Oof. I didn't realize "harm" was meant so literally. At least it was a one-time thing, though... right? I read "had several thousand WAV audio files that I generated" and expected to read something of the form "I corrupted several thousand important data files irreversibly".
Haha yeah. I've definitely "harmed" myself in the form of time lost from deleting files/messing something up on my computer, but I think this was the only time I've actually experienced physical pain from my own bad code.
A few years ago, I ordered the cheapest six-axis robotic arm from ebay for about $100 that came with basically no software or motor-driver boards, so I did it all from scratch with a PCA9685 board, a basic kernel driver and some very hacky scripts from user space.
One day I had some friends over for a glass of wine, and wanted to show off my creation. I invited them into my "lab" and placed my wine glass down on the desk so I could type a few commands with both hands.
My rudimentary software had some motion smoothing once it was up and running, but upon initialization, if the arm was significantly displaced from where it had been when it was turned off, the PWM board would instruct the motor to immediately "be" in a position that required the arm to travel clear across the desk in effectively as little time as possible.
In this case, where it had been previously happened to be where my wine glass was now, and the flimsy aluminum at high speed was enough to shear the stem from the glass and explode the bulb. Luckily the wine didn't get in any sensitive electronics, but I learned a valuable lesson about the difference between messing around with hardware vs software.
Anything with an actuator, really. I'm a controls engineer, we work with all kinds of hazards and it's my responsibility to run the risk assessment that makes sure no minimum-wage operator gets harmed because of our machine. People are the squishiest, weakest, most sensitive part of just about any shop, so there's a lot of risks to assess!
One key observation, though, when working with code is that the machine becomes so close to predictable that it's more dangerous than if it were unpredictable. A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and the machine will take off.
There are definitely two kinds of safety domains, one applies to manually operated tools where the operator of, say, a knife is responsible for their own safety - if they cut themselves, they're at fault, not the knifemaker. There's another kind of safety engineering where if the machine takes off 'by itself' while an operator is in the way it's the machine designer's fault for not stopping that from happening, the operator can't be expected to know what's going on.
The latter should become more common as computers continue to permeate everything we use - that cordless drill is no longer controlled by the operator with a trigger switch that connects power to a DC motor, it's a brushless motor driver with an analog input sensing the position of the trigger and the EMF of the motor, and the charge state of the batteries, and who knows what else. Bump a sensor and it might take off, you don't know why it does what it does.
I'll continue to make my automated cells as safe as I can, but don't trust code that's not so simple you can be confident of how it works.
> A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and the machine will take off.
A friend needed a valve cover gasket changed on his Honda, and his wife needed to use the car for her Uber runs that night. He came over and instead of our usual hand tools I put a socket adapter on my 20V drill to speed up disassembly. I handed the drill to him and told him "start on the lowest torque setting, and move up in small steps."
I turned around to grab more tools from the toolbox. A minute later, I heard a loud noise. I turned to see the car's windshield cracked and a shocked look on my friend's face.
My friend was used to his renter's power drill. He hadn't anticipated how much torque a modern contractor's drill outputs and set the torque to the maximum setting. On the third valve cover bolt, the drill had caught on the bolt head and spun my friend around, smashing the battery into the windshield.
There's a piece of paper taped to me toolbox called "List of things <friend's name> may not attempt unsupervised." It gained a couple of entries that day...
For drilling holes in soft materials like drywall and wood, or even softer metals like aluminum. I recently used that drill to drill into a motorcycle engine to remove a stuck rotor cover.
Powerful electric drills will often come with an extra handle on the side (or a mounting point for one) so that you can brace them with both hands. It's up to the user to set an appropriate torque limit if they're only using one hand.
I imagine he was leaning over the engine bay, maybe holding the drill in one hand. So in that specific scenario, the tool was more powerful than he could control.
But that same drill might be asked to bore a large hole in a piece of wood, and the user would anticipate the amount of leverage they need to control it. Two hands, arms close to body, etc.
They probably could have, had they been ready for it. Not everyone is the same weight and strength either so it could just be that it was out of their physical capabilities.
That is often the difference between home and tradesman tools. A tradesman can reasonably be expected to handle a bit more responsibility from their tools than the home handyman.
When I drill 30cm holes in fiberglass or wood, I place my leg next to the handle. That have saved my wrist many times as the tool bites to the material and send the drill in a circular motion.
For a continuous drilling operation the torque is totally fine, the problem is abrupt changes in torque because of something catching. On drills without this feature that's what the torque limiting clutch is for.
Dunno about Bosch's implementation, but the Milwaukee one sucks. The drill/impact driver would strip the screw head, jerk your wrist, and then cut the power. I'd much rather have a mechanical clutch than than that one.
We actually had an older drill with the mechanical clutch with a stripped high gear that we kept around for driving screws instead of tossing because the new one was so bad.
An impact driver (rattle gun) is much better for speeding up disassembly than a drill. They also don't apply anything like the same feeling of torque to the operator's wrist.
A lower power (e.g. 300Nm max) battery driver is great for when you have to undo lots of lower sized bolts, while it would be a little bit underpowered for wheel nuts or motorcycle fork retaining bolts.
You should be introduced to Italian single-sided-swingarm nuts. For example, my MV Agusta Brutale required 220 to 240Nm tightening. It would come loose with my battery-powered 300NM rattle gun, but only after a while. (Fantastic bike but I no longer own it. I'd rent another though.)
Ducati single-sided swingarm nuts can be similar, but I have not yet owned a Ducati.
Recently I did what’s called the ‘big 3’ upgrade on my car’s wiring. You replace the oem wiring from your alternator, etc. with 1/0 gauge cable, thus allowing substantially more power through. This is for speakers. I made my own cables and was in the process of upsizing one of the battery lugs by drilling the hole bigger on a drill press. I was just holding the wire steady with my left hand while pulling the drill handle down with my right. The drill bit caught and spun the cable around, including somehow my hand in it, winding my hand up in the cable very tight against the still spinning drill. It’s a small drill press and didn’t have enough torque to keep spinning, but had the drill been stronger I’d have at least broken my hand if not worse. As it was my hand was swollen and scratched pretty good. When you make your living typing this really makes you think.
Having had this happen a few times, I'm pretty obsessive about workholding now. It's a shame that a good drill-press vise can cost almost as much as the drill press itself, because it's really important for safety.
You should image-search the term "radial drill" sometime. ;)
You don't need a high-dollar Kurt milling vise for a drill press, and you only need to constrain the part in one degree of freedom (rotation about Z axis). Just put a single fastener in your table and drop the slots in that vise over it. Gravity and quill pressure hold it in Z, the table holds it flat against rotation about X and Y, and you want it to have the ability to slide a bit in X and Y to let the drill find the center of your punch/pilot hole. If the drill catches, the torque will push against the stud and it can't move.
One of the reasons I love to dable in the game Space Engineers is that you get to experiment with simulated physical equipment. Things often go wrong and boom (or Klang in SE parlance) and you often die or hurt yourself. You seen learn to program in steps for safety.
Back in 2002, I was getting a package with a brand new Pocket PC (smartphone without the phone, running Windows). And I really wanted to know when it was delivered, but the UPS guy would regularly leave packages on the porch without ringing the bell or anything.
This was before you could get delivery alerts or anything like that. But I had a spare laptop with an integrated webcam (wow!), and I'd figured out how to make it run actions on motion detection.
My plan was to point the laptop at the door, and eject the CD drive when it detected motion. The tray of the drive would push a water bottle off the table. That would land on a seesaw, which would launch a deck of cards in a hard plastic case at the door and make a very loud noise.
It's unclear why I couldn't just play a really sound on the speakers instead. Anyway, I tested the program by standing in front of the laptop and waving my hand.
It worked perfectly! The CD tray ejected, and I watched as the water bottle slowly rolled off the table. It dropped onto the seesaw...... and instantly launched a hard plastic deck at my face and got me right between the eyes.
Never again have I been in so much pain and also so excited about my code working perfectly at the exact same time.
This made me actually laugh out loud, it feels like some of the things I came up with as a teenager wanting to do robotics and automation but having no money or way to purchase things online, water bottles were actually a good way of powering things like opening curtains by dropping them on a string.
Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something.
> Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something.
It totally doesn't make any sense! I think I might have been fascinated with the idea of Rube Goldberg machines or something at the time. Or maybe I thought I could build a "security system" with it? Also it was summer and I was a bored teenager.
I used to do robotics, I can tell you that the fact that it was the cheapest or the most hacky does not matter in the least. Everything can and will go wrong, even the priciest and well documented part.
I used to have multiple clamps around the controller, message bus, the firmware and also a physical barrier, and yet would not feel safe with my fingers or person around moving parts.
Yep. When I have to work with robots, it's from a distance and with as much safety equipment as possible. I've seen too many physical, hardware, and software failures to risk anything I care about. Hearing protection is also important. A hundred pounds or more of metal slamming into itself at high speed makes a deafening sound.
I’ve read a story somewhere, that someone trying to fix something in the toilet had to be in a position close to the toilet, then the lid accidentally fallen shut and the guy had his hearing damaged because the toilet bowl somehow concentrated the noise in one point where his head was.
It’s weird how even ordinary things can be dangerously loud.
When I was a graduate student making something in the machine shop, another user of this (excellent) departmental facility had just spent most of the day setting up his CNC milling job on the oldest, shittiest (and therefore least-time-pressured) 3-axis mill in the building. Whilst I was manually turning something on the lathe about 15 m away, he shut the door and pressed the 'go' button.
There was an absolutely almighty BANG, of the 'an explosion has just occurred' variety that made me very glad I wasn't actually cutting metal at that precise point in time. His g-code had an off-by-one error (I think) and it had dutifully picked up a ~20 cm HUGE flycutter, spun it at the speed of of a ~5 mm bull nose cutter, and driven it directly down into a piece of aluminium. The flycutter had broken and effectively welded itself to the aluminium, which had sheared down the middle, spun out, and hit the protective guards that completely encompass the machine. The person driving it (either a postdoc or graduate student) was maybe 40 cm away and saw this ~2 kg piece of metal bounce off a thick reinforced poylcarbonate guard directly at the level of his head.
Which makes it even more confusing. Were they preparing a sandwich on top of the server? Did they eat mayonnaise straight from the jar? The condiment plot thickens.
Oh, I have to introduce you to some of our finest subway sandwiches prepared by students that have no clue how to make sandwiches that don't spill all their innards as soon as they leave their hands.
Some small metal pressing machines for example have two buttons, one on each side of the machine. You have to push them both for the machine to operate. This means your hands can't be squished.
Or a dental x-ray machine has the final "run" button in the hallway so the nurse taking x-rays must go there to do it, so they don't get repeated exposure.
There's lots of safety mechanisms like this in manufacturing. I've also seen "light curtains" which are essentially 2 bars on either side of a hazard. If anything crosses that plane, the machine stops automatically. There are also pressure pads. For one type, you have to be standing on for the machine to operate so that you are in a safe location when it starts. For the other, the pad covers the danger area and the machine will not operate if there's any weight detected. Trying to think of any others I've run into. It's actually pretty interesting stuff. You've got to keep in mind that the operator is liable to be in a hurry, tired, stupid, or any combination thereof.
Another one is machinery where you have to "enter" the machine to do maintenance. Think industrial ovens.
You're supposed to turn off the circuit breaker and lock it with your own personal lock that only you have the key to. That way no one can turn it on even if they wanted to.
I've heard no one, under any circumstances is allowed to take the lock off. If the person leaves after their shift and forgets to take it off for example, they have to come back in the middle of the night so to speak and take it off.
Not just equipment you have to enter. This is used in situations with "stored energy" or other systems that need to be turned off or otherwise disabled for safe maintenance. There are multi-lock hasps that can be used if multiple people have overlapping needs to lock out the system, and other devices such as valve handles covers, etc., that help with locking out components don't have a built-in place for a lock.
As someone else mentioned, that's a lockout-tagout procedure. Very common when doing any kind of maintenance on a machine. You isolate the power sources and place a personal lock on it to which only you have the key. It usually has your name and an ID number written on it. The lock cannot be removed by anyone else. If you, for instance, forget to take your lock off and go home, it's a very long process where they have to get someone high enough up the chain to get in contact with you and either get you to come back or confirm that you're safely a long way away from the machine before they can cut the lock off. This makes your management very unhappy and most places that I've worked will write you up for leaving while the equipment is still locked out if maintenance is finished and it's safe to operate.
It's not only electricity that needs to be isolated and locked out. A lot of machines use air pressure to operate moving parts, so in that case you'd have to isolate all electrical sources as well as the air. The machines I usually mess with require 2 locks. Some of the machines I've seen can require 6 or more locks to be fully locked out and safe to work on.
When I served on a submarine, tagout procedures were followed to the letter.
A typical maintenance period might require 100 or so separate tagouts, each of which could require anywhere from one to dozens of tags. Each duty watch was required to show up early enough to go through the entire tagout book and at least know the gist of what was in progress.
Finding a loose tag was an automatic all hands all work stoppage, until it was tracked down and resolved. No questions, even if your work was in a different compartment, or had no logical connection to what he tag was for.
Each new tagout request had to be signed off on by at least three people, sometimes all the way up to the captain and not just a foreman or supervisor but one or more shop heads.
Seawater system tagouts on a floating sub were serious business.
These make the worst horror stories I've read from various safety organizations. Tanks with gases (nitrogen is particularly sneaky), ovens, radioactive sources... If you want to learn about industrial risks based on real stories watch the CBS videos https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ItJe2Incs
Another awesome safety system is the SawStop which uses the conductivity of skin to monitor for contact against the blade in a tablesaw. If it detects contact a small explosive charge goes off, instantly sending a block of aluminum into the path of the blade, stopping it dead. Even a serious accident like leaning with an elbow against a moving blade is likely to result in little more than the scratch from hitting a stationary sharp object rather than decapitation.
Sadly the inventor couldn't convince the tablesaw manufacturers to use his invention for cost and/or liability reasons so he had to make his own. Their tablesaws themselves are relatively expensive but cost per accident is $100 for the charge plus whatever the blade costs, so basically $200 to prevent serious injury or death.
Do you know what moisture level sets it off? I didn't even think about that - it's easy to take Southern California's weather for granted. Here it's either pretty much ready from the lumberyard or you got it right off the mill's truck so it has to sit for a few days/weeks.
The lobbying is off putting, yes, but at least his greedy self-interest would do some actual good instead of extracting evermore capital from everyone. Powertools inhabit this uncanny valley of dangerous equipment where they're cheap and accessible enough to the average joe (compared to CNC machining centers or forklifts or whatever) yet powerful enough to do some real damage. My understanding is that the primary reason the major manufacturers didn't want the SawStop wasn't cost but the fear that it would expose them to more liability by making the tools seem less dangerous. I really wish it achieves mass adoption so that the price drops even further.
Thankfully the patents are starting to expire in 2024. Nothing holds pack progress quite like the patent system.
The problem with causing $300 of destruction and lost work time vs possibly saving a limb is there's no fine woodworking operation or framing carpentry operation that requires a table saw. Technically if you feel unsafe working with a table saw you can do absolutely everything very slowly and tediously with a router or router table or bandsaw, or manual tools like a chisel and hammer. Anyone concerned about safety doesn't use a saw stop, they use an entirely different technology than a table saw. If you make a table saw too safe or too expensive to actually use, people will simply use something else. The death toll may or may not be lower...
From a marketing perspective, the people most likely to buy a saw stop because they're scared of table saws will save a lot of money by not buying either sawstop or table saw, and they'll cut dado slots using a hand held router (more dangerous in a different way) or break down plywood using a tracksaw (unholy expensive and many crushed foot injuries) or cut beveled edges on a router table or zillions of alternatives. Meanwhile the people who don't care about safety because they're not drinking on the job or they actually use the substantial amount of safety gear that makes a table saw perfectly safe OR they only do operations on the table saw that are inherently safe by nature (as opposed to relatively low risk operations, and some very high risk operations that people do anyway), will continue to save a lot of money by the combo of not being dumb and not buying sawstop. Finally the real dumb woodworkers who get drunk and get hurt or simply don't care, will continue to not care and not buy sawstop and will not live too much longer in a world either with sawstop or without table saws anyway, so its not like the world will net improve, the Darwin award winners will continue to win Darwin awards. So sawstop is a VERY hard sell.
A similar problem is well manufactured table saws are safer than homemade table saws. The concept of "put a round blade on a motor" is too simple to legislate out of existence. So making table saws illegal wouldn't eliminate table saws it would just mean the homemade ones will make table saws, on average, more dangerous.
Arguably, radial arm saws are more dangerous than table saws and "the marketplace" effectively eliminated those decades ago, so its not like the marketplace dislikes safety or whatever.
> Meanwhile the people who don't care about safety because
> they're [never doing unsafe things]
This sounds an awful lot like suggesting that skilled users of firearms don't care at all about safety because no one's going to deliberately do stupid stuff. It seems farcical to me. Just as with firearm safety rules, they're there to protect people from the rare moments when we are inadvertently NOT careful. History has shown that people DO do stupid stuff because they were thinking about something else, or were tired, or distracted -- hence why every firearm is treated as loaded, even if you unloaded it, and why weapon safeties exist.
For table saws, having a sawstop helps prevent situations that you don't have fill control over from having bad consequences. Of course you'd still use all the same safety measures you normally would without one.
Most firearms accidents happen during normal operations like carrying, cleaning, disassembly, and so on. In comparison table saws are extremely versatile and can do many operations some of which categorically prevent entire classes of accidents. For example I have a commercially made box cutting jig with various shields and guards and its not physically possible to stick my fingers in the blade during operation. If as you claim my mind drifted and I did stupid stuff, by physical design of the operation its impossible to hurt myself.
There's another class of accident involving equipment. Some people do not store firearms with trigger locks or unloaded in safes or whatever. Likewise there's an analogy with table saws where I don't rip small boards without a nice featherboard, riving knife, and some really nice plastic pushsticks. If as you claim my mind drifted, this time by use of tools it would still be physically impossible to hurt myself.
There is a class of inherently dangerous operations where no safety tools exist but the table saw is so versatile and flexible people can successfully do the operation... most of the time. My point is instead of spending more money to build a "better" tablesaw to do something dumb, simply invest the money in a COTS bandsaw or track saw or jigsaw hole cutting jig or chainsaw or planer or whatever crazy risky thing there's a better, faster, safer tool. You can do dangerous things with a table saw but there's always a better safer faster way to do it with a different tool. Taking away money by making the required table saw more expensive just means the woodworker will not be able to afford the superior even safer tool for the job.
Ha! You described me to a 't' and all that makes sense. As a programmer I didn't want to risk my fingers even with a SawStop cabinet so I invested the money in a Festool tracksaw and Domino instead. No crushed foot injuries yet but man I wish I had a tablesaw to cut thin pieces from stock that aren't wide enough to fully support the track.
I have no idea on the moisture levels that cause it to be set off, I just remember reading/watching a video about it because at first it seemed like technology that SHOULD be widely used and implemented. When I first learned about it I thought it was a great idea.
Or they went about developing their own systems. Bosch made their own system that didn't involve slamming a brake into the blade, but SawStop decided to throw some money around and get an injunction against it.
All the evidence I've found is super cloudy, but early reports indicated Bosch's variant predated SawStop's release.
Luckily SawStop's patents expire in a few years so hopefully we'll see other safety mechanisms similar to SawStop without the downsides and greed.
Current saw stop units do have an over-ride switch so that if you know you're going to cut questionable wood, you can disable the safety mechanism for a series of cuts. (The safety mechanism comes back on if you power the table saw off, then back on.) But of course you don't know advance for sure if the piece of wood in hand will trigger the safety mechanism or not.
Not everybody's cup of tea, but our ability to be 'present' is highly variable, both person-to-person, and one person over time. I'm a somewhat daydreamy sort of person, so I work to bring focus when I'm using power tools. As a hobbyist I walk out of my shop when I get tired, emotional, or otherwise distracted, but that's not an option for everyone.
It is true, laser cut wood and burnt wood in general also sets it off. However on all saw stop saws I've used you can disable the safety when you have to cut those materials.
The one at our *kerspace has tripped numerous times on damp wood, laser-cut wood, shiny laminates that didn't register as metallic but apparently it was a full moon that day or something, etc.
It's also saved a few legit fingers, so it's still a net win, but you've got to have pretty deep pockets to cover all the false trips.
Is there anyway to do it magnetically using inducted currents? I doubt you can stop the saw that way, but you should be able slow the blade down so it does not do as much damage.
A tablesaw goes through a finger as if it is nothing. Fingers can move at speeds of dozens of centimeters per second. So anything that takes longer a dozen microseconds to stop the blade will not be good enough to let you keep your finger.
One thing I'm still unsure of regarding table saws: is there really much risk of injury if you follow all of the typically recommended safety practices?
Every tablesaw injury I remember hearing about involved the operator failing to follow some of those guidelines.
This goes back to the basic point of safety work: Even the best trained, most attentive and careful operator can get into dangerous situations. There's no way to anticipate the moment that their attention might wander or some external circumstance might just force the situation.
>one type, you have to be standing on for the machine to operate so that you are in a safe location when it starts
Of course, the weakness of a system like this being if middle management is demanding unachievable timelines and/or people in the shop are willing to cut corners, someone can leave a box of heavy stuff on the pressure pad to "save time." Absolutely right that all these systems need to be resilient to operator tiredness etc
If you want to manually operate an industrial robot via its controller, you usually have to squeeze a "deadman" switch or else the robot will engage its brakes. What's neat is that the deadman switch is a 3-position switch: They discovered that when people panic they either let go or squeeze harder, so both actions stop the robot.
Used to work in robotics. The QA folk were obviously very much sticklers for the full process of enabling the hardware interlocks before getting near the moving bits. One time a manager got mad at them for taking so long going through the full interlock process while repeating a failure mode. He therefore went up to the machine saying "look, it failed so it's stopped, that's how the code works!" At that point our beta version of our CI requisitioned that bot (as the interlock wasn't the only process corner that the manager was trying to cut the bot wasn't marked as reserved in the CI system), it started initializing and broke his arm.
I'm just glad that ultimately he was the only one who faced physical consequences for his poor choices. And thankful that the consequences weren't that bad at the end of the day; a broken arm is way better than a cracked open skull.
I hope that the arm healed well, and that, after the painful demonstration, everyone in the organization was fully onboard with workplace safety protocol.
Yeah, the arm healed great, and whole situation (plus the subsequent "N Days Since a Limb Mangled" sign) contributed greatly to the manager's humility and respect for safety.
A lot of the toxic pressure that pushed the manager in that direction still existed, but a light hearted floppy arm joke served well to remind everyone relevant of the state space of outcomes.
I worked for a car company. We had robots for mounting parts. Big robotic arm several tons of pressure possible. I was part of the maintenance team, we get an alert for a robot malfunctionning. Coming in the area we see screwdrivers cleverly placed in all the safeties. And a guy trying to tweak the robot that was slowly moving...
He was next to the robot (like his hip touching it) trying to do we never knew what with his hands on the robot. And the robot was moving of course all securities were disabled and it was in a kind of. debug/manual mode) He was also just an operator from the next stage of production, so he was not supposed to be here at all. We checked everything and ran the calibration and validation procedures and they went through so maybe he did repair it in the end.
I don't work in robotics so I might be entirely off-base here, but surely the interlock process would consist of hitting an E-stop somewhere? What was this process that took long enough for said manager to get annoyed with?
You usually only hit the E-stop when the robot is moving in a way that could be dangerous. Safety interlocks are intended to minimize the probability of such a dangerous situation. The robot won't move unless all of the interlocks are outputting a "go ahead" signal. The most common interlock is a (switch/laser/hall effect sensor/whatever) that detects the door to the robot cell is closed.
Well yes I know that much, but surely having an e-stop pressed will stop the robot from moving, same as any of the other interlocks? And opening/closing a door or the like doesn't seem like something that takes a long time either...
The "Stuff Made Here" youtube channel was dealing with this recently when making a chainsaw robot. As you can imagine, it was kindof important. He ended up with a combination of a flashing "armed" light and an e-stop switch.
We had a scary and quite overspec'd arm acquired cheaply in the early history of a startup. We we're able to control it via the serial interface, but similarly to you we had no documentation and everything had been reverse engineered. The thing was surrounded by e-stops.
Back when I was doing some hands-on practical training in electric engineering school, we had to design a control circuit on some breadboard, the kind that in high school would lit a couple of leds, and maybe make a light fade, but here it was driving a big-ass train engine boxed in a 1.5m x 1.5m x 3m steel cage, right next to the bench where we pieced the control device together, barely arms length away.
While conceptually the same, "theory" vs "practice" and "command" vs "power" suddenly takes a whole new meaning where you're suddenly pushing several orders of magnitude more power than a puny 9V battery could. The buzzing of a hundred amps ready to flow inches away was chillingly ominous. You get a strange urge to triple check, quad check even, design and calculations before flicking the switch.
As we all successfully started up our bench, the rumbling of a dozen of these bare protomachines revving up in a hangar was eerie. The thought of them sucking in such an amount of overall power from the grid dizzying. I rarely get cold-sweat and goose bumps, but this was one of these days.
Something similar happened to me when I remote-controlled a buddy's computer. This was I guess in the early 2000s when disc drives were still a thing. Opening the drive knocked over a glass of wine and caused quite a mess... Noone hurt, but also spilled wine.
I remember in college (mech ENG BTECH) I had a coursemate who's day job was a programmer on the CNC side.
She mentioned that this had happened to a v high end CNC machine the cutting tool after a power cut went straight to the home position very $$$$$$$
At my place we had a computer controlled wave tank and as the guy I shared an office with said you could program the ram to go full travel in zero time which would have flooded the lab.
At my first job we once developed our own controllers with haptic feedback for our surgical training simulation. It was amazing how realistic the feel was.
The motors were quite powerful and there were a few close calls which really made you think.
It used to twitch violently as it was calibrating on initializing. Once, it reset and did that while testing. Luckily the person holding it managed to get his hands out of the handles on time.
Another tim the tip of one instrument had broken off and during initialization there was an error in the force applied in the direction along the shaft. It flew out like a rocket.
I have. Back in early days of Oculus, I was using one of the development kits (DK2?, maybe DK1) and making something in Unity. The Oculus had one screen, with lenses over the left and right halves. To give depth perception, it renders a view for each eye, and shows them in a vertical split screen. Some script had a bug, and none of that happened; Instead it simply stretched a normal view across both screens.
I put the headset on, and quickly noticed things weren't working right. I was walking around, trying to figure out what the issue was. Trying walking back any forth looking at a wall in front of me, I felt terrible pain. Something about the left and right eyes seeing movement in different directions across their entire field of view really breaks the brain. It was very sharp and localized too.
I had weird experience with valve index. I somehow miscalibrated it and the floor wasn't level.
I spent maybe 20 seconds in VR with skewed floor and it felt horribly wrong. And the whole evening my sense of ballance and perception was broken not to be the point of falling over but the real world around me felt wrong. Only after I slept my brain fixed itself.
I had a similar early experience with Oculus Quest. I downloaded a "ISS tour" game, where you played as an astronaut, and had the full freedom of movement microgravity affords you. The "advanced mode" of the game allowed you to move around by grabbing handles or pushing off things.
This kind of unconstrained motion is notoriously hard on VR players, and I felt a bit uneasy the whole time when I was navigating this way, but then I made a mistake. I wanted to rotate myself, so I instinctively grabbed two handles and made a sideways hand motion, sending myself into a fast spin. I almost puked, and even after taking the VR headset off, I kept feeling nauseous for the rest of the day. Like in your case, my brain fixed itself when I fell asleep, and I woke up feeling fine.
My bachelor's degree is in neurobiology and it would have been very interesting if this was reproducible in other people. Experiencing physical pain from visual stimuli (stimuli unrelated to light intensity, at least) is not something I've ever really heard of. You may have discovered the visual equivalent to the Brown Note.
I know in the past I felt pain while trying to say certain lies. I do not mean I felt uncomfortable, I mean I felt real pain. It is weird, but sometimes you can cause pain without a direct physical cause.
I'm not sure if you ever write rage comments, just laced with profanity and nonsense, complaining about the situation at hand... I've written my fair share, I used to work with a lot of perl and bash, and I'd come across some disgusting ideas that had made their way into scripts and utilities. Naturally, finding some of that crap after an hours long search for some bugged behavior, it can be very frustrating and irritating to find out that it all stemmed from someone doing an easy task in a stupid way!
I once had someone leave me a message on my desk phone referring to one of these comments verbosely, and I happened to be listening to my messages on speakerphone as the day was almost over and we were all doing our little ritual tasks before we walked out the doors for the evening. So, this comment starts being read and all my neighbors are packing up their lunchboxes or tidying papers on desks, etc. As the message went on, I could hear the silence enveloping me, because of course it was wildly heinous, and I just froze up and let it play out. It wasn't that I couldn't have jumped over there and hung up the phone but it was so casual that it just caught me off guard that someone would read that awful crap I wrote right into my voicemail! I remember the end being sorta like "anyhow, that's not a very good practice, so don't write them like that anymore". I don't really even remember exactly what happened next other than leaving with my tail between my legs. I don't think anybody mentioned it to me. I guess it seemed worse in the moment of it.
This was well over 20 years ago now, I was basically brand new to everything. That was a turning point, thankfully enough.
Reading open source has exposed me to a LOT of different commenting practices. I don't really think about it often enough, but the human on other side is always the most important consideration.
Yes, I setup a DDP to figure out how I can make my own TNF blockers using nutrient intake optimization.... yada yada yada. Immunomodulators and the immune system are really complex and now I have 2 detached retinas.
Yes, I have Crohn's and I do not like to take the meds or listen to the doctors. This is NOT AT ALL SOMETHING I RECOMMEND, PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT IT.
Crohn's is an auto-immune disease and the main class of drugs that is used to treat Crohn's like mine (long term) are called TNF inhibitors or TNF blockers.
TNF alpha triggers the production of several immune system molecules, including interleukin-1 and interleukin-6. I realized I can track this with basic inflammatory marker test, I also realized that I could use diet to impact my markers. So instead of taking what is referred to as a Biologic e.g.: Adalimumab, Certolizumab etc... I started using NIO to try and get the same effect.
I got a pill making machine, and learned how to make supplements but they were not working well enough so I knew I needed something stronger. Then I found this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32311496/ I think it was on HN but I do not remember for sure. I order some modafinil and worked it into my mixture.
I do not manually create my mixtures because I do not want to know which version I am on, I want my symptoms to go away and that should be the trigger to tell me if its working. So I have a 14 vile setup with an audrino all wired into my press and based on my food diary (e.g.: nutrient intake) it decides how much of what should go into a run. e.g.: how much burdok, tumeric, serrapeptase etc...
I got something wrong and ended up adding far too much to a run of pills, I didn't realize this until i started ti see floaters in my eye and I checked to see how much moda was left and it was far less than should have been left.
Then i did some reading and a side effect of taking too much moda can be detached retnas, since I have all the symptoms: Floaters, stars and peripheral flashes I am assuming that based on the timing I now have detached retnas, I also found my mistake and essentially no matter where my markers were I was getting about 600mg of moda per day. Which is far more than should be taken. This was for about a 1 month period.
I have fixed the issue now and I have a much more sophisticated pipeline but I will have to get this fixed.
NOTE: I am not a doctor, I have no college education or anything like that. I just like bio-hacking and decided to pursue my moonshot during the pandemic. I can explain more or provide pics and vids to explain further if you like, email in profile.
I am currently writing up a 100% independent non peer reviewed case study to document everything I have done and the results.
Not OP, but I have done this for allergies. N. Americanus, 10-15 eggs at a time. No side effects other than an awful itch 12-36h after administration. Been great for my allergies. I've cut way down on fexofenadine. I also live with a cat and a poodle and only really feel symptoms if I literally rub my face in the cat, or groom the dog inside without a mask.
If you would ever be willing to discuss your work and hear about mine, that would be awesome. AGAIN, I AM NOT A DOCTOR. But I really love this stuff and have started to study for MCAT just so I know more and dont feel like such a moron.
Yes, it is one of the therapies I am currently studying as I have had success with it but it does not scale. The reason I want to do this is so that I can create a Medicare/Medicaid E2E single payer solution that provides these solutions to everyone. Even people on the lower socioeconomic rungs. The pandemic was really hard for me and I have been behaving very recklessly in terms of my own health but I have been very responsible in terms of other people health.
I was running an outpatient program for alternative therapies before I knew that you cant just do that, you need insurance and stuff. So now I am making my own Medicare/Medicaid and hope to bring all of my work into a single payer system. There is no way I can pull this off, my only hope is to attract the attention of some really smart people that will tell me why and how I am a moron and how to fix it, lol.
I would love to talk about my work with someone but i'm kind of still scared because its not in a state that is 100% ready for end users and I know everyone is just going to laugh at me, lol. Hell I laugh at me. But I worked at goop and i know more than everyone there so i'm kind of like ... fuck it. Just code / Fierce Nerd blah blah <insert-some-rationalization-here>.
Right now I am having fun exploring the world of BHM HMS modules, its far less regulated than I thought it would be which might not be a good thing, but we will see. I am going to do a "Show HN" soon but I want to publish feedback from my active patients and providers first.
As someone with autoimmune issues who rarely checks HN but is very interested in your work, do you have a newsletter I could sign up for or an email address I could reach out to to receive updates on your work?
Yes, I also am dying to just talk to anyone about my work and what I am trying to do. I am very approachable and I CRAVE the most vicious, critical feedback that I can find. You can email me (email on profile) as the newsletter stuff will not be done for at least 1 month.
Well, this was finally the thing that made me get an HN account, because I am really interested in talking with someone about that kind of stuff. I can't see an e-mail in your profile though, and as far as I understand noone can see your email you supplied in the email field, and your about section looks empty to me.
Because I am "literally" trying to recreate a better version of medicare and Medicaid. Those terms are not trademarked. If you look at Medicare.gov and Medicare.com you can see, the term is actually used a ton and the gov does not care. They care much more about bad-faith actors. One of the main benefits is I don't have to tell "regular" people what I am trying to do. This is my "moon-shot project so even if it was an issue I would not change it just to cause a big fuss and get the press from it. The bigger issue was using all of the state HHS logos, but they don't really care about that either.
In preparation for my big launch I needed to test the "do they care" theory so I literally did 2 press releases.
1 targeted directly at the D.C. area and one nationally, every contact they have made with me has been a positive interaction.
I paid for someone to handle this for me, really embarrassed by the title but in their defense I have won 7 health hackathons; much of that work inspired what I am doing here.
Ideally I get to a point where my systems are so much better than theres that I can promote services from .dev to .gov, I really have not thought that far ahead but I would love to discuss.
I'm not a trademark lawyer so take this as you will, but the term Medicare has been trademarked since 1957, assigned to the Executive Director of the US Army.
Just because you haven't run into a trademark issue yet doesn't mean that you will not in the future. And I don't think I'd want to be fighting the US Army lawyers for the naming rights.
I love your initiative, but you may want to look into the naming issue a bit further (since this is what trademarks are explicitly designed for, to prevent confusion about one product/service doing the same thing under the same name).
What in the everliving biohacking heck? I though I was leaning into things by modulating my caffeine levels based on workload (just dissolved in liquid and pouring out X mls based on need). I've thought about having a dispenser I could track metered doses with, but arionhardison here has a robotic pill press. Man, I gotta up my game now.
I wouldn't be comfortable without some sort of closed loop to be reasonably confident it was dispensing what it claims. Also helps to have the active ingredient pre-diluted so you are mechanically capped at a certain volume.
I am using pre-diluted (or mash paste) in some cases, I have no idea how else to do it. I would actually need a mechanical weighting system and that would be really hard to manage. Moda was not really a liquid mixture but more of a paste at this point and I use stops in the vile. For example. Each vile has 5 stops and each stop has a MG associated with it. There are smarter ways of doing this im sure but they involve more ME than I know how to do.
Wow. That’s... bold. One suggestion, maybe have it email your dosing to a trusted person so a human being can at least establish whether the numbers look approximately right? Although that still doesn’t cover any mechanical failures unless you’ve got a rock solid redundant closed loop setup. To be honest, the whole thing sounds ill advised, but I guess you already knew that.
< unless you’ve got a rock solid redundant closed loop setup
I do not
I do not even know who I would send it to honestly.
I am obsessed with this work now which is why I am expanding my provider network to other countries.
I found that things I think are "experimental" are much more common overseas probably due to a lack of regulatory controls but the result is that there are really smart people with a plethora of knowledge about these things as where my western doctors were not that knowledgeable or willing to really listen.
If you have any suggestions it would be awesome if you could email me.
I'd imagine having a strict boundary between "software thing that calculates how much you need" and "robot thing that mixes stuff together" would help, and you'd set up guardrails and unit tests on the calculation part.
Worst case you could have physical guardrails such as "can't take more than x mg per week" in the form of only supplying a certain amount of raw materials and topping off intermittently. If you run out you find out sooner instead of a month later.
I am using a 5 stop vile system right now, I don't even know if thats a thing the big boys do or not but its the only way I knew to handle things without needing to using lasers or mechanical weighting systems; both of which I have not the least bit understanding of.
LMAO, this was really funny. I did not really think of it as blind I just wanted to remove confirmation bias. I saw so much of that at goop. I have no formal training and I just learn on the fly and try to execute. I have no doubt there are better and smarter ways, I would love critical feedback here or via email.
I'm not sure I have any useful advice; I get the impression you're doing incredibly well for someone with no formal training. On the one hand you might benefit from someone with a more rigorous background helping you avoid known non-obvious risks, but on the other hand almost all such people are going to run screaming because your risk tolerance is way higher than theirs. Having a chronic condition for which the existing treatments are inadequate really sucks. I wish you luck and safety.
(For the "era of higher risk tolerance", the good old "Ignition!" by John D Clarke is a fun read from the era when the official US rocket fuels programme consisted of just lighting stuff on fire and seeing what happened)
All of my "buddies" kind of abandoned me pre-pandemic. Much of what was driving me here was boredom, curiosity and solitude.
The CEO/Founder at my old job used to kind of check-in on me from time to time via slack, she thought my work was cool which kind of helped me keep going once I was no longer at the company.
Having worked in research on Crohn's this sounds wild.
Why would you not take the biologics if you can afford them? Side effects?
What you do is of high risk to yourself and of no value to others.
Let's discuss in public, I think others might be interested. What do you mean by scale?
Are you saying that the biologica are too expensive and you are looking for cheaper solutions? Apart from the price AFAIK they are the best known solution.
In that case hurting yourself trying to find sth. cheaper is not worth it, because:
a) it is bad for you
b) it doesn't help others either, since even if your special cocktail ends up working for you it will most likely not work for others.
I would focus on making tnf-a blockers cheaper, probably by circumventing or straight out ignoring the patents. This stuff is not rocket science anymore.
Have you researched the prices in other countries? Looks like in Europe its below 2k€ per month but more around 20k in the us? Whats the price in India?
> Let's discuss in public, I think others might be interested. What do you mean by scale? Are you saying that the biologica are too expensive and you are looking for cheaper solutions? Apart from the price AFAIK they are the best known solution.
In that case hurting yourself trying to find sth. cheaper is not worth it, because: a) it is bad for you b) it doesn't help others either, since even if your special cocktail ends up working for you it will most likely not work for others.
OK, lets start with just the official stuff that they actually admit.
HUMIRA can cause serious side effects including hepatitis B infection in carriers of the virus, allergic reactions, nervous system problems, blood problems, heart failure, certain immune reactions including a lupus-like syndrome, liver problems, and new or worsening psoriasis.
Do you see a trend here? Auto-immune treatment causes more auto-iummune diseases. Thats real sus to me.
> I would focus on making tnf-a blockers cheaper, probably by circumventing or straight out ignoring the patents. This stuff is not rocket science anymore.
You are actually trained at this and I am not but I do not understand why youy would focus on alpha when beta is far more cytotoxic. Like I said, I don't have your training but that seems odd given the rate of colo rectal cancer in Crohn's patients.
Given that the entire family of drugs refers to Cytokines which is cell-death it seems a bit asinine to focus on alpha.
> Have you researched the prices in other countries? Looks like in Europe its below 2k€ per month but more around 20k in the us? Whats the price in India?
India does not sell the name brand I am familiar with; they have Zydus' Exemptia and its around $4,500 USD.
> What do you mean by scale?
I mean scale. Given that N patients have Crohn's and wish to treat themselves with Z. If Z is a finite resource what are the obstacles to Z being produced and distributed at a "scale" great enough to reach each patient, for life.
> it doesn't help others either, since even if your special cocktail ends up working for you it will most likely not work for others.
Please provide some form of empirical evidence to support this position, I was saying in private because I have actual clinical outcomes that i can report form myself and a number of others, but doing so publicly is not ethical or legal; HIPPA and all.
Can you expand a bit more on what you meant when you said you were a researcher? Possibly point me to a white paper or jupiter notebook, anything so that I may get a better understanding of your work.
I do not even know how to begin to address the reductive nature of pharma disco and production "not being rocket science" other than to state the obvious, yes it's not rocket science its bio chem.
I am sure i'm just missing something given that you work professionally in the field.
FYI: It has nothing to do w/ the price at all, even on the worst medical/medicare plan humera is only 250 for 2 viles and it was less, now it just has the extra lux tax.
Yeah I was kind of confused about this when I was reading through the spec trying to figure out what went wrong. I wanted to touch on this in the blog post, but I wasn't able to find a good resource explaining the advantage for mixing endianness in a file format.
Because the important thing about those fields is that they aren't really big endian at all, they're clearly ASCII characters. Why the spec you have decided to say they were big endian is beyond me.
The WAV format is not mixed-endian; everything that’s actually a number is little-endian.
The fields the diagram in the article marks as “big endian” are ASCII text— four-byte strings with specific content (“RIFF” for the first ChunkID, “WAVE” for the Format, etc.). If you wanted to treat those as integers in your code, you’d need to treat them as big-endian so their byte order doesn’t get reversed, but they’re really four-byte sequences, not numbers.
Obviously not ideal, but it could for instance come up when the file format has one overall endianness but wants to include fragments of data conventionally encoded with the opposite endianness. Trivial example would be a .tar file containing an assortment of other files, but this would also include say embedding network endian data or images within a larger file that contains other data.
I've had this come up with composite data formats. If your data formats includes already existing data formats and they do not all agree on an endianness you are basically stuck with being inconsistent about it.
I made a janky AR rig with a webcam taped to an Oculus DK2 as part of a hackathon. My code ran at 15fps. after taking off the goggles, my vision was 15fps.
If anyone has trouble with normal (not-obviously-broken) VR, I recommend Yoga for Building VR Tolerance. https://web.archive.org/web/20190813004505/http://elevr.com:... The research organization ran out of funding but IMO they had some groundbreaking stuff. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive at least.
I've been slowly building a homemade quadcopter over the last few years. One of the first times I tested it out it with all 4 motors it immediately headed my direction and caught me in the ankle before I could get out of the way. Nothing a bandaid couldn't fix but it sure sucked.
Not exactly but I've been mashed, crushed, cut, scraped, shocked (static), etc. many times by the FIRST robotics team robot I mentored as code ran haywire.
One time I got run over by my FRC robot causing me to shout a profanity around a bunch of probably very disappointed adults at the competition. Not my proudest moment...
The story is we were testing some autonomous code I wrote and it stopped moving because it was hanging waiting for on some sensor data. Without remembering to disable the robot first, I walked over to it and found the sensor wasn’t plugged in properly. Plugging it in, the code started running again and proceeded to drive up and on to me...
Nowadays that I work with industrial robot arms (specifically ones with 24,000 RPMs of death on the end of them) I am very aware of how important safety practices are knowing how easy it is to slip up.
Mistake #1: Should not have had my volume that loud.
I always keep the volume low enough that a full-amplitude noise wouldn't be anywhere near physically painful to listen to, but then again most of the stuff I listen to is ultra-compressed already...
Of course, the actual bug is that the audio is in units of samples, which are only 1 byte in the case of mono 8-bit format, so treating the file as being 8bps mono when it could be 16bps mono, 8bps stereo (far more subtle difference in the case of byte misalignment), 16bps stereo, or any of a number of other formats is always going to lead to cases where this could occur.
I once wanted to run my Bash script (for archiving photos) through ShellCheck. I will never know, but I had to do something terribly wrong, as it started to remove my root directory... Thankfully, didn't had root privileges, so "only" resulted in nuking my home folder.
I once copied a Terraform directory & changed all the confit values to match the new environment I wanted to spin up. Unfortunately I forgot to remove the Terraform state files. So running “terraform apply” did a great job of spinning up the new environment, right after it tore down the old one.
A long time ago in a university far-far away, I stayed up for several days straight writing code for an aerial robotics platform. I was so focused on writing this code that even my dreams were trying really hard to be expressed in perl. I woke up extremely tense and in a sweat because I couldn't figure out how to express a strong emotion in perl.
As for the harm, well ... that code led to a marriage which catastrophically failed. Lesson learned: keep code and emotions away from each other.
Not my own code, exactly, but back in the day I was trying to get a balky dot-matrix print head working and accidentally sent power to it while I was holding it.
I had a row of dots tattooed on the ball of my thumb for a year or two afterward.
I once programmed an arduino driving multiple solenoids with felting needles at pretty high speeds (wool felting uses needles to push wool fibers together into shapes), all pointing to the same target area, at slightly different timings. In the perfect case, it worked really well. Felting needles however bend and break with heavy use, leading to colliding felting needles projecting toward my hand. Ouch.
I learned that you could pipe anything to any device. Decided thirteen-year-old me was an avant-garde artist who would pipe my hard-drive to my speakers and create beautiful works. Was that just a `cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/snd` or something like that?
Incomprehensible shrieking. Later that year, someone posted about the thing that would become the Internet phenomenon called 'Anonymous'. I am certain that idea was birthed from the wailing portal of hell I summoned that day.
I've melted a table once. Was testing a heat controller, and had the debugger left on.
When the laptop the debugger was running turned off, it also stopped the code from running on the microcontroller, leaving the heater on without adding any new controls.
It was a good learning to make sure there's a watch dog circuit, and that the microcontroller is much less trustworthy than the fpga
I've done this debugging a system with a pneumatic controller on one of the threads. Hit a breakpoint with the compressor still running and after a minute, hoses start blowing off. It happened often enough that we learned to not use hose clamps since losing a hose connection was a safe failure point.
However, I've read about the same thing happening to a couple guys testing a tank turret rotation controller. Controller is paused at a breakpoint, but a hardware counter is still accepting error pulses. Start running again and the error built up enough to command a full speed slew, sending the engineer who was sitting on the turret slamming into the wall, breaking a few bones.
I can think of two examples. The first is somebody else's that I helped them with, and the second is mine. Context: Mid-2000's snack-sized hosting company with less than 10 employees.
A customer with a dedicated server called in one day. I knew him well, and he I. It was that kind of company and I loved it. Anyhow, he called in and said "I've been hacked!" I asked him to explain the problem and he said that his server wasn't working right and wouldn't reboot. I looked into it, and a ton of things were missing from the file system. /bin, /boot, /dev, etc. Gone. So I did a restore of the server and got it back online.
He called me up an hour or two later "I've been hacked again!" Same problem. Same solution.
An hour later he called me up, sheepish. "I think it might be ME. Every time I think it's happening every time I run this command." I managed to get him to email me the command he was running, verbatim (he was copy/pasting it into the shell) and it looked like this:
The other harm was my own. I was budding system administrator tasked with designing and deploying dedicated servers (this is before VPSs were a thing, and way before cloud computing). I challenged myself to learn Perl because the greybeard admin (who cut his teeth on PDP-11's) was a master at it and I could benefit from his tutelage. But I didn't. Instead I got the SAM's book on Perl and started learning. Having an interest in security, I decided that I'd write a simple Intrusion Detection System for our dedicated server products.
I don't have the code, but it's irrelevant. A the time one of the bigger problems was servers getting rooted due to various exploits. The attacker would rewrite /bin/ls with their own version that hid their executables. The solution (obviously right?) is to look at the md5sum of /bin/ls, and if it changes, the server must be rooted, right? So I wrote code that would shut down sshd, close the port, and display a message via `wall` that said something very much like:
System Modification Detected! Shutting down system and alerting security staff. YOU HAVE BEEN CAUGHT! BUH BYE!
I was very pleased with myself. I couldn't understand why the aforementioned greybeard didn't revel in my brilliance. sigh I deployed the script on a cron job and felt very satisfied with my good work. Until a call came in. "Yeah, I ran a yum update, got some message about being caught, and now I can't get into my system."
Yeah that's right. I'd hard coded the md5sum for /bin/ls and had no means of updating it. I've since forgotten Perl but I never forgot this lesson: Take everything into account. Spend less time coding and more time thinking about what you're building and how it'll affect others. Since then I've written several utilities that are/were in use at the hosting companies I work(ed) for and I saved people countless time, effort, and trouble. But it sure didn't start out that way!
I’ve gradually developed the same instincts around mechanical and home improvement tasks. “How could this five-minute task turn into a multi-hour nightmare?”
Examples could be spilling a poorly placed can of paint all over the carpet, or having a nearly unobtainable fastener fall somewhere inaccessible (or where it can do damage).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadStill, this is how we learn. We make some ridiculously bad choices and we hope to learn from those.
I guess what I am saying is: if you are looking at past work and feeling bad/embarrased, likely you have gotten better.
One day I had some friends over for a glass of wine, and wanted to show off my creation. I invited them into my "lab" and placed my wine glass down on the desk so I could type a few commands with both hands.
My rudimentary software had some motion smoothing once it was up and running, but upon initialization, if the arm was significantly displaced from where it had been when it was turned off, the PWM board would instruct the motor to immediately "be" in a position that required the arm to travel clear across the desk in effectively as little time as possible.
In this case, where it had been previously happened to be where my wine glass was now, and the flimsy aluminum at high speed was enough to shear the stem from the glass and explode the bulb. Luckily the wine didn't get in any sensitive electronics, but I learned a valuable lesson about the difference between messing around with hardware vs software.
One key observation, though, when working with code is that the machine becomes so close to predictable that it's more dangerous than if it were unpredictable. A cordless handheld drill is hardly a tool that most people would call 'hazardous'. You turn the trigger, the thing rotates, grab the chuck and you can likely stall it. But that much energy in something driven by code is extremely dangerous, it's waiting for any of who knows how many conditions to take off, a common one is that putting your hands in/on something that seems to be not moving can 'make' a sensor and the machine will take off.
There are definitely two kinds of safety domains, one applies to manually operated tools where the operator of, say, a knife is responsible for their own safety - if they cut themselves, they're at fault, not the knifemaker. There's another kind of safety engineering where if the machine takes off 'by itself' while an operator is in the way it's the machine designer's fault for not stopping that from happening, the operator can't be expected to know what's going on.
The latter should become more common as computers continue to permeate everything we use - that cordless drill is no longer controlled by the operator with a trigger switch that connects power to a DC motor, it's a brushless motor driver with an analog input sensing the position of the trigger and the EMF of the motor, and the charge state of the batteries, and who knows what else. Bump a sensor and it might take off, you don't know why it does what it does.
I'll continue to make my automated cells as safe as I can, but don't trust code that's not so simple you can be confident of how it works.
A friend needed a valve cover gasket changed on his Honda, and his wife needed to use the car for her Uber runs that night. He came over and instead of our usual hand tools I put a socket adapter on my 20V drill to speed up disassembly. I handed the drill to him and told him "start on the lowest torque setting, and move up in small steps."
I turned around to grab more tools from the toolbox. A minute later, I heard a loud noise. I turned to see the car's windshield cracked and a shocked look on my friend's face.
My friend was used to his renter's power drill. He hadn't anticipated how much torque a modern contractor's drill outputs and set the torque to the maximum setting. On the third valve cover bolt, the drill had caught on the bolt head and spun my friend around, smashing the battery into the windshield.
There's a piece of paper taped to me toolbox called "List of things <friend's name> may not attempt unsupervised." It gained a couple of entries that day...
Relevant old article: http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
But that same drill might be asked to bore a large hole in a piece of wood, and the user would anticipate the amount of leverage they need to control it. Two hands, arms close to body, etc.
That is often the difference between home and tradesman tools. A tradesman can reasonably be expected to handle a bit more responsibility from their tools than the home handyman.
For a continuous drilling operation the torque is totally fine, the problem is abrupt changes in torque because of something catching. On drills without this feature that's what the torque limiting clutch is for.
We actually had an older drill with the mechanical clutch with a stripped high gear that we kept around for driving screws instead of tossing because the new one was so bad.
A lower power (e.g. 300Nm max) battery driver is great for when you have to undo lots of lower sized bolts, while it would be a little bit underpowered for wheel nuts or motorcycle fork retaining bolts.
They're supposed to tentioned correctly with a torque wrench, usually between about 110 and 120Nm.
Edit to add a reference, just random from a search: https://www.barum-tyres.com/car/expert-advice/safety-driving...
And for that purpose, it does seem appropriate.
However my point still stands, somewhat: if 300Nm is insufficient to undo your wheelnuts, they're way too tight.
Ducati single-sided swingarm nuts can be similar, but I have not yet owned a Ducati.
You should image-search the term "radial drill" sometime. ;)
$21: https://www.amazon.com/Irwin-Tools-Drill-Press-226340/dp/B00...
$25: https://www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-jaw-capacity-drill-pres...
You don't need a high-dollar Kurt milling vise for a drill press, and you only need to constrain the part in one degree of freedom (rotation about Z axis). Just put a single fastener in your table and drop the slots in that vise over it. Gravity and quill pressure hold it in Z, the table holds it flat against rotation about X and Y, and you want it to have the ability to slide a bit in X and Y to let the drill find the center of your punch/pilot hole. If the drill catches, the torque will push against the stud and it can't move.
Back in 2002, I was getting a package with a brand new Pocket PC (smartphone without the phone, running Windows). And I really wanted to know when it was delivered, but the UPS guy would regularly leave packages on the porch without ringing the bell or anything.
This was before you could get delivery alerts or anything like that. But I had a spare laptop with an integrated webcam (wow!), and I'd figured out how to make it run actions on motion detection.
My plan was to point the laptop at the door, and eject the CD drive when it detected motion. The tray of the drive would push a water bottle off the table. That would land on a seesaw, which would launch a deck of cards in a hard plastic case at the door and make a very loud noise.
It's unclear why I couldn't just play a really sound on the speakers instead. Anyway, I tested the program by standing in front of the laptop and waving my hand.
It worked perfectly! The CD tray ejected, and I watched as the water bottle slowly rolled off the table. It dropped onto the seesaw...... and instantly launched a hard plastic deck at my face and got me right between the eyes.
Never again have I been in so much pain and also so excited about my code working perfectly at the exact same time.
Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something.
It totally doesn't make any sense! I think I might have been fascinated with the idea of Rube Goldberg machines or something at the time. Or maybe I thought I could build a "security system" with it? Also it was summer and I was a bored teenager.
I used to have multiple clamps around the controller, message bus, the firmware and also a physical barrier, and yet would not feel safe with my fingers or person around moving parts.
It’s weird how even ordinary things can be dangerously loud.
There was an absolutely almighty BANG, of the 'an explosion has just occurred' variety that made me very glad I wasn't actually cutting metal at that precise point in time. His g-code had an off-by-one error (I think) and it had dutifully picked up a ~20 cm HUGE flycutter, spun it at the speed of of a ~5 mm bull nose cutter, and driven it directly down into a piece of aluminium. The flycutter had broken and effectively welded itself to the aluminium, which had sheared down the middle, spun out, and hit the protective guards that completely encompass the machine. The person driving it (either a postdoc or graduate student) was maybe 40 cm away and saw this ~2 kg piece of metal bounce off a thick reinforced poylcarbonate guard directly at the level of his head.
Safety equipment saves lives.
It was close to lunch, so I kept eating.
The finale was a jar of mayo spilled into the guts of a 50k server. Best mayo I ever had.
Anyway, try out a Point Chaud. Same overflowing sandwiches.
I once bought one, I walked out the shop and 45 meters later the sandwich literally went through the paper bag and fell down on the ground.
Or a dental x-ray machine has the final "run" button in the hallway so the nurse taking x-rays must go there to do it, so they don't get repeated exposure.
You're supposed to turn off the circuit breaker and lock it with your own personal lock that only you have the key to. That way no one can turn it on even if they wanted to.
I've heard no one, under any circumstances is allowed to take the lock off. If the person leaves after their shift and forgets to take it off for example, they have to come back in the middle of the night so to speak and take it off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockout–tagout
It's not only electricity that needs to be isolated and locked out. A lot of machines use air pressure to operate moving parts, so in that case you'd have to isolate all electrical sources as well as the air. The machines I usually mess with require 2 locks. Some of the machines I've seen can require 6 or more locks to be fully locked out and safe to work on.
A typical maintenance period might require 100 or so separate tagouts, each of which could require anywhere from one to dozens of tags. Each duty watch was required to show up early enough to go through the entire tagout book and at least know the gist of what was in progress.
Finding a loose tag was an automatic all hands all work stoppage, until it was tracked down and resolved. No questions, even if your work was in a different compartment, or had no logical connection to what he tag was for.
Each new tagout request had to be signed off on by at least three people, sometimes all the way up to the captain and not just a foreman or supervisor but one or more shop heads.
Seawater system tagouts on a floating sub were serious business.
Sadly the inventor couldn't convince the tablesaw manufacturers to use his invention for cost and/or liability reasons so he had to make his own. Their tablesaws themselves are relatively expensive but cost per accident is $100 for the charge plus whatever the blade costs, so basically $200 to prevent serious injury or death.
So on a worksite if you are using lumber that hasn't had adequate time to dry the saw stop would trip even without any limbs being in danger.
Each time it would destroy itself, you would have to take the saw apart and change it which would cause a work stoppage.
What irks me the most is that the SawStop owner tried to create legislation that would have required companies to use his product.
The lobbying is off putting, yes, but at least his greedy self-interest would do some actual good instead of extracting evermore capital from everyone. Powertools inhabit this uncanny valley of dangerous equipment where they're cheap and accessible enough to the average joe (compared to CNC machining centers or forklifts or whatever) yet powerful enough to do some real damage. My understanding is that the primary reason the major manufacturers didn't want the SawStop wasn't cost but the fear that it would expose them to more liability by making the tools seem less dangerous. I really wish it achieves mass adoption so that the price drops even further.
The problem with causing $300 of destruction and lost work time vs possibly saving a limb is there's no fine woodworking operation or framing carpentry operation that requires a table saw. Technically if you feel unsafe working with a table saw you can do absolutely everything very slowly and tediously with a router or router table or bandsaw, or manual tools like a chisel and hammer. Anyone concerned about safety doesn't use a saw stop, they use an entirely different technology than a table saw. If you make a table saw too safe or too expensive to actually use, people will simply use something else. The death toll may or may not be lower...
From a marketing perspective, the people most likely to buy a saw stop because they're scared of table saws will save a lot of money by not buying either sawstop or table saw, and they'll cut dado slots using a hand held router (more dangerous in a different way) or break down plywood using a tracksaw (unholy expensive and many crushed foot injuries) or cut beveled edges on a router table or zillions of alternatives. Meanwhile the people who don't care about safety because they're not drinking on the job or they actually use the substantial amount of safety gear that makes a table saw perfectly safe OR they only do operations on the table saw that are inherently safe by nature (as opposed to relatively low risk operations, and some very high risk operations that people do anyway), will continue to save a lot of money by the combo of not being dumb and not buying sawstop. Finally the real dumb woodworkers who get drunk and get hurt or simply don't care, will continue to not care and not buy sawstop and will not live too much longer in a world either with sawstop or without table saws anyway, so its not like the world will net improve, the Darwin award winners will continue to win Darwin awards. So sawstop is a VERY hard sell.
A similar problem is well manufactured table saws are safer than homemade table saws. The concept of "put a round blade on a motor" is too simple to legislate out of existence. So making table saws illegal wouldn't eliminate table saws it would just mean the homemade ones will make table saws, on average, more dangerous.
Arguably, radial arm saws are more dangerous than table saws and "the marketplace" effectively eliminated those decades ago, so its not like the marketplace dislikes safety or whatever.
For table saws, having a sawstop helps prevent situations that you don't have fill control over from having bad consequences. Of course you'd still use all the same safety measures you normally would without one.
There's another class of accident involving equipment. Some people do not store firearms with trigger locks or unloaded in safes or whatever. Likewise there's an analogy with table saws where I don't rip small boards without a nice featherboard, riving knife, and some really nice plastic pushsticks. If as you claim my mind drifted, this time by use of tools it would still be physically impossible to hurt myself.
There is a class of inherently dangerous operations where no safety tools exist but the table saw is so versatile and flexible people can successfully do the operation... most of the time. My point is instead of spending more money to build a "better" tablesaw to do something dumb, simply invest the money in a COTS bandsaw or track saw or jigsaw hole cutting jig or chainsaw or planer or whatever crazy risky thing there's a better, faster, safer tool. You can do dangerous things with a table saw but there's always a better safer faster way to do it with a different tool. Taking away money by making the required table saw more expensive just means the woodworker will not be able to afford the superior even safer tool for the job.
All the evidence I've found is super cloudy, but early reports indicated Bosch's variant predated SawStop's release.
Luckily SawStop's patents expire in a few years so hopefully we'll see other safety mechanisms similar to SawStop without the downsides and greed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV6Jhw0hhBI (at ~3 min)
Not everybody's cup of tea, but our ability to be 'present' is highly variable, both person-to-person, and one person over time. I'm a somewhat daydreamy sort of person, so I work to bring focus when I'm using power tools. As a hobbyist I walk out of my shop when I get tired, emotional, or otherwise distracted, but that's not an option for everyone.
Is there any proof of this? From my understanding, that's a myth. Demonstrated here at about 3:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV6Jhw0hhBI
It's also saved a few legit fingers, so it's still a net win, but you've got to have pretty deep pockets to cover all the false trips.
You’d be surprised at the number of materials you might want to cut on a table saw that are unexpectedly conductive.
Every tablesaw injury I remember hearing about involved the operator failing to follow some of those guidelines.
Of course, the weakness of a system like this being if middle management is demanding unachievable timelines and/or people in the shop are willing to cut corners, someone can leave a box of heavy stuff on the pressure pad to "save time." Absolutely right that all these systems need to be resilient to operator tiredness etc
What does this mean?
I'm just glad that ultimately he was the only one who faced physical consequences for his poor choices. And thankful that the consequences weren't that bad at the end of the day; a broken arm is way better than a cracked open skull.
That made me actually lol.
[0] https://www.rifftrax.com/shake-hands-with-danger
I would assume he'd be the poster-child for following safety protocols after that. But I'm still learning a lot about human nature.
Is he next to the malfunctioning robot?
In other words, some person did something very stupid, while thinking he is clever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix68oRfI5Gw&t=732s (12m12s)
Back when I was doing some hands-on practical training in electric engineering school, we had to design a control circuit on some breadboard, the kind that in high school would lit a couple of leds, and maybe make a light fade, but here it was driving a big-ass train engine boxed in a 1.5m x 1.5m x 3m steel cage, right next to the bench where we pieced the control device together, barely arms length away.
While conceptually the same, "theory" vs "practice" and "command" vs "power" suddenly takes a whole new meaning where you're suddenly pushing several orders of magnitude more power than a puny 9V battery could. The buzzing of a hundred amps ready to flow inches away was chillingly ominous. You get a strange urge to triple check, quad check even, design and calculations before flicking the switch.
As we all successfully started up our bench, the rumbling of a dozen of these bare protomachines revving up in a hangar was eerie. The thought of them sucking in such an amount of overall power from the grid dizzying. I rarely get cold-sweat and goose bumps, but this was one of these days.
She mentioned that this had happened to a v high end CNC machine the cutting tool after a power cut went straight to the home position very $$$$$$$
At my place we had a computer controlled wave tank and as the guy I shared an office with said you could program the ram to go full travel in zero time which would have flooded the lab.
Tesla Autopilot developers should read this.
The motors were quite powerful and there were a few close calls which really made you think.
It used to twitch violently as it was calibrating on initializing. Once, it reset and did that while testing. Luckily the person holding it managed to get his hands out of the handles on time.
Another tim the tip of one instrument had broken off and during initialization there was an error in the force applied in the direction along the shaft. It flew out like a rocket.
I put the headset on, and quickly noticed things weren't working right. I was walking around, trying to figure out what the issue was. Trying walking back any forth looking at a wall in front of me, I felt terrible pain. Something about the left and right eyes seeing movement in different directions across their entire field of view really breaks the brain. It was very sharp and localized too.
The brain's perception system is weird.
I spent maybe 20 seconds in VR with skewed floor and it felt horribly wrong. And the whole evening my sense of ballance and perception was broken not to be the point of falling over but the real world around me felt wrong. Only after I slept my brain fixed itself.
This kind of unconstrained motion is notoriously hard on VR players, and I felt a bit uneasy the whole time when I was navigating this way, but then I made a mistake. I wanted to rotate myself, so I instinctively grabbed two handles and made a sideways hand motion, sending myself into a fast spin. I almost puked, and even after taking the VR headset off, I kept feeling nauseous for the rest of the day. Like in your case, my brain fixed itself when I fell asleep, and I woke up feeling fine.
Since the brain and the body are wired up pretty closely - this is not so weird at all.
As for me... I've certainly made it so things that shouldn't be hot to the touch are hot to the touch.
I once had someone leave me a message on my desk phone referring to one of these comments verbosely, and I happened to be listening to my messages on speakerphone as the day was almost over and we were all doing our little ritual tasks before we walked out the doors for the evening. So, this comment starts being read and all my neighbors are packing up their lunchboxes or tidying papers on desks, etc. As the message went on, I could hear the silence enveloping me, because of course it was wildly heinous, and I just froze up and let it play out. It wasn't that I couldn't have jumped over there and hung up the phone but it was so casual that it just caught me off guard that someone would read that awful crap I wrote right into my voicemail! I remember the end being sorta like "anyhow, that's not a very good practice, so don't write them like that anymore". I don't really even remember exactly what happened next other than leaving with my tail between my legs. I don't think anybody mentioned it to me. I guess it seemed worse in the moment of it.
This was well over 20 years ago now, I was basically brand new to everything. That was a turning point, thankfully enough.
Reading open source has exposed me to a LOT of different commenting practices. I don't really think about it often enough, but the human on other side is always the most important consideration.
Yes, I have Crohn's and I do not like to take the meds or listen to the doctors. This is NOT AT ALL SOMETHING I RECOMMEND, PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT IT.
Crohn's is an auto-immune disease and the main class of drugs that is used to treat Crohn's like mine (long term) are called TNF inhibitors or TNF blockers.
TNF alpha triggers the production of several immune system molecules, including interleukin-1 and interleukin-6. I realized I can track this with basic inflammatory marker test, I also realized that I could use diet to impact my markers. So instead of taking what is referred to as a Biologic e.g.: Adalimumab, Certolizumab etc... I started using NIO to try and get the same effect.
I got a pill making machine, and learned how to make supplements but they were not working well enough so I knew I needed something stronger. Then I found this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32311496/ I think it was on HN but I do not remember for sure. I order some modafinil and worked it into my mixture.
I do not manually create my mixtures because I do not want to know which version I am on, I want my symptoms to go away and that should be the trigger to tell me if its working. So I have a 14 vile setup with an audrino all wired into my press and based on my food diary (e.g.: nutrient intake) it decides how much of what should go into a run. e.g.: how much burdok, tumeric, serrapeptase etc...
I got something wrong and ended up adding far too much to a run of pills, I didn't realize this until i started ti see floaters in my eye and I checked to see how much moda was left and it was far less than should have been left.
Then i did some reading and a side effect of taking too much moda can be detached retnas, since I have all the symptoms: Floaters, stars and peripheral flashes I am assuming that based on the timing I now have detached retnas, I also found my mistake and essentially no matter where my markers were I was getting about 600mg of moda per day. Which is far more than should be taken. This was for about a 1 month period.
I have fixed the issue now and I have a much more sophisticated pipeline but I will have to get this fixed.
NOTE: I am not a doctor, I have no college education or anything like that. I just like bio-hacking and decided to pursue my moonshot during the pandemic. I can explain more or provide pics and vids to explain further if you like, email in profile.
I am currently writing up a 100% independent non peer reviewed case study to document everything I have done and the results.
Since you seem to be into experimental treatment, have you ever tried helminthic treatment?
https://www.healthline.com/health/crohns-disease/hook-worms
I was running an outpatient program for alternative therapies before I knew that you cant just do that, you need insurance and stuff. So now I am making my own Medicare/Medicaid and hope to bring all of my work into a single payer system. There is no way I can pull this off, my only hope is to attract the attention of some really smart people that will tell me why and how I am a moron and how to fix it, lol.
I would love to talk about my work with someone but i'm kind of still scared because its not in a state that is 100% ready for end users and I know everyone is just going to laugh at me, lol. Hell I laugh at me. But I worked at goop and i know more than everyone there so i'm kind of like ... fuck it. Just code / Fierce Nerd blah blah <insert-some-rationalization-here>.
Right now I am having fun exploring the world of BHM HMS modules, its far less regulated than I thought it would be which might not be a good thing, but we will see. I am going to do a "Show HN" soon but I want to publish feedback from my active patients and providers first.
In preparation for my big launch I needed to test the "do they care" theory so I literally did 2 press releases.
1 targeted directly at the D.C. area and one nationally, every contact they have made with me has been a positive interaction.
https://www.kpvi.com/news/national_news/award-winning-progra...
I paid for someone to handle this for me, really embarrassed by the title but in their defense I have won 7 health hackathons; much of that work inspired what I am doing here.
Ideally I get to a point where my systems are so much better than theres that I can promote services from .dev to .gov, I really have not thought that far ahead but I would love to discuss.
https://trademarks.justia.com/890/00/medicare-89000008.html
Just because you haven't run into a trademark issue yet doesn't mean that you will not in the future. And I don't think I'd want to be fighting the US Army lawyers for the naming rights.
I love your initiative, but you may want to look into the naming issue a bit further (since this is what trademarks are explicitly designed for, to prevent confusion about one product/service doing the same thing under the same name).
https://medicare.com/
This i why I use medicare.dev and medicaid.dev and NEVER just use the naked terms.
This is also what I have seen everywhere else, can you point me in the right direction on this? I really appreciate the input.
I wouldn't be comfortable without some sort of closed loop to be reasonably confident it was dispensing what it claims. Also helps to have the active ingredient pre-diluted so you are mechanically capped at a certain volume.
I do not I do not even know who I would send it to honestly. I am obsessed with this work now which is why I am expanding my provider network to other countries.
I found that things I think are "experimental" are much more common overseas probably due to a lack of regulatory controls but the result is that there are really smart people with a plethora of knowledge about these things as where my western doctors were not that knowledgeable or willing to really listen.
If you have any suggestions it would be awesome if you could email me.
Worst case you could have physical guardrails such as "can't take more than x mg per week" in the form of only supplying a certain amount of raw materials and topping off intermittently. If you run out you find out sooner instead of a month later.
Double blind testing, in the "now unable to see in both eyes" sense?
(For the "era of higher risk tolerance", the good old "Ignition!" by John D Clarke is a fun read from the era when the official US rocket fuels programme consisted of just lighting stuff on fire and seeing what happened)
The CEO/Founder at my old job used to kind of check-in on me from time to time via slack, she thought my work was cool which kind of helped me keep going once I was no longer at the company.
In that case hurting yourself trying to find sth. cheaper is not worth it, because: a) it is bad for you b) it doesn't help others either, since even if your special cocktail ends up working for you it will most likely not work for others.
I would focus on making tnf-a blockers cheaper, probably by circumventing or straight out ignoring the patents. This stuff is not rocket science anymore.
Have you researched the prices in other countries? Looks like in Europe its below 2k€ per month but more around 20k in the us? Whats the price in India?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27305183
OK, lets start with just the official stuff that they actually admit.
HUMIRA can cause serious side effects including hepatitis B infection in carriers of the virus, allergic reactions, nervous system problems, blood problems, heart failure, certain immune reactions including a lupus-like syndrome, liver problems, and new or worsening psoriasis.
Do you see a trend here? Auto-immune treatment causes more auto-iummune diseases. Thats real sus to me.
> I would focus on making tnf-a blockers cheaper, probably by circumventing or straight out ignoring the patents. This stuff is not rocket science anymore.
You are actually trained at this and I am not but I do not understand why youy would focus on alpha when beta is far more cytotoxic. Like I said, I don't have your training but that seems odd given the rate of colo rectal cancer in Crohn's patients.
Given that the entire family of drugs refers to Cytokines which is cell-death it seems a bit asinine to focus on alpha.
> Have you researched the prices in other countries? Looks like in Europe its below 2k€ per month but more around 20k in the us? Whats the price in India?
India does not sell the name brand I am familiar with; they have Zydus' Exemptia and its around $4,500 USD.
> What do you mean by scale?
I mean scale. Given that N patients have Crohn's and wish to treat themselves with Z. If Z is a finite resource what are the obstacles to Z being produced and distributed at a "scale" great enough to reach each patient, for life.
> it doesn't help others either, since even if your special cocktail ends up working for you it will most likely not work for others.
Please provide some form of empirical evidence to support this position, I was saying in private because I have actual clinical outcomes that i can report form myself and a number of others, but doing so publicly is not ethical or legal; HIPPA and all.
Can you expand a bit more on what you meant when you said you were a researcher? Possibly point me to a white paper or jupiter notebook, anything so that I may get a better understanding of your work.
I do not even know how to begin to address the reductive nature of pharma disco and production "not being rocket science" other than to state the obvious, yes it's not rocket science its bio chem.
I am sure i'm just missing something given that you work professionally in the field.
FYI: It has nothing to do w/ the price at all, even on the worst medical/medicare plan humera is only 250 for 2 viles and it was less, now it just has the extra lux tax.
https://www.google.com/search?q=DDP+drug+discovery+pipeline&...
The fields the diagram in the article marks as “big endian” are ASCII text— four-byte strings with specific content (“RIFF” for the first ChunkID, “WAVE” for the Format, etc.). If you wanted to treat those as integers in your code, you’d need to treat them as big-endian so their byte order doesn’t get reversed, but they’re really four-byte sequences, not numbers.
It's tethered to a test-stand now.
> Look at an audio file's waveform before playing it at max volume.
That’s always good advice.
The story is we were testing some autonomous code I wrote and it stopped moving because it was hanging waiting for on some sensor data. Without remembering to disable the robot first, I walked over to it and found the sensor wasn’t plugged in properly. Plugging it in, the code started running again and proceeded to drive up and on to me...
Nowadays that I work with industrial robot arms (specifically ones with 24,000 RPMs of death on the end of them) I am very aware of how important safety practices are knowing how easy it is to slip up.
I always keep the volume low enough that a full-amplitude noise wouldn't be anywhere near physically painful to listen to, but then again most of the stuff I listen to is ultra-compressed already...
Of course, the actual bug is that the audio is in units of samples, which are only 1 byte in the case of mono 8-bit format, so treating the file as being 8bps mono when it could be 16bps mono, 8bps stereo (far more subtle difference in the case of byte misalignment), 16bps stereo, or any of a number of other formats is always going to lead to cases where this could occur.
As for the harm, well ... that code led to a marriage which catastrophically failed. Lesson learned: keep code and emotions away from each other.
I had a row of dots tattooed on the ball of my thumb for a year or two afterward.
Incomprehensible shrieking. Later that year, someone posted about the thing that would become the Internet phenomenon called 'Anonymous'. I am certain that idea was birthed from the wailing portal of hell I summoned that day.
When the laptop the debugger was running turned off, it also stopped the code from running on the microcontroller, leaving the heater on without adding any new controls.
It was a good learning to make sure there's a watch dog circuit, and that the microcontroller is much less trustworthy than the fpga
However, I've read about the same thing happening to a couple guys testing a tank turret rotation controller. Controller is paused at a breakpoint, but a hardware counter is still accepting error pulses. Start running again and the error built up enough to command a full speed slew, sending the engineer who was sitting on the turret slamming into the wall, breaking a few bones.
A customer with a dedicated server called in one day. I knew him well, and he I. It was that kind of company and I loved it. Anyhow, he called in and said "I've been hacked!" I asked him to explain the problem and he said that his server wasn't working right and wouldn't reboot. I looked into it, and a ton of things were missing from the file system. /bin, /boot, /dev, etc. Gone. So I did a restore of the server and got it back online.
He called me up an hour or two later "I've been hacked again!" Same problem. Same solution.
An hour later he called me up, sheepish. "I think it might be ME. Every time I think it's happening every time I run this command." I managed to get him to email me the command he was running, verbatim (he was copy/pasting it into the shell) and it looked like this:
The other harm was my own. I was budding system administrator tasked with designing and deploying dedicated servers (this is before VPSs were a thing, and way before cloud computing). I challenged myself to learn Perl because the greybeard admin (who cut his teeth on PDP-11's) was a master at it and I could benefit from his tutelage. But I didn't. Instead I got the SAM's book on Perl and started learning. Having an interest in security, I decided that I'd write a simple Intrusion Detection System for our dedicated server products.I don't have the code, but it's irrelevant. A the time one of the bigger problems was servers getting rooted due to various exploits. The attacker would rewrite /bin/ls with their own version that hid their executables. The solution (obviously right?) is to look at the md5sum of /bin/ls, and if it changes, the server must be rooted, right? So I wrote code that would shut down sshd, close the port, and display a message via `wall` that said something very much like:
I was very pleased with myself. I couldn't understand why the aforementioned greybeard didn't revel in my brilliance. sigh I deployed the script on a cron job and felt very satisfied with my good work. Until a call came in. "Yeah, I ran a yum update, got some message about being caught, and now I can't get into my system."Yeah that's right. I'd hard coded the md5sum for /bin/ls and had no means of updating it. I've since forgotten Perl but I never forgot this lesson: Take everything into account. Spend less time coding and more time thinking about what you're building and how it'll affect others. Since then I've written several utilities that are/were in use at the hosting companies I work(ed) for and I saved people countless time, effort, and trouble. But it sure didn't start out that way!
e.g.
- could cause this one page to fail to display - be ready to roll back, open the page asap once deployed
- could bring down the entire website - be ready to roll back, maybe try running this during off hours
- could delete the entire database - be ready with a backup to restore, maybe make sure your whole team is oncall at the time
- could cause ear damage - maybe play it with the headphones sitting next to you first
Examples could be spilling a poorly placed can of paint all over the carpet, or having a nearly unobtainable fastener fall somewhere inaccessible (or where it can do damage).