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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • I startled my dogs laughing at that last bit.

    Last time I dealt with Matlab much was like fifteen years ago when I was helping some people using it for quick interpretation of data. We just kept finding bugs that caused calculation errors (which they fixed pretty quickly TBF) and it was so much slower than any other general programming language we tried. It could be way better now, I wouldn’t know, I haven’t had call to use it since… A circuit simulation class?


  • In all reality it’s fine for what it does, just like every other language. It’s another tool in the box that’s most useful for a certain set of problems.

    Matlab shouldn’t, in my opinion, be used to construct a GUI, or generally be used for any sort of production code. Perfectly fine as a research tool though.

    But I digress, my overall point is a meaningless semantic joke. The only people who will get bent out of shape about splitting hairs between “scripting” and “programming” are all people who belong in this community.











  • Beyond any issues with the owner of the company, these cars have multiple dangerous issues.

    You cannot treat a company that makes physical stuff that can endanger lives the same way you treat a software company that makes a leisure activity platform.

    Iterative design for a purely software environment is way more forgiving than iterative design for physical hardware or even software that interacts with physical hardware. You can profoundly fuck up the backend for a website and take the whole thing down until you could roll back to last known good production, you won’t kill anyone, but you’ll make the line go down temporarily.

    If you profoundly fuck up an iteration on an embedded vehicle system and don’t catch it because you don’t respect safety regulation or existing engineering norms you can and will kill people.







  • These should be USB sticks, but otherwise this is preferable to something like wifi.

    You do not want to stop requiring physical access to avionics for updates and reprogramming.

    The fewer surfaces for entry into the avionics systems the better and if that means an engineer schlepping a database update on a thumb drive to the cockpit that’s what you want.

    I spent the better part of a decade on avionics, and while this as a headline sounds bad it’s one of the few things Boeing shouldn’t be mocked for right now.