A very talented junior engineer joined our team. He puts a lot of pressure on himself and gets very bummed out when something he does isn’t perfect. He tries to do a million things at once and is at risk of burning out. I’m trying to help him manage his work, learn to take pr comments professionally (not personally), and help him have a healthy work/life balance.
I'm currently designing an "Automatic Rust", something high-level that will automatically implement the usual Rust patterns (generational indices, the occasional Vec or arena, and something I call a LifeCell), so we have fast and memory safe code with no run-time GC.<p>Rust's biggest challenge (IMO) is that the borrow checker makes the code very brittle... many changes which <i>should</i> be small end up causing widespread refactors. Not great for software engineering sometimes. Perhaps this approach will solve that.<p>Nailing down the perfect balance of all the techniques is challenging, but it's fun and looking promising =)
My personal problem: Coping with long Covid. If I talk, or walk for more than a few minutes, it wipes me out for a few hours.<p>The next year: Figuring out some form of employment compatible with the above, or navigating the bureaucracy to get disability.<p>Long term: Convincing people that we need to implement capability based security. Until that point, we're going to keep losing liberties in the name of cybersecurity (theater), and nothing will actually get better. It's the only way to actually own your computer.<p>Other: I want to find out if Bitgrid was a dumb or smart idea before I die, for real.
Working on making computer vision for robotics easier.<p>I feel like the real reason we don't have robots doing all of our physical grunt work, is that it is just way too expensive to develop robots that do advanced and custom things. Currently only big players with deep pockets can consider developing software for a robot that automates a task that requires some level of fine grained control or visual feedback.<p>The computer vision part is challenging as you need deep subject knowledge, you need to implement complicated algorithms and assemble huge datasets. We are working on a way to improve the efficiency of creating datasets, standard algorithm implementations and standardizing interfaces to make things as composable as possible.<p>It ain't much, but it's a start. <a href="https://www.strayrobots.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.strayrobots.io</a>
Automated theorem proving + neural language models + reinforcement learning.<p>I think most people seriously underestimate how powerful modern proof assistants like Lean [1] are for building things like provably correct software and chips, as well as verifying math research. But fully formalizing anything big leads to a proliferation of small annoying lemmas -- not "difficult" to prove per se, just annoying and time-wasting. I'm working on a neural theorem prover that aims to solve these lemmas fully automatically.<p>[1] <a href="https://leanprover.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://leanprover.github.io/</a>
Living life. It's an important project. Think small rather than big. Volunteer in your community. Hang out with family and friends. Garden. Barter. Reduce dependence. It will make a larger impact than other projects. YMMV.
Involuntary homelessness.<p>Trying to create a notepad based "OS" ui that devs and grandmas can use together.<p>Throwing events at my place and making free pizza for friends so we can keep community cohesion after our co-working space closed.
Working on machine learning infrastructure for self driving cars.<p>In my opinion, self driving cars are going to be a significant improvement in quality of life for people who do not have access to transportation (eg. the young and elderly, and people who are not able to drive for various reasons) or may need goods and food delivered at a cheaper rate than what is currently available.
Dynamic storage allocation (DSA) from the fragmentation perspective.<p>DSA is as important for programming as control flow statements. Yet we keep ignoring the fact that it is not understood--see Wilson et al's "DSA: A Survey and Critical Review" for one of the best problem statements of all time.<p>Fragmentation is DSA's (and every Tetris player's) main enemy. Believe it or not, we haven't managed to converge on how to measure it yet.<p>I am working on a tool that a) computes an approximately optimal fragmentation value per application and b) also computes fragmentation for arbitrary app/allocator pairs.
Personal/financial success issue:<p>Trying to figure out my life. I work a job I'm starting to hate because it's dead-end, but it pays well for what it is. Mentally exhausting though.<p>I haven't had time anymore to find something else, and to make it worse, it's not tech-related (in a broad sense, not just FAANG).<p>I'm kind of stuck where I am for a bit, but it pays the bills. I don't want extravagant, I just want a small place, far out of the way. Not into the "Van Life" thing though.
I'm working on extracting Chinese subtitles from video in order to make it easier to learn the language using them. Probably 95% of all Chinese videos have hard subs. Some have soft subs but it's still pretty rare. This is certainly important to me, to allow me to learn faster with less effort so that I can talk to in-laws and family in China, and immerse myself in the culture. <a href="https://zimu.ai" rel="nofollow">https://zimu.ai</a>
My team has cracked making blockchain NFTs legally control physical property: buy the NFT, get legal ownership of the underlying physical asset.<p>Works right now for stuff in vaults. Property in warehouses and galleries is next. It's a building block of the circular economy.
Indexing hospital prices. Recent regulation requires hospitals to post all of their prices but they’re not easily searchable yet. <a href="https://turquoise.health" rel="nofollow">https://turquoise.health</a>
Dealing w apple about finding Pegasus on my phone since 2016. They have ignored my request for help until now and technical support saying there is not much they can do about it.
A social media with focus on moderating toxicity and hatespeech, meanwhile bringing some interactive content on the table other than just the mindless scrolling.<p>We're trying to build a mix of insta + twitter + Reddit, without the drawbacks of each. All these big apps have issues, Insta with its data mining, Twitter with its blatant hate speech and reddit which is very limited in terms of features.<p>Fingers crossed, its a bit of a stretch and tbh even I'm not sure I can pull this off but current social media has a lot of room to grow imo.