I noticed a trend in most junior engineers as they gain experience and maturity that they sometimes are less willing to move quickly and prototype, and instead want firm requirements spelled out before starting work. There are times when this desire comes from previous projects where prototypes were forced to
Many organizations and projects attempting to work in hardware end up spending their “agile energy” in modeling or system design rather than in the hardware itself. There’s an obvious place for Cameo, DOORS, SysML, etc, when it comes to designing a first article since you have to start somewhere.
I try to set a high bar for the questions I bring to colleagues. Anything I can figure out on my own — with a textbook, or now with an LLM — I do. So the questions I actually ask people are the ones that clear the bar; they’re not questions
It‘s been a few weeks since SpaceX went public with a boom and then contracted significantly, but I remain extremely bullish on SpaceX in general and on Elon in particular. The news that he is eligible for 1 billion SpaceX shares when the human population on Mars reaches 1
I never thought too much about solar until my recent trip to Florida. We’re planning to get solar on our roof, but largely to create some energy independence and wean off the natural gas our municipal electrical company uses. I’ve been bullish on solar, especially as its cost
I’ll caveat this post with the acknowledgement that compensation and promotion aren’t everything, and comp especially is just one dimension in what I consider to be a fulfilling job. Other dimensions worth mentioning the same breath are autonomy/agency (especially technical autonomy in engineering roles), responsibility, visibility to
When trying to view space from space, the earth blocks a cone-like volume and casts a sightline “shadow” behind it. I’m interested in exploring the amount of occluded space for an observer/satellite as a function of altitude. Given Earth’s radius R and the viewing altitude h
When I worked at Boston Consulting Group, there was a large team that handled the presidential transition after the election. Around 2016 when Trump was elected for the first time, there was a lament from some partners that they couldn’t staff the transition team because many BCGers weren’t
I watched a video recently of Carl Sagan discussing defense spending in contrast to spending on climate change prevention. His salient point is that if we used a small nonzero chance of annihilation to justify massive cold war spending in preparation for that possibility, we should be willing to do
In “Stubborn Attachments,” Tyler Cowen presents a fascinating thought experiment to stress test our responsibilities to future generations. He says to imagine a space traveler leaving Earth now and taking a somewhat long journey (for us) at close to the speed of light (99.995%). People on earth would experience
Experts like Tyler Cowen and Dario Amodei place optimistic (and realistic) GDP growth over the next few decades due to AI at 10-20% (and 3-5%), but this can only be realized if AI is widely adopted by the right markets. Large companies are pursuing AI adoption with insufficient
There is a population of people – especially in their 30s and 40s – who are perfectly able to use LLMs (or "AI" more generally) to improve their lives and work but remain unwilling to do so. A larger group seems content to use it to generate an image for