My son’s science fair project was to measure how much water got used by taking showers vs baths, low-flow vs regular toilets, hand-washing vs dishwashers, etc. We had a pretty nasty drought in our state that year. He had plotted charts, calculated cost savings, learned how to use graphic software and printed color banners. Did it all himself.

The next aisle over, a couple of kids had counted the number of colors in a bag of jellybeans. They had hand-drawn a bar chart on a board with a sharpie. However, they also had a bowl full of jellybeans and you could take a handful if you stopped by. They made sure the bowl was kept full. There was a line out the door.

An important science lesson was learned that year.

I’ve been using these for constrained, boring development tasks since they first came out. “Pro” versions too. Like converting code from one language to another, or adding small features to existing code bases. Things I don’t really want to bother taking weeks to learn, when I know I’ll only be doing them once. They work fine if you take baby steps, make sure you do functional/integrated testing as you go (don’t trust their unit tests–they’re worthless), and review EVERYTHING generated. Also, make sure you have a good, working repo version you can always revert to.

Another good use is for starting boilerplate scaffolding (like, a web server with a login page, a basic web UI, or REST APIs). But the minute you go high-level, they just shit the bed.

The key point in that article is the “90%” one (in my experience it’s more like 75%). Taking a project from POC/tire-kicking/prototype to production is HARD. All the shortcuts you took to get to the end fast have to be re-done. Sometimes, you have to re-architect the whole thing to scale up to multiple users vs just a couple. There’s security, and realtime monitoring, and maybe compliance/regulatory things to worry about. That’s where these tools offer no help (or worse, hallucinate bad help).

Ultimately, there’s no substitute for battle-tested, scar-tissued, human experience.

Wait, they still have 14,000 people working in that division. How is that ‘shutting down?’

I’m not a VR fan or customer, but these headlines are a bit much.

🍿🍿🍿

https://lemmy.world/post/41640680

If you download and install untrusted code extensions, you’re screwed. Not like it’s rocket-science.

Spanglish much? Parlais Franglais? Denglisch sprechen?

“Say hello to my little friend!”

What if you end up with a child who likes maths AND crying?

Smart move. Now you know who to blame if Siri tells you to put glue on your pizza.

Got a couple of 50ft, high-speed Ethernet cables delivered today. Spent the whole afternoon moving boxes and furniture so I could hide them from view.

Subscription unlocks ability to also run in slow motion.

I could have volunteered for this study… but put it off.

A long time ago, I turned a PC in my basement into a web server. No DNS. Just a static IP address. Within 15 minutes, the logs showed it was getting scanned.

SSL encrypts traffic in-transit. You need to set up auth/access control. Even better, stick it behind a Web Application Firewall.

Or set up a tunnel. Cloudflare offers a free one: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/networks/connectors/cloudflare-tunnel/

I helped set up many households with kids on Pi-2s and 3s, running Raspbian and Kano. All you needed was a keyboard, mouse, and a monitor. It all worked fine with Scratch, Minecraft, LibreOffice, Web, and email.

At least, until the kids outgrew them.

Super-Intelligence has been achieved.

Arduino is based on the ‘giant loop’ model, where you initialize settings in the setup() function, then wait for events (inputs, timers, handlers, etc) in the loop() function.

Each time, the loop() function has to finish before it can be called again. So if there are timing related actions, there’s a chance they may fall out of sync or stutter. If you want to advance an animation frame, you’ll need to maintain all the state, and hope the loop gets called often enough so the frame can advance. If you want to sync up the animation to an RTC, then you’ll want to track whether the current loop syncs up with a time code before deciding whether to advance the animation (or not). Pretty soon your giant loop will likely get complicated and messy.

Another option is to look at something like SoftPWM for controlling LEDs and see how they set up animation timing. Or to use the millis() function instead of delay() to manage timing. Adafruit has a nice tutorial on that: https://learn.adafruit.com/multi-tasking-the-arduino-part-1/using-millis-for-timing

To get more asynchronous activity going, the next option is to move to a more task-based system like FreeRTOS. Here you set up ‘tasks’ which can yield to each other, so you can have more asynchronous events. But the mental model is very different than the Arduino loop. The toolchain is also completely different. Here’s a decent primer: https://controllerstech.com/freertos-on-arduino-tutorial-part-1/

If your target device is an ESP32, the underlying OS is actually FreeRTOS. Arduino is a compatibility layer on top. So you can use the Arduino IDE and toolchain to write FreeRTOS tasks. Many peripheral device drivers can also be shared between the two. However, the minute you switch to tasks, the Arduino loop doesn’t work any more. Examples here: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-freertos-arduino-tasks/

From your description, it sounds like you may want to switch to FreeRTOS tasks.

When do we get to try it out against the creative, destructive power of a hangry toddler?

Tyranny of the Right-handed.