> “ Three factors were required to join this holy ensemble: the technical expertise to design a capable and reliable microcomputer, a nose for the larger business opportunity latent in the hobby computer market…”
I think the same opportunity exists now in the hobby robot market.
Okay, that made me chuckle. As someone[1] who has also predicted the opportunity for hobby robots based on my experience with home computers. And yet that has really never materialized. I mean there are common household robots today, things like Roombas and robot lawn mowers, but the whole "app" ecosystem, a robot that can do lots of different things, Etc. is still not in the cards. Part of that has to do with how insanely hard vision to inverse kinematics is, "fuzzy logic" was going to fix that before, now "AI" is the buzzword of choice, but realistically you need a lot of things to go right to make this work.
Back in the day we had everyone in the club set some goals for their robot, mine were simple; on voice command, have my robot go to a special refrigerator, get out a cold Diet Dr. Pepper, replace it with one from stock, then bring the cold one to me, where ever I was in the house.
Even allowing for a lot of customized environment to support the robot that is a really high bar today (much less in 1998 when I was thinking I'd have it working by the early 2000's)
End effectors, vision, custom fridge that an open electonically on demand with structured storage to hold beverages in pre-specified places, etc etc. I could probably get a lot closer.
Of course my eldest child could do that at 3 years old without any programming at all and no custom engineering of the appliances. So some things seem effortless for people are really challenging for computers.
[1] I was President of the Home Brew Robotics Club (hbrc.org) for 10 years around the turn of the century (after Dick Prather had been President for 10 years and before Wayne Gramlich became President for 10 years :-)
In 1977, a company named Quasar Industries demonstrated a household robot claimed to understand a vocabulary of 4000 words and capable of vacuuming, washing dishes, and teaching the children of the household French. It would ship within the next two years, at a cost of $4000.
Some CMU graduate students attended one of the demos, and discovered two people discreetly loitering in the background, one doing the "speaking" of the robot, and the other remote controlling it.
Luckily in today's more advanced times, we have Optimus shipping any day now, which definitely has never been teleoperated at any of its demos…
My 7 year old loves it! He likes the animations, how the creatures get the questions wrong sometimes, and the math questions. Questions were - why do we play a wizard guy (he wants to play as different characters), why does the scorpion drop a star, why are some of the moves not available / charged up yet
Sounds like you just need interview practice. (Your post seems more about interview nerves than ADHD issues). It’s a different skill, separate from being a good coder. It’s difficult to tell from your post if you have had any interviews yet. You mention “I've never had a real interview after college”. I would specifically look into getting mock interviews where the stakes are low, and get feedback and practice, so you learn how to improve and gain more confidence. You can ask friends, watch YouTube videos (for ideas, but this is not real practice), go to college career networking events, or search for “interview practice” - there are companies and services that offer this. You can get good at this! Good luck!
Just to provide some counterpoint to the echo chamber here - as a Dad of a six year old who played with legos as a kid and again now, I can affirm - Legos and the sets they put out now are way cooler now than when I was a kid!
You might worry that the less general purpose, specialized pieces might stunt creativity, but guess what!? The 6 year old has no problem taking them completely apart and building something off script.
It's the olds who worry about keeping them all together and not losing the pieces so they can still make the thing on the front of the box. The kids don't care and will happily take it all apart and build things we never would have thought of.
It's definitely variable, some children will not go off-script, others barely want to stay on script long enough to do the box-image build.
Certainly in our house I (as dad) am more relaxed about playing with the stuff than building "the" model; that's fun too but you might as well use the Kragle if you're not going to mod it or tear it down and build something else...
The new sets are more complex and detailed, but god do I hate the franchised sets. Nothing kills kids creativity more than that. It's not a pirate ship, it is Jack Sparrow's pirate ship. It's not a spaceship, it's Luke Skywalker's spaceship!
Additionally, the quality of parts has seriously decreased since the 80s and 90s.
There's no single right "amount" of structure to provide to inspire creativity. Different works of art, different moods, different people, different days, will all "want" different starting points. Sometimes you want to experiment with basic geometry and it's useful to start from a bucket of raw parts. Sometimes you want to dig into stories and characters and it's useful to start with something that already exists. And because you can always remove structure from a situation - Legos can always be broken down into the bucket of raw parts! - more highly structured sets strictly expand the available range by pushing out the high end.
Even more than that, kids are learning how to be creative, and having some structure to start from helps a huge amount for a beginner. If you hand a blank piece of paper to someone who's never written anybody and tell them to be creative they'll never even be able to start. If you give them something to start from they'll have a much easier time. Even as expertise builds and you pull back on the guidance it's still incredibly useful to have new material injected from outside your own bubble of experience. Concretely, when you're just getting started it's a hell of a lot easier to learn that you can have a different person win a lightsaber fight than it is to write all your own characters from whole cloth, and when you're trying to learn how people work it's absolutely necessary to examine characters and stories that you didn't make up and that don't just confirm your own preconceptions and biases.
If I wanted to summarize my opinions, I think that playing with licensed-IP Lego sets is actually a critical step in the development of creativity because it lets you get started on more complicated topics earlier, makes you less afraid to adapt existing works, and provides inspiration and outside influence to break filter bubbles. I would compare it in many ways to writing fanfiction, and in a very literal sense it absolutely is.
> Nothing kills kids creativity more than that. It's not a pirate ship, it is Jack Sparrow's pirate ship. It's not a spaceship, it's Luke Skywalker's spaceship!
Why do you think so? I had a Hogwarts Express set and most of the time I didn't pretend for it to be the Hogwarts Express when playing.
I based that on empirical observation of my kids' friends. They don't make up stories, they just replay the star wars or Harry Potter movies. So I don't know, a dozen kids or so. I haven't done a nation wide study yet.
“The new sets are more complex and detailed, but god do I hate the franchised sets. Nothing kills kids creativity more than that.”
I haven’t noticed this with my son, fortunately. What I have noticed is that franchised characters immediately detach from their property when they enter his LEGO world. Lately I think Chewbacca has been dating an elderly woman, and every time Luke Skywalker talks about the rebellion his hair falls off. We have a Porg that runs a food delivery service with a Goomba and Harry Potter. I played in a similar way when I was a kid. I think in many cases the characters can be jumping off points, but a lot of kids take plenty of liberties from there.
I don't know, they have a service online to order replacements for lost or broken pieces for free. I use it 2 or 3 times a year, they never question it and just ship the pieces.
Having two teenage boys I cannot confirm this. They play with other stuff, but Lego is for building once and putting it on a shelf, where it will collect thick layers of dust. My sons never really played with Lego, which I found a bit disappointing.
I bought two of those last Christmas, one for me, the other for the son of a co-worker --- mine is currently out on loan to the parent to practice with so as to be able to keep up with the child (and if need be, as a source of parts if any are missing).
You're free to take them apart and start making stuff with them. I'm pretty sure your kids would join in, mine certainly did. Sets should not be seen as holy and giving them a prominent display spot may be the wrong thing to do. For a week, sure, after that it's parts :)
Oh no my friend, this is not allowed - "Dad, don't touch it; why did you add that piece; you're ruining it" "but you're not using it, it was just sitting on the shelf...".
There's definitely a strong divergence. In part, for us I think it's driven by poverty, they want "the nice thing" to look at (all our own models are necessarily colour-mismatched). But I know others who have rooms full of prestige sets that are 'not to be touched'!
Many on HN will be tinkerers who will take anything apart, that probably makes a difference too.
I always cry on the inside when I see those beautifully designed, symmetrical, detailed sets taken apart and tossed together to form the next ninja castle or whatever, but after all Lego is to be taken apart and my 6-8-9 year olds have no remorse in doing so.
No one uses API keys with Copilot intentionally. If you install the VSCode extension and start using it, and you happen to open a file that has an API key in it, boom - it's sent to Copilot. That is the issue. It's currently like walking a tightrope with no guardrails, and it's not obvious.
You haven't really tried everything if you "don't want to hire sales people or a marketing firm of any kind." This might be a self limiting belief.
You can learn by hiring someone / paying someone for a limited time. You can learn what they do, and then use that knowledge to set up systems and processes. Once you have a process, you can pay others like a VA to execute it for you at a lower cost than your time is worth and gain back that time to do higher leverage things.
If your product is making $30k a month, you can afford to experiment with some amount of that, say $2k a month, for a few months, then switch it up. You will learn. If you could spend $2k a month on a sales person or marketing firm which resulted in you making an additional $3k a month, why wouldn't you?
Caprover is nice and convenient but security wise, only a single password field is required on the admin console. (See demo here: https://captain.server.demo.caprover.com/#/login)
Given this it would be nice to at least make the web admin console only accessible via an IP whitelist, but last time I used it I did not find an easy way to do that.
I haven’t used it but it appears to serve everything over the same port. You could block it with a reverse proxy but not with a firewall or layer 4 proxy.
I use TripIt for multi-person travel itineraries. It does allow for sharing and multiple contributors. It is not necessarily for getting consensus on activities, but for centralizing all of your confirmed plans in one place.
I think the same opportunity exists now in the hobby robot market.