June 20, 2021

Yak trails 2021-06-20 | Project exhausts and Discord convos

A roundup of what the Yak Collective was up to this week. Yaks — jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a member, consider joining here.

@now

#Soapbox. “It is now obvious that the concept of ‘project exhaust’ is central to everything we do here. It is not just fuel for marketing/PR on the website, newsletter, etc, but it is also the input for automation processes. Everybody here is here not only because we all kinda hate being managed, but because we hate managing as well. I barely have patience for project managing my solo activities, let alone other people in teams.[…] What are the principles of generating ‘smart exhaust’? A simple example is — every conference tool (Google Meet, Zoom) has its native chat stream, but if we adopt the convention of never using those and ONLY using Discord as the sidechannel, it’s a little bit of a burden, but a lot easier on the management. We need to generalize this into a set of ‘smart exhaust design principles’ across everything we do. Create data to kill the need for human management.”

#Quantum Computing. “Would anyone be interested in a project or study group on quantum computing? I don't have a specific direction in mind, but with tools like Qiskit https://qiskit.org/ it looks not so hard to play around and do something interesting.”

#New Old Home and Country “Making a call for interesting case studies in the emergent roles & projects spun up or faltered during the course of the pandemic. This would begin as a slide presentation just like last year’s The New Old Home and could go for there to multimedia formats. DM Scott Garlinger or email him at scottgarlinger@gmail.com for info for next steps.”

#General Discussion “Anyone interested in a decentralized finance study group? thinking about starting one up” / “Also, anyone interested in regular weekly coworking sessions?”

#Online Governance Studies. “Are y'all familiar with this? Transduction, different sensemaking worlds, and deathmarch projects... The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth : Bruce F. Webster. I associate it with (1) transduction in systems/cybernetics (2) my concept of 'worlds' of sensemaking (3) my 'doomed to succeed' death march projects. Y'all will have different associations, and/but this seem worthy of a place in the reference library”

My patience for project management level of procedural meta thinking is at a lifetime low... just wanna fingerspiutzengefuhl my way through shit in a well-appointed environment that magically translates vague intentions into quality output with nothing in between @vgr

#yak rover updates

Nature is Murder. Modify the design of Accessory Before the Fact... battery turned out to be too big to fit the space I planned. Which in turn means my longest 20mm M3 bolt is too short 🤬. I think I need a proper full week-or-two long block of time to do nothing but rover. This piecemeal shit isn't enough. The first 50% of the parts buying takes 90% of the time. The second 50% takes the other 90% of the time. It's amazing how I always seem to have just a few more components to buy.

Wonderful Wandering Growth. build sunglasses. try to update sunglasses with IR blocker. need to obtain damaged surveillance camera. even if the camera does not expose an exposure-control tool, it seems to have some sort of auto-exposure mechanism built in

Stubborn. Built a persistent configuration component for flight system. Wired it up so I can disable the impact sensor on-demand. Starting dreaming about some non-software improvements. Add a few more configuration options to fine tune movement. Maybe I'll decide to rewire the rover. I created a PR (on GitHub) for my work on adding persistent configuration to Stubborn. Even though I'm working alone on this code I found it very satisfying to package up and explain a change even if I'm the only one to see it.

Abio Flex Wanderer. (1) Upgrade software tooling for the recently mounted OAK-1 camera. (2) Sketch out how to approach bidirectional communication OAK-1 / RPi, so alerts can be pushed. (3) Just keeping considering flexible skills modelling with Maier (this starts converging into tasks), as part of BOS. (1) OAK-1 upgrade requires long compilation times on RPi. First is to finish this! So Maier's remote control can work with OAK. (2) code more on BOS. (3) hopefully find a way to easily experiment with OAK-1 to RPi message pushing. Not really a blocker, but I am trying to focus on code with Rust and Python. The OAK-1 to RPi seems it is going to need C++. Working around that may just burn time. Very glad with the feedback from this week talk on multi-compute builds. Challenging and maybe not always the right choice, but engaging intersection between multi-agent systems and real-time systems...

Go and See. For this third rover iteration, researched use cases for an earth-based rover that are accessible to me without a lot of added overhead. Settled on the perspective of the rover being a field research unit that does things that I am curious about but don't have the patience, senses, computational capacity, or memory to do; and prepared to discuss this and associated mission and technology related topics in the Yak Rover Meeting. Determine the fundamental operations that this rover iteration needs to be able to do, distill those down into capabilities that the technologies involved need to provide, and then begin research into what will provide them, with intent to be able to eventually generate a BOM and then proceed from there. This rover will will be performing much more complex operations in a much less constrained environment than my previous indoors kit robots, so I don't expect this to be a fast process. Realizing that there are many potential uses for rovers in field research here on Earth beyond what I've seen in the existing literature. I definitely want to explore this further!

#take-gig-leave-gig

@gigayak list of outstanding gigs. details on the server

(id 14) Was asked to spread word about this position at the Exeter Ed Incubator - part of the prestigious University of Exeter. It's a remote job, but you'll need to based in the UK.
(id 18) I am looking for a product engineer to work on a new headphone project I am looking to get off the ground. essentially the idea is modular over ear headphones where if anyone any one part breaks then as part of a subscription you can get a replacement part without having to replace the whole thing.
(id 19) looking for a graphic designer who can take technical process and architecture diagrams and make them look attractive.
(id 20) Client is looking for a react-native front-end dev for a 2 week UI sprint towards launch.
(id 23) cool job alert: Linktree is hiring a Head of Creators and a friend is leading the recruiting for the role. who's the right person for the job?
(id 26) came across this 6 week research project for a food business thought someone here might be interested.
(id 29) Urban tech startup is looking for a contract mobile developer, for a small project, to get an app on the app stores (it’s a single-task app for sensor installers, with no commercial activity on the app). (id 30) Justice tech startup is hiring a Product Designer!
(id 31) A friend of mine is looking for a web designer to help launch a web page for a start-up he's working with.
(id 35) Looking for a tech lead/collaborator my new startup! (I've coded a good chunk in MERN + GraphQL, but everything is flexible / fine to throw away / plan to transition to Postgres). DM for details.

#yaks-at-work

A grid for better customer / citizen led transformation
Negative capability: how to embrace intellectual uncertainty
Should we really focus on one thing at a time?
The Clockless Clock
After Westphalia
Welcome to Ribbonfarm Studio
Perpetuated Beta
The Ultimate Guide & Reasons To Take A Sabbatical
Communal computing, part 1
Transduction — leading transformation — Issue #2
Links for June, 2021

#links shared

Open-Source Quantum Development
Make a personal changelog
Telomeres and aging - PubMed
Things To Try Before Quitting Your Job - Interintellect
"Great resignation" wave coming for companies
Descript community server
The History of Clarus the Dogcow – 512 Pixels
Yak Collective Governance
How to use Python to execute a cURL command?
Make a Widget to Display "Future Frontiers" Style Slideshow
Quantum computing for the determined
Quantum Country
Shtetl-Optimized - Archive for the ‘Quantum’ Category
Learn quantum computing: a field guide - IBM Quantum
Composer - IBM Quantum
Can a $110 Million Helmet Unlock the Secrets of the Mind?
Animation Obsessive
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
Publications accepting submissions - Roam
Short Stories — With Special Guest Instructor Mary Robinette Kowal - Youtube
Company Starts Shipping Its $50,000 Mind-Reading Helmet - Futurism
‎inspectAR PCB Tools
GitHub Codespaces: Your instant dev environment
Gitpod - Always Ready-to-Code - Youtube
Intel made $2bn+ takeover offer for RISC-V chip darling SiFive
Boston Dynamics - Concepts - Spot API
NASA's Dragonfly Mission to Titan Will Look for Origins, Signs of Life
Prototype Snowcat with Injection Molded Tracks! - Youtube
Build your own integrated sensor platform with our devices.
Tiger: Spy in the Jungle (TV Mini Series 2008– ) - IMDb
Thousands of eggs abandoned after a drone scares off nesting birds
RadicalxChange - Partial Common Ownership
The Alignment System - True Neutral
Reterritorialization — Part 2 — The Individual
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
HewlettPackard/swarm-learning
Leverage (American TV series)
How I Became the Honest Broker
Nakatomi Space - Bldgblog
2x2 maker
Flowing Markdown reference links

https://twitter.com/RCScience/status/1405880479673323520