they don't even turn on the "20 when flashing" signs because if you're gonna walk there, you're gonna come in via residential side streets in the back and the school itself is way back off the road. The other school near me is downtown and you wouldn't be able to go 17 even if you wanted to.
Kinetic energy is a bad metric. Acceleration is what splats people.
Jumping out of a plane wearing a parachute vs jumping off a building without one.
But acceleration is hard to calculate without knowing time or distance (assuming it's even linear) and you don't get that exponent over velocity yielding you a big number that's great for heartstring grabbing and appealing to emotion hence why nobody ever uses it.
Had a similar thought today while marking up pdfs with my iPad. Half of the time I'm fighting with Files' ability to persist my changes after it frequently crashes. Why market it as an iPad if marking up pdfs is so scuffed? this has been happening for years, it's like Apple's desire to add new features tops the desire to fix long lived bugs.
I guess that explains why they had no qualms shutting down half of Boulder's power with a vague time horizon. After losing everything in my fridge, though, they finally turned it back on today.
Indeed. Losing the contents of (lots of) fridges is cheaper, as a whole, than incidentally burning the countryside. We all ultimately pay for the result no matter what, so that seems like a reasonably-sensible bet.
On the fridge itself: You may find that the contents are insured against power outages.
As an anecdote, my (completely not-special) homeowner's insurance didn't protest at all about writing a check for the contents of my fridge and freezer when I asked about that, after my house was without power for a couple of weeks following the 2008 derecho. This rather small claim didn't affect my rate in any way that I could perceive.
And to digress a bit: I have a chest freezer. These days I fill up the extra space in the freezer with water -- with "single-use" plastic containers (water bottles, milk jugs) that would normally be landfilled or recycled.
This does a couple of things: On normal days, it increases thermal mass of the freezer, and that improves the cycle times for the compressor in ways that tend to make it happier over time. In the abnormal event of a long power outage, it also provides a source of ice that is chilled to 0F/18C that I can relocate into the fridge (or into a cooler, perhaps for transport), to keep cold stuff cold.
It's not a long-term solution, but it'll help ensure that I've got a fairly normal supply of fresh food to eat for a couple of days if the power dips. And it's pretty low-effort on my part. I've probably spent nearly as much effort writing about this system here just now as I have on implementing it.
It's probably not worth it to go through your insurance for the loss of food and perishables in the fridge/freezer. It counts as a claim on your home insurance and can result in increased rates or even your insurer dropping coverage at the next renewal.
As previously-stated: There was no rate increase that I could discern.
I did neglect to mention that there was also no issue with renewal, but perhaps I should be more careful to always use absolute rote specificity and leave nothing to implication.
They also sent over some folks with a tall ladder to have a look at the roof of this property that they insured, which was good since we had no means to visually inspect it from the ground. (The roof was fine.)
Anecdotally, that phone call to the insurance company had no downside at all.
It provided a roof inspection that I did not have ready means to perform on my own, and a relatively small amount of money (a couple of hundred bucks) that became very useful not just because of lost food, but also due to all of the other storm-related issues that we were not insured against.
I highly recommend looking into Marc's work [0]. I would say he's on the sharp end of lithography for microrobotics. As soft lithography catches on more, work like his will become only more common to see.
When searching for podcasts that interview researchers I'd like to hear about, I often have to scroll past many AI-ingested arxiv summaries before finding what I'm looking for. It's not inherently bad to have those TTS summaries, but they should reside in their own place rather than the general podcast space.
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