Bob learned how to use the agent to do work, which is just as useful to society.

Bob used the agent to do the work of a junior and it cost him the ability to learn how to do it himself as a senior in the future.

This is an uncomfortably well written and thought out article. Its also helped me put into words some of my own conceptual reluctance to fully embrace LLMs in my work. I know how I’ve learned from tackling problems on my own in my career. I worry that the seductive siren of the “right answer” LLM without the effort may be too strong for me to resist or too subtle for me to notice.

Whats the answer? Become the constant contrarian never able to trust anything these output? At that point the value of using the LLM at all is erased.

SLAAC

I don’t really know what to say, but thank you is a start, I might actually be a bit down.

This can happen to any of us. If you need help, seek it. There’s no shame it in. We are not born with the tools to remedy everything. Many times we need to seek help outside of ourselves. Remember that life is worth living.

LEO is still in over 10-20k a cubsat no?

Nope! That same 1kg cubesat you’re referring to can be put in Sun synchronous orbit (meaning always has solar power exposure) for $5k-$6k on a rideshare launch that launch every 3 to 6 months. Picosats and even Femtosats are all smaller and cheaper with some less than $1k (but you may have to wait years for a launch).

I went for a walk, touched grass, and remembered one of my old inventions that I never had the time to build (and my homemade 3D printer wasn’t up to the job, but my new store bought one is, probably).

I’m glad to hear this! You’ve obviously got some incredible skills and experience. I hope you’re able to recapture your spark. It sounds like you’re already on the path to doing so!

and feel not so interested in just following say how a meshstatic works or just buy one.

If you’re at the high end of knowledge and skill, as it sounds like you are, you are even closer to being able to take advantage of technology that exists today that is cheap now that most of us. Ten years ago:

• a LiDAR system would have cost thousands of dollars. Today you can buy them for about $100.
• Inconel was only available to the state-of-the-art industrial processes and was very hard to manufacture parts with. Today you can upload your files, have your parts made via additive manufacturing with Inconel and those parts shipped right to your door for affordable prices.
• Computing power has significantly increased. TPUs are bringing down not only the cost of Tensor operations, but the energy consumption needed for equal amount of processing from 10 years ago.
• the cost per kg for delivering a payload to LEO has dropped dramatically in the last 10 years and continues to do so. More orbital inclinations are available on rideshare flights than ever before including many sun synchronous allowing for continuous solar power. Some idiot like me can actually afford to put an object in LEO. That’s freakin’ amazing!
• battery technology has evolved drastically in 10 years for commercially available product from cheap and plentiful LFPs to Na-ion cells that can operation without loss at - 40 °C without power loss.

“Everything” also has been built which doesn’t help. Or so I feel!

I can’t even imagine having this thought. Honestly, with your skill level I am getting the feeling this has nothing to do with the state of technology right now. I’m not going to pry into your personal life, but I’m wondering if you’re facing challenges that have nothing to do with technology, but are causing you distress depressing your interests in things you used to love. I could be way off, and if so forgive me for presuming.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a fun space but not much has happened the last ten years there (or prove me wrong 😁!)

10ish years ago when R Pi and Arduino entered the scene it was a big splash, but the most benefit really only occurred for folks that could take the raw parts and had the ability to built a new solution largely without help from others. Its even better today because you can buy a ready-made Pi Hat, fully documented, with drivers, to dramatically expand the functionality of an R Pi today. 10 years ago, you’d be laying out your own PCB, etching it yourself, and soldiering those SMT components with your own hot air pencil. Now you don’t, and you can access that functionality to keep building on whatever it is you’re actually trying to build.

Nearly everything has a RestAPI now. This means coding solutions are much more accessible for modifications. Software Defined Radio is cheap and easy now, all with over a decade of documented solutions and parts available. This leads to things like Meshtastic and Flipper.

Its a much more accessible space to these cheap and functional technologies than it was 10ish years ago.

Yes, both are expensive out-of-pocket. That’s part of the decision about why to not recommend gardisil (HPV vaccine) for the wider groups without the clinical outcomes to show the value. However, I addressed this in a later post in this thread, in the USA the ACA makes sure nearly all health insurance pays for recommended vaccines at 100%. So if you have insurance its most likely you can get gardisil or shingrex (for shingles) with zero out-of-pocket costs. I was surprised to see the retail price of Shingrex at $500, but I didn’t pay a penny of that as it was fully covered.

My friend had a really bad case of shingles at age 45 he was bedridden for 3 weeks in tremendous pain, he almost lost eyesight in one eye. Another friend got it at 41 and while she wasn’t as bad off as the first friend was tremendously painful and she was out of work for weeks. When I got my shingles shot I told the pharmacist these stories, and she told me she herself got shingles at 35.

I would have rolled the dice on a bad inflammatory reaction from shingles vaccine given the chance.

Yeah, thermal batteries are great mainly just when you actually want heat.

Right, that’s what this new technology is, a liquid thermal battery. There’s not electricity or motion generated by the OP article, just storing heat.

A pharmacist is perhaps in trouble for not following regulations? They set these rules because they’ve done studies about adverse effects, and those trials apparently only included folks up to age 45, so they don’t know for sure what would happen to older people. Its the same reason most people can’t get the Shingles vaccine until age 50 (even though LOTS of people under 50 get Shingles). The clinical data starts at 50 for that one.

You’re not going to die or anything, but the rules are in place they won’t give it to you so I recommend getting it while you can as it is clearly showing benefits over time. I got HPV shot before I aged out and it was completely paid for by insurance (because of the USA ACA).

TLDR; whether you are male or female if you are under the age of 45, and insurance will pay for it, get the HPV vaccine. They won’t let you have it over 45 years old.

Firs they say we don’t need it,

When it initially came out supplies were low and the only known at-risk groups it was know to help directly were girls and young women, so they said, rightfully, men don’t need it at this time.

then they say we’re too old for it

Because at the time time it was thought that if you got one of the non-threatening strains of HPV that your body would already be primed to fight of a future infection of one of the few threatening strains. With nearly any vaccine there’s a negligible amount of health risks. If the research at the time said that there’d be no benefit to you, but you’d still be exposed to the negligible risk, then it made sense to say you were too old to benefit.

There’s also a money thing here. The HPV vaccine isn’t particularly cheap. So the guidance is trying to save you from throwing money away. If you need it, the cost is well worth it, if it wouldn’t benefit you, the money paid for it would be wasted.

then they say we’re too old for it, and finally they say it’s beneficial.

Years passed with outcomes showing benefits for other not in the primary group of recipients (girls and young women). So, yes, now they’re telling you they have evidence that its helpful to you too.

Most electricity rate payers aren’t interested in paying a “coolness” fee on their power bills. Worse, many are fine with paying less for dirtier sources of electricity than clean ones. Besides hydropower and some geothermal, its only been in the past 20 years or so where the cleaner tech is also the cheaper one in the forms widespread PV solar and wind.

Tech used to be fun and exploratory, now it’s just companies pushing to see how much they can be allowed to exploit you for the least cost.

The fun and exploratory tech still exists, its just not sitting as a single product on a store shelf in a plastic clamshell package. The maker space is where all the exciting exploration is happening. If you have an idea the technology likely exists to make it happen, and the cost of the parts won’t break the bank. Lots of reuse of cast off out-of-date tech can be integrated dropping the costs even more. While there are even better solutions, if you’re just getting started pick up an old Arduino or Raspberry Pi (not the new expensive high end models) for under $30. Grow from there to microcontrollers like the ESP32 where it gets even cheaper for about $5 each. Learn to solder! Learn modeling and 3D printing! Use an operating system that lets you control your system instead of one that you just have to accept what they give you.

It really is an amazing time in tech if you stop accepting a products as they are, and instead what you want them to be with your own modifications.

I mean if you can write shell and some orchistration language you’re golden for anything.

This is part of what I meant by labor costs increasing with alternate solutions. As I’m sure you’re aware lots of folks in our field cannot write shell script to save their lives. You’re a higher skill engineer than many orgs that were running VMware. This isn’t a knock on VMware folks. PowerCLI can do lots of things especially in the hands of a skilled engineer, but a good number of folks never make it out of the vSphere client to do their work and complete their tasks. These folks are cheaper to employ because they can still accomplish the task by using the VMware tools that would otherwise require a bespoke solution written by the engineer.

We had some PCI stuff, I relapsed smoking because of getting through it haha. We were also halfway through getting the Australian government PII/gov contract thing when I left.

I hear ya! It can be pretty brutal, especially if you have an honest and knowledgeable QSA.

Most people suck at passing audit compliance because they try to box tick rather than explain how their tailored systems meet and exceed the requirements.

There are also those orgs that shop for a weak QSA, and pay the price later if the resulting audit is too weak. I agree with you that chasing a checked box isn’t the best approach especially if you’ve got a good solution and can document compensating controls.

How many VMs were you running? How many regions and what level of geographic redundancy were you offering your org? Were you serving any type of organization that had regulatory compliance/audit requirements (FDA, HIPAA, PCI, DoD, SOX, etc)?

have a tank of water painted black sitting on the sand, water vapor pressure pushes turbines,

Water vapor by itself at any temperatures of unconcentrated sunlight would heat, wouldn’t come close to the tempurature needed to turn a steam turbine to generate power. Most steam driven power plants have the steam be at about 500 °C. There is no place on Earth that would get even close to that by just placing a black painted barrel of water in direct sunlight.

You’re not wrong in your general idea, but just the scale. The approach you’re describing is close to how Concentrated solar power works. The idea to get up to those crazy high tempuratures from sunlight is to use mirrors to reflect a huge amount of sunlight on one small space. It looks like this:

There are a number of these built around the world. In fact, the solar thermal energy is so high its heating molten salt, which is later used to heat water to steam to turn a turbine generating power.

While Concentrated Solar Power works in both theory and practice, it has not been found to be more efficent for generating electricity in 2026 than just using a giant amount of Photo Voltaic solar panels instead. Many of the Concentrated Solar Power installations are being shut down because of this.

Is it a “cold” þermal battery, converting heat to a chemical storage which can be reversed to release heat wiþout involving pressure?

Sure, but ammonia can do that right now with 12x the density.

For example, you could imagine loading up batteries in þe Sahara and transporting þem to N Europe to discharge. Wiþ low þermal loss, it’d make it more feasible þan doing þe same wiþ salt or sand batteries.

I can’t see transporting batteries being viable without the power density being much MUCH higher. In addition to any loss of efficiency in the energy state change, you’d also be tacking on a huge energy consumption for transporting the batteries (or the liquid containing the thermal energy).

Different experience then. After finishing university I had to learn a lot in my first job in the exact field university was for.

Apologies, I probably didn’t communicate this point well. University did very little education in my area of expertise. In fact for me, I intetionally got a degree outside of my area of expertise to get greatter educational benefit. I agree with you that a Bachelors degree does not fully prepare a student for immediately executing in that skillset. It does, however, give you a solid basis to start in it. I think this will always be the case because curriculum lags reality. Its nearly impossible to create a curriculum covering a body of knowledge of an industry because the industry evolves simultaneously to the creation of the curriculum.

Strongly disagree, but perhaps your college had special training on this. Mine just gave me material and told me to learn.

I’ll agree there’s usually very little overt hand-holding. There’s an expectation you seek on your own. When you were stuck at that beginning, did you ask your professors how to approach the problem? Advisors? Librarians? Study groups? These are just some of the things that are baked into the college experience that are available to put you on the path. The act of completing the coursework exposes you to the different situations and the school has the resources to let you explore it.

There was nearly no difference in grades between people who worked on their education daily/weekly and those who just marathoned through this on last week before exams. The biggest “effort” in some cases was either getting over 50% attendance or buying book authored by professor. Luckily it was mostly for some niche subjects.

I acknowledge this in my first post. Its certainly possible to skate through without learning, but that’s a choice of the student. A student is only going to college for the grades then they’re robbing themselves of the main benefit of college. If a student just barely passes the classes, but is able to learn and retain the knowledge, that is far more valuable that obtaining a high GPA with zero ability to learn anything.

If those were part of a single college course, it must have lasted for a decade to cover all of that. At which point job market will prefer person with 10 years of experience instead.

Oh that certainly wasn’t one class, it was many. Just to name a few:

• Financial Accounting/Managerial Accounting
• Intellectual Property Law
• Political Science courses
• Business Mangement
• Human Anatomy
• Communications and Presentations

I don’t think I can fully understand your position. I neither been a college dropout, neither have I ever wanted to know why company I work for makes specific decisions. I don’t even have ambition and pride necessary to switch from position of expert to position of manager.

None of this to end up in management (if you don’t want to advance that direction).

I assume there are things you want to accomplish professionally in your field? The resources you need to do that are rarely in control of those doing the executing, like yourself. This means that to get your needed resources (or permission), you have to convince others to give it to you. Knowing why they would say “yes” or “no” to your proposal, or say yes to one of your prosposals but not another is understanding what drives them and their goals. Being able to speak at least part of their language means you get what you need to accomplish your professional goals. Without this you have to hope you’re talking to people that will choose to enter deep enough into your field of experise to do the translation for you. I have found those people are exceedingly rare. Without those rare folks, you’ll be told “no”, or worse, lose your job because you’re not properly able to communicate your very real value to the organization.

What I was aiming at is that university often misses tools, frameworks and knowledge that is more up to date with needs of current job market, instead opting to “give a good base” that is also half a decade outdated in most optimistic case.

Oh, I completely agree with your statement here. I touched on it in my response above. A University education will frequently be behind the times vs the state-of-the-art in the working world. This is especially true of technology fields. I experienced this in my college coursework too, studying certain technologies I already knew were out-of-date. However, those were there for the benefit of those that had never been exposed to the technology at all just to give them a working understanding of a version of technology.

I guess my take does not match goal “let’s advance as high as we can in company”.

It doesn’t have to. The approach can be “advance as high as you want to in the company, and be able to stay there at that level for as long as you want”.

There are FOSS hypervisors that are more than adequate for almost everyone’s useage.

While I wish that were true I didn’t find that to be the case.

For home use? Aboslutely. For Small businesses, probably, but labor costs rise noticeably in maintaining those alternate FOSS hypervisors. That can be a dealbreaker for lots of companies which swings the pendulum back to cloud (or Microsoft on-prem hypervisor).

When the Broadcom/VMware apocalypse occurred I looked at all other hypervisor options both FOSS and commercial and found none that were close to VMware’s feature offerings for large enterprises. The best for most orgs would be HyperV only because of existing MS licensing the orgs had would cover most of the new license burden.

I’m all for new technology and approaches, and it looks like this is just at the beginning for this approach so I would assume it could grow in efficiency in the future.

However, as it stands today its pretty far away from a good replacement for existing solutions or approaches.

The new material, called a pyrimidone, can store more than 1.6 megajoules per kilogram. That is almost double the energy density of a conventional lithium-ion battery, which is about 0.9 MJ/kg.

1.6 MJ/kg…that’s…not very dense for a thermal solution for this new material. This is especially true with the likely increase complexity of adding a plumbing system and heat exchanger to extract the energy. With the lithium battery its a pair of wires going in and the same wires coming out to move the stored energy. Further, the lithium battery energy is electrical which certainly can be converted to thermal energy at 100% efficiency with a simple coil of wire (resistor), but it can also be used electrically for all the fun things we use electrical energy for. The new technology solution looks to only be a thermal storage medium.

For reference 1 kg of gasoline has 45 MJ/kg. Keep in mind I’m not saying gasoline is a replacement, I just wanted to offer a scale for reference. Another approach suggested for storing sun energy in chemical form is ammonia which has about 19 MJ/kg. Yet another approach for storing solar thermal energy is sand batteries. A sand battery has a density of .4 to .8 MJ/kg ( 500 °C to 1000 °C respectively). Sand batteries would come with the same burden of a plumbing system and heat exchanger though but without any exotic materials.

None of this is to discourage the basic reseach these folks are doing. They could be onto the “next big thing”, but I just wanted to put it in perspective as to where it is today.