Once upon a time, I was using postgres for OLTP and OLAP purposes combined with in-database transforms using TimescaleDB. I had a schema for optimized ingestion and then several aggregate views which produced a bunch of purpose-specific "materialized" tables for efficient analysis based on the ingestion tables.
Timescale had a nice way of abstracting away the cost of updating these views without putting too much load on ingestion (processing multiple TBs of data a time in a single instance with about 500Gb of data churn daily).
FIRST and most of its teams are very open to collaborating and supporting rookies new to the org. I recommend reaching out to as many nearby teams as possible and see what support they can provide. Any serious teams are motivated to help as this directly contributes to their team's success during the competitive season. Competitions require a teams to have a pro-social aspect to their operations. Helping other teams is a strong signal in this area.
Additionally, find a nearby FRC competition and volunteer for at least one event (do more, if you can). Wander the robot pit and interact with the teams. There will be a lot of good intel for you there just wandering around and asking questions.
I couldn't agree more. FIRST is an excellent organization to get involved with. Even if you don't have specialities which directly align with the needs of a team, most will not turn you away (especially if you demonstrate passion).
Just a few thoughts about starting a team and/or volunteering:
Starting a FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team is not for the feint-of-heart and requires significant time and money investment. This is the sort of endeavor you try when you're either retired or have a group of other dedicated volunteers willing to help you build the team over multiple seasons. If you spend a year or two mentoring/volunteering for a well-established team, you'll get a good sense of what you're getting into. FRC is a bit hardcore.
If no FRC teams exist nearby, FIRST Lego League (FLL) is a good entrypoint, but may not be technical enough for an adult interested in using FIRST to gain exposure to robotics. (It is plenty satisfying to mentor these teams, but Mindstorms can be somewhat limiting.) These are geared toward using Lego Mindstorms for learning robot concepts.
A good middle ground (for exposure to more practical robotics) would be volunteering with a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team. It's the middle ground between FLL and FRC and is _doable_ for a single, dedicated, passionate adult to start (though I'd strongly recommend finding another volunteer to pursue this with).
If getting involved with a team is not an option, seek out nearby FIRST events that you can volunteer at. Many competition events need volunteers and you'll get a chance to interact with local teams and find plenty of opportunities to play with robots.
> Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.
Good news. That's what Bluesky does with the AT Protocol. They are a consumer of the AT Protocol and it is completely open and interoperable with private (and even offline and local-first) installations. (https://atproto.com/)
This is a matter of semantics... anyone who actually cares about E2EE probably understands the nature of email being cleartext over the wire and that Proton can't control what is outside of their control. Maybe inaccurate but I doubt they are misleading (in the sense that they are hoping to fool people into thinking their email is encrypted over the wire).
Marketing copy would not likely care to include "E2EE" .... "at the point that Protonmail recieves your message" on their frontpage.
I’m gonna start selling sugar-free soda and when people point out that there is sugar in the soda I’ll explain to them that the sugar was added to the mixture by a different supplier before the mixture arrived at my factory.
My factory does not add any sugar to the soda. Therefore it’s clearly fair to market it as sugar-free!
I've felt this to the point that I attempt to preempt the fake concern with my own rhetorical "Hope everything is going well for you." I'd like to think this alleviates the other party from feeling like they have to share anything they aren't comfortable with but allows them room to respond if they choose.
What is silly and obvious to you is exploratory for others. When you cast shade on curiosity, you snuff out the potential before it ever comes to light.
If everyone put little turbine generators on the downspouts of their houses and businesses, how much power would we generate? Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators?
—Damien
[a house uses rain that falls on its lid to run a turbine]
A house in a very rainy place, like the Alaska panhandle, might receive close to four meters of rain per year. Water turbines can be pretty efficient. If the house has a footprint of 1,500 square feet and gutters five meters off the ground, it would generate an average of less than a watt of power from rainfall, and the maximum electricity savings would be:
(math that works out to $1.14/year)
The rainiest hour on record occurred in 1947 in Holt, Missouri, where about 30 centimeters of rain fell in 42 minutes. For those 42 minutes, our hypothetical house could generate up to 800 watts of electricity, which might be enough to power everything inside it. For the rest of the year, it wouldn’t come close.
If the generator rig cost $100, residents of the rainiest place in the US—Ketchikan, Alaska—could potentially offset the cost in under a century.
You've missed my point or didn't read it. This is not about the market fitness of the idea/product. This is about the parent commenter throwing shade on the inventor's curiosity and aspiring entrepreneurial effort. Regardless about how right you or the parent is about the products fitness, making assumptions about the inventor's motive removes the opportunity for the inventor to learn/grow from their attempt at going to market.
Instead, it would be better to support the inventor with constructive criticism... how they might better measure PMF, how they might prove whether there's a need for their idea in the market earlier, or how they might get more efficiency out of their approach.
And if you don't have the criticism to offer, you can probably find a better way to share your knowledge without saying the idea is terrible or they are acting in bad faith. (Or just don't comment at all!)
Basic test for "Is this a good idea" is to check to see if someone else has already had this idea or one that is similar, and if they have ever executed on the idea, and how did that go.
So they shared their idea, and I showed them that Randall Monroe has already done the math and shown that the idea is dead in the water due to the extremely small amount of energy available to be extracted from rainwater on roofs.
If they didn't know this, hopefully they will stop here and pivot to something else.
If they did know this and made a functionally terrible but somewhat flashy looking website in order to sell this device anyway, then they are just looking for a sucker to bilk money out of.
> This proposed definition adopts the E.O. 13984 definition for “Infrastructure as a Service product”, which is any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications.
How would an ISP not be misconstrued as a "managed network"? Deploy/run software could just as easily be running some protocol over the network connection?
Sure, there are very few international ISPs which would be affected by this as physical infrastructure must be local to the user, but I wonder if this would be true always (e.g.: Starlink)
I can't see how an ISP (or VPN for that matter) would qualify for the second half "and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications."
This would apply to all hosting providers, which is bad enough.
- TCP is a spec delivered by a software implementation program. Maybe you disagree that TCP is being "deployed" as opposed to "used"?
- What about peer-to-peer hosted webpages? Certainly this is deployed software served over the internet connection?
The devil is in the details... details which are not specified in the order. It wouldn't be hard to imagine a lawyer arguing the finer details of "deployed" and "software" and falling on a definition which results in a less "open" Internet.
Also, I think of the meaning of "that is not predefined" is not at all clear. Predefined at what point in time?
There are a few projects doing this. This one piqued my interest as having a potentially nice UX after some maturity. https://github.com/OpenInterpreter/01
Timescale had a nice way of abstracting away the cost of updating these views without putting too much load on ingestion (processing multiple TBs of data a time in a single instance with about 500Gb of data churn daily).