Correct. Reduced smoking, alcohol, and other behaviors have been documented. There's a complex relationship between the gut and certain behaviors. These drugs slow down gut processing, and delay the reward mechanism. With slightly less reward from the body, the scales may tip slightly in favor of self control.
Source: currently using GLP and seeing reduced positive feedback from alcohol (incidentally)...
I didn't get any LLM vibes from the comment at all. I'd heard of "off label use" and other incidental use-cases. So the comment makes a lot of sense...
Agreed. A laptop also comes with battery backup, screen, and input devices out of the gate. Granted, it consumes more power than RPi. But a laptop is definitely a solid choice, based on my experience with RPi resets and corrupted SD cards, etc.
Internet connectivity is the main thing that's prevented me from going down this path. Zoom meetings and file transfers really suck up a lot of bandwidth. But a lot of hotels have more casual internet. And many places that would be amazing to visit are quite rural. Perhaps something like Starlink will become a good solution for this?
We did something similar with a move to Columbus, GA. Cost of living was super-low, but 200k people means you get theater, airport, etc.
One thing to keep in mind as you get older: smaller places may not have all the medical facilities you need. For example, if you get an unusual cancer or need a transplant, your family will be regularly shuttling you 2-3 hours to the nearest large city.
I think that being ~50-60 minutes south of Atlanta would be nice. It's small enough, but you can hop right up to one of the world's busiest airports and get a flight to about anywhere.
Interesting that he mentioned the $300,000 model...
Hypothetical question for US-based folks:
I wonder if there is a non-traditional path for people who can afford to research without the need for a stipend?
Technologists tend to be in the upper income brackets. For a lucky few, it's possible to achieve financial independence in their 40's. At that point conducting research may seem like an attractive intellectual pastime.
These hypothetical PhD students can sustain themselves for 4-6 years without a salary. I suppose there would still be some grant-seeking, depending on the scale of the research. Technically they could actually pay the university, becoming a funding source instead of a burden...
If someone had $2-$3 million in their retirement accounts, it seems strange to scratch and claw for $300k of research stipend funding.
Has anyone heard of such an arrangement? Is this a thing?
If you are financially independently wealthy, then you can just apply to the school and pay the full-rate tuition. Usually the way admission works is that you indicate a faculty advisor with whom you want to work. They will act as your mentor. I don't know of a situation where you would work alone, nor would you want to if you wanted to get the most out of your time there. So you would want to talk to that actual person you want to work with, and have a conversation about the fact that you can fund your own research. I imagine the funding process would have to go through the University. They get a cut of research funding, so they would want to funnel your funds through the same system set up for private grants, of which there are plenty.
So yeah, I don't see why you couldn't do this. You would just set up a private research grant with a faculty member and fund yourself with it.
For larger user counts (and budgets), Salesforce.com is a workhorse. Builds tabs, data views, filters, dashboards, great auditing, security, etc. I've used the force.com platform to track everything from dog daycares to coffee shipments to hospital patients. It's an acquired taste, but it's a huge toolbox that gets the job done.
I'm a young guy, but this presents an interesting question: what's the best path to modernize your skill set?
Imagine being a Cobol or dBase III developer. You recognize that some new technology (say AWS Aurora) is in demand.
So you study a whole bunch during your off time. You do tons of courses, hobby projects, and even take the applicable certifications.
Here's my question: then what? You have textbook knowledge of this new skill, but no actual production experience. What's the best way for these re-skilling workers to make the jump from learning to earning?
Take a job with a lesser title / pay but in exchange get exposure to the new tech you want. Do that for a year or two and the next position you'll be back on par.
Depends on what specifically interviewers are looking for, but:
- You do have production experience, just not with the new software
- You know the new software, and especially if it’s new, you probably know it as good as most other developers
- Your prior coding experience won’t 100% transfer over to new tasks, but it won’t 0% transfer either. For example many programming languages are very similar, if you’re familiar with one general-purpose language you’re ~almost~ familiar with all of them (C++, Rust, C#, Java, Scala, Kotlin, Swift, TypeScript, etc.)
Ok, so it would be unethical for me to suggest that you lie and imply that you have actual production experience but... there's really no way for most interviewers to realistically check whether or not the company you worked for did or didn't use (say) AWS Aurora in some internal projects. That's why they do technical screens and ask you trivia questions about things.
If you're working in software development already, all decent employers should encourage you to constantly learn, even if it isn't directly related to the job at hand.
If this isn't the case, it's a huge red flag.
I didn't downvote you, but I could imagine it is because your comment does not actually address the point made by the OP: which is that you can learn new tech that is not applied in your job only on a theoretical level, but you will not be able to claim applied knowledge of it on your resume.
I think though that there's other ways to apply new things you learn than just in your job. Open source projects come to mind, of course.
However, that raises a related point: if our field one where it's a necessity to spend a substantial amount of hours in addition to your day job (for both studying new tech and finding ways to apply it) just to stay relevant for the job market?
Well I disagree with that. The skills you learn in your spare time are 100% applicable to the job you are after as long as you make sure you solve “real” problems when learning it. Otherwise logically it would be impossible for anybody to get a first job since they (with no previous job) doesn’t have any skills :) I more than once have gotten a job based on skills I learned outside of work. I just made sure I could clearly demonstrate that I had the skills.
I know what you mean but keep in mind that the kind of jobs you can score as a newbie are - for that very reason - also quite limited.
But just to be clear: no-one claimed that you cannot learn any new skills outside you work. The point was really more about the difficulty of demonstrating that you actually have said skills, and not just say you do.
The easiest transition is to learn a new skill applicable to what you're already doing. Tell your employer that your Cobol project is ultimately unmaintainable and they will have difficulty hiring Cobol engineers in the future. This is true and you both know it. Propose rewriting the system in Java (or whatever you want to learn, so long as it's a reasonable choice from an engineering perspective). They'll often go for it. Improve your odds by finding a small piece of the system to replace as a pilot project, where success on that small piece would offer immediate benefits like new automation options or the elimination of legacy equipment. If it's a small risk, they'll usually let you try, and if it works out, they'll often let you keep going. They don't want to be stuck with a project they suddenly can't maintain, and you're the best person to replace it -- not because you're a Java expert, but because you're an existing system expert. Find a low cost, low risk approach and it becomes a very good deal for them. They usually take you up on it (and are delighted by the opportunity), if they can spare the time and expense. Sometimes they really can't, and the answer for that is to be patient. And there's room here for going rogue and doing it without permission - I have done this many times in my career, and finding an opportune moment to say, "by the way, I had a slow week a while back and used it to make this more efficient and modern alternative for us" is almost always received well, especially if it just happens to be helpful with this week's painful problem. Skills used to tackle the same projects you already know how to do are both easy to move into, still take advantage of your experience, and are often easy to weave into your professional life. Boom, Java experience. The real beauty of this is that for your next job, they don't know you only have six months of Java experience. They see you worked at Corp for 5 years, you did Java there, and you can clearly do Java now. They don't usually ask too many questions.
A harder (but still pretty easy) transition is to work on something other people at your company are doing, but which you aren't. Perhaps there's a group doing big data and you want to get into it but you've never done it. Learning the skill on the job can be a hard sell, but it isn't always impossible. It's worth asking. Employers like working with smart people they already know, and can see it as a better bet to teach a known good guy a new skill than hire someone with the skill who turns out to be a terrible engineer. Some places will actually send you to school to get the certificate or whatever. However, this route often doesn't work because they genuinely can't afford to train you. Your odds of success go way up if you're willing to learn it on your own time. They improve even more if you can get pretty good at it. It helps further if the people on the team respect your intelligence and capability. The killer strategy is to make your preferences known, keep doing excellent work on your old system that no one else is willing to do, build up karma that way, get really good at the other thing on your own time and talk shop to the other team about their work, wait for a good time for the company. . . . your odds of eventually getting in are excellent. Boom, data science experience.
For something totally unrelated to what your company does, this is a lot harder. You have to both learn the skill and demonstrate competence on your own time. Your best bet is to build up a portfolio of accomplishments and side projects that you can share. This isn't the same as professional experience, but professional experience demonstrating you're capable, properly socialized, and people will actually trust you with stuff for years on end -- all of this still puts you ahead of total newbies, even if the specific skill is new to you. The truth is that talent is in such desperate demand (especially if you chose your new skill wisely) that interviewers are usually much more interested in whether you can actually do the work than they are in what your resume says. So just make sure you really can do it, and you really can prove that. Some employers really will insist that you have those 15 years of Haskell experience the job req says they want. But most of them will see solid general engineering experience on your resume, see during the coding portion of the interview and by looking at your public work that you really can do the job, and they'll decide you're probably the best bet they're going to get to fill the position anytime this year, and they really do need the help. Don't take "X years of Y experience" too seriously. If you really can Y, your odds are excellent.
I'm super interested in using this for my masters thesis. But their github docs are terse at best. I have no confidence that I'd be talented enough to figure out their api, and the mention of the broken website form further deters me. Too bad; I love the concept of quadrupeds for navigating stairs and other urban obstacles.
Bittle is obviously not of the same size as the Go1 so won't be suited to the same practical tasks but if you're looking at exploring the control aspects it would serve as a good platform to learn on (for a substantially lower initial outlay). Petoi has the OpenCat repo and there are plenty of ways to hook it up to additional sensors or a remote system for more advanced guidance etc.
Edit: Mine arrived on Friday. It's great, although putting it together had a few challenges (the springs are a tough fit, but people figured workarounds on the forum)
Source: currently using GLP and seeing reduced positive feedback from alcohol (incidentally)...