Some other comments have posted about the laser safety being the issue but I have a more physical story:
Recently got a Waymo for the first time to take my kids and I from one hotel to another in Phoenix.
- Car pulls up
- I walk up to the trunk as I have a suitcase
- Out of habit, I go to open the trunk by pressing the button under the "handle" (didn't realize you have to unlock the car via the app first)
- My hand moves by the rear trunk laser that is spinning and "whacks" my hand.
Not a big deal but seems like an interesting design choice to place a motorized spinning device right next to where people are going to be reaching to open the trunk.
The externally spinning Waymo Laser Bear Honeycombs do indeed cause whacking and pinching and occasionally get gunked up with wet leaves and debris. One reason why they are like that is because these have very large fields of view. A cylindrical plastic cover seriously degrades optical quality especially when the beam is hitting it at a steep angle. Another reason is that it has a heatsink on the back of the spinny part. Earlier Waymos like the Firefly in fact cover up this lidar, e.g. on the "nose" and the side mirrors [1]. But they went back to leaving it exposed for better performance.
Likewise with the big spinning lidar on top, which was covered in the older Chrysler Pacificas but externally spinning in the newer Jaguar I-Paces.
I'm guessing about 10-15 years ago I was watching a documentary on the re-release of Ken Burns Civil War.
They were highlighting the digital tools they were using to restore and enhance the original film capture for new streaming services etc.
They showed one of the restorers using a fascinating tool where one window was a video feed of the original film's "first pass" to digital. One of the landscape scenes had a small smudge in the upper right hand corner so the restorer pauses the feed, goes back frame by frame and then was able to drag and drop the frame into another window where he used Photoshop like tools to fix everything and then drag and drop it back into the "feed". Seemed VERY efficient and shows how good tools can really accelerate a workflow.
The documentary is no longer available (or, possibly, only available in the US), but the tool you're describing is pretty common in digital video editing. In DaVinci Resolve the dustbuster tool will look a few frames ahead and behind of the one where you want to paint out a mark, and make its best guess based on that.
I've used it to paint out tape dropouts on VHS transfers with remarkable success.
I got into it because my parents produced a video about the area I grew up in, back in the late 80s, and I only have VHS copies. The master tape is probably lost but the guy who shot it said there might be a copy made about 20 years ago on DVD that the editor made for archival purposes.
Since then it's turned out that people want their old tapes copied over quite a bit. I don't do it "professionally" simply because I cannot afford to dedicate that sort of time to it, because people actually expect it to be done more quickly than "okay today I have a full day of Teams calls where I don't need to say much so I'll get on with something fun" ;-)
My advice is to pay someone else to do the transfer, but get someone good. Most services online don't bother with a real TBC because a professional TBC is expensive, and not worth investing in for the average consumer. However, it is an absolute necessity if you want any kind of quality.
Failing that, you can get a retrotink 4k and any old HDMI capture card to do a "good enough" job for most folks. It has a sort of poor-mans TBC that will work as long as the tapes aren't too bad. You're still looking at a grand for the retrotink, but you can then use it for retro video games if you're into that.
I am fortunate that the Panasonic AG7650 I use for playback has a built-in TBC that emits stable enough video to go straight into my BMD Intensity Pro.
Restoration tools are very cool. One tool I liked allows you to draw a marquee around an area you'd like to fix. It then allows you to shift the frames forward/back in just the highlighted area to find a frame without the blemish. Obviously a more static shot gave better results, but it was fast and easy to use. Much easier than trying to use a blemish/clone tool. Doing the same fix with rotoscoping techniques would take much more time/effort.
I used to work at a film restoration studio about 10 years ago, and back then PF Clean from PixelFarm was more or less the industry standard. That might have been the software you saw.
This is heartening - I'm about to start with the daily challenges today and document my experience and that sort of thing.
Any other suggestions? I have sysadmin experience as a homelabber and at work with a small company as a "tech lead" but have not yet had the chance to do it full time in a larger company. Currently focused on back-filling knowledge gaps and adding certs to support my existing experience.
Sad Servers is great for trying out how to fix scenarios that you would probably run into while working in the real world.
If you are looking into more of the "people" side of things, I would HIGHLY recommend Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss [0]. A big part of being a team lead and/or working at a larger firm is understanding where people are coming from and then convincing them that your solution is "win/win". The book is great at highlighting multiple different tactics to do that.
Turn the Ship Around [1] is also great at giving examples of how to "change organizations in place". If you end up at larger firms, there will be a LOT of legacy infra and processes that you may want to improve. Marquet gives excellent examples of how to change things WHILE ALSO getting buy in from the team.
I actually read "Never Split the Difference" a couple years ago! Initially just to prepare for a salary negotiation but I found it to be very useful in many other ways. Your second recommendation is also appropriate: I had a ton of latitude to build and configure whatever hardware was needed to solve $BUSINESS-PROBLEM (which was often very exciting) but it was done in a bit of a vacuum without any mentorship. Adapting to a more rigorous/larger/slower working environment is exactly what I need to do.
Great suggestions and thanks for taking the time to respond :)
One of my favorite "myths" about the discovery of stainless steel:
Metallurgist is trying out all kinds of steels looking for a particular attribute. He would dutifully record each recipe + test in a notebook but if a particular batch didn't have the attribute, he would throw it out a window into an outdoor scrap pile.
Several months go by and he's cleaning up the pile and notices that one of the blocks has no rust or corrosion. He knows that the pile is six months old but doesn't know which of the recipes this block was connected to.
So he repeats ALL of the block recipes from the last 6 months but labels each block so he can figure out which recipe led to the "stainless" steel.
I recall reading that the microwave oven was invented by a physicist after he walked by a radiation chamber and the chocolate bar in his pocket melted... makes me wonder if there was any historic license taken in that case as well.
The trick to actually melting chocolate in a microwave is to do it in pulses of only a few seconds, see if it stirs yet, and repeat. Longer runs will quickly destroy it.
Highly recommend reading Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto" [0] if you are interested in the operational results of adding something like checklists to medical care.
Case in point: requiring everyone in the operating room to say their name, specialty and reason for the operation (and their part in it).
You might ask why the above is necessary?
Well:
- everyone is wearing a mask, cap and possibly glasses which makes them hard to recognize
- the patient is often draped in such a way that you can't tell who they are
- many Operating Rooms(ORs) look the same
- there are apparently COUNTLESS stories of medical personnel going into the wrong OR and not realizing until the surgery has started
Another fascinating point about checklists since the OP article mentions doctors vs nurses: checklists give nurses the power to challenge doctors. e.g. "Dr, I believe the next step on the checklist we agreed on is to do X".
If you have no checklist, the Dr can just say "No, we don't need that, I know what I'm doing. Shut up, Nurse!" (this is a real example from the book btw).
He also has an article comparing the Cheesecake Factory to health care that I also highly recommend [1]
This reminds me of an article I read [1] where a surgeon, deciding his skills had room for improvement and lives could be bettered by honing those skills, had a retired surgeon come in occasionally and coach him. The external perspective and quick feedback improved his confidence and outcomes, and he convincingly advocated that practice.
Another similar example of process excellence in healthcare from personal experience: I had to have two shoulder surgeries (one on each side) a couple of years apart after ultrasound-guided injections into the joints didn’t really fix the underlying problem. In both cases I used the same surgeon[1] and both times on the day of the surgery (in spite of having been involved in my care for months so she definitely knew) she asked me again which shoulder was affected and immediately rolled up my sleeve and drew an arrow on the arm in question in black marker pen.
Why? Well she definitely didn’t want to ever make the mistake of operating on the wrong arm, and if I’m anaethsetised it’s not like she couldn ask me while the procedure was underway.
[1] Susan Alexander- She’s absolutely amazing. If you have shoulder problems and live in the UK I would strongly recommend.
One of my favorite stories about processes and documentation:
- Work at a hedge fund
- Every evening, the whole firm "cycles" to start the next trading day
- Step 7 of 18 fails
- I document Step 7 and then show it to a bunch of folks
- I end up having a meeting where I say: "Two things are true: 1. You all agree that Step 7 is incorrectly documented. 2. You all DISAGREE on what Step 7 should be doing"
I love this story as it highlights that JUST WRITING DOWN what's happening can be a giant leap forward in terms of getting people to agree on what the process actually IS. If you don't write it down, everyone may go on basing decisions on an incorrect understanding of the system.
A related story:
"As I was writing the documentation on our market data system, multiple people told me 'You don't need to do that, it's not that complicated'. Then they read the final document and said 'Oh, I guess it is pretty complicated' "
What drives me nuts is how many people can’t separate those two tasks/projects.
We’re going to write down what Step 7 currently is/does. No, now is not the time to start discussing what it ought to do. Please let us just get through sorting out what Step 7 currently is. Yes, some people do it differently. That’s why we hit a snag. Let’s just pick one of those wrong ways, document it, and do it all wrong together. We’ll fix it as a separate step. Now isn’t the time to fix it, as much as it feels like a convenient time to.
This is also what's preventing the EU from stopping messing with clocks twice a year.
1) everyone agrees that it's stupid to move the clocks, we have electric lights now
2) NOBODY agrees which timezone everyone should be when we stop messing with the time.
Because solving 1&2 at the same time is about impossible, nothing will happen. What they should do is agree on 1. Write it into irrevocable law. THEN start arguing about 2.
Which way sounds toxic—wanting to get it right now that they’ve become aware it’s a problem? Or getting something down now, as close as possible to what happened yesterday and the day before, to unblock the larger process—then refining it after the fires are out?
Seems like horses for courses to me: I can imagine my very happy healthy teams needing to operate in either mode, depending on the specific problem. I also can imagine us needing the person closest to the problem to tell us which direction applies.
(To your point though, I also can imagine that any type of pressures like these would really bring out the dysfunction in “toxic” teams.)
> Or getting something down now, as close as possible to what happened yesterday and the day before, to unblock the larger process—then refining it after the fires are out?
But at least, in that scenario, the process is unblocked.
The other way, you've blocked the process until every subcommittee of the committee assigned to fix the process has delivered their Final Report Draft 8 FINAL (1) (13) (1).docx. And that could be preventing an entire department from working at all.
Sometimes blocking the process is the best way to do. Blocking gives leverage and allows to fix long-standing inbalances.
Imagine that you have been slaving for low salary with abusive boss, who constantly promises but never delivers. If shit hit the fan and you are desperately needed, this is the perfect time to talk and solidify improvements. Game does not run on gratitude.
The same rule unfortunately also applies to relationships.
I've been in discussions about Step 7, and my god, the experience was soul crushing. Even more soul crushing was that the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done.
Writing stuff down is great since it provides a baseline to agree upon, and later additions to the team will take it as given and not start to discuss minutiae and bog down discussions into nothingness. And if some point really is worth discussing, it shouldn't be hard to find support to change it. I've heard some wild misunderstandings of how things were based on how they were being done, and now I never want to do anything of any significant size without there being a clear and obvious process to it.
> the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done.
In Charlie Beckwith's book about Delta Force [0] there is a line where he says (paraphrasing):
"The SAS never wanted to write down what their role was and what tasks they were trained for. Why? Because they didn't want to get pigeon holed into a role. ... They also never wrote down their SOPs b/c the argument was that 'if you can't keep it in your head, you shouldn't be in the Regiment'. At Delta, we were going to write down our mission AND write down our SOPs."
For a force whose goals can change at any moment, this seems pretty reasonable. The SAS shouldn't be trained for anything in partucular, but rather for anything and everything. Not to mention that in the SAS you have a commanding offiser who can overrule if needed.
Step 7 in a process which already has defined end-goals though? The fact that there were disagreements in the first place baffled me. The fact that it was impossible to write anything down about it without invoking heaven's wrath made me quit.
Your story and the article’s thesis that AI is for acceleration and automation (not other things like design/intelligence) remind me of one particular CEO’s five step product process:
1) design smart(er) requirements- I.e beat up the ask and rewrite the problem statement correctly. 1B is every requirement has a persons name attached who is traceable/responsible for its inclusion- not a department.
2) delete features you don’t need or which are hedges (if you aren’t adding back 10% of the time, then you aren’t deleting enough)
3) simplify or optimize. This step must come after 1 and 2 so you aren’t wasting effort optimizing the wrong thing
4) accelerate
5) automate
This way is very clear where AI plugs in- and more importantly, WHEN it plugs in.
Also, plenty of times people try to run this process backwards, with poor outcomes.
Writing is such a powerful and often underrated and underutilized tool; I don't think it's an overstatement to say that it's at par with fire and should be in the top 5 of all-time humanity inventions/discoveries.
I wish there was a repository of "cold DM" stories like this to help inspire younger folks that you can "just do things."
My own story:
- helped found my college paintball club (Rutgers University)
- that became our college paintball team (where we played other schools)
- graduate
- had a real job (involving LOTS of database work)
- find out that year after I left, the team go to go to paintball World Cup (and I was mad/envious that I didn't get to go)
- quit my job
- wanted to go to World Cup and only person I knew was the head of the college league so DM'ed him asking if he needed help with the college event. He replies that he actually needs help with a player database and asks if I know databases? (I do)
- Go to world cup, love it, keep working on the player database
- Three years later I'm the General Manager of the pro-paintball league (I was 26!)
People would often ask me, at the time, if this was my dream job. I would often answer "Calling it my 'dream job' would imply I knew it existed as an option to dream about. I just emailed a guy and one thing led to another and here I am"
So many great lines:
- "We tried to find the smoothest thing in the frame but the smoothest thing turned out to be the sky"
- "We had it adapt to rough terrain by having me drive the car and it learned from my driving. Granted, it drives like a German now."
- "Nobody tells you their sensor error rate so we had to drive the car around and have the car learn the error probabilities"
- "Nobody needs to tell you this but Stanford students are amazing"
- "A lot of the people who entered are what I would call: 'car nuts' "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXQlpu8Y4fI
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