Pure cope.

It is extremely possible to work on a product people don’t hate, and still maintain a realistic perspective on your engineering abilities or impact or whatever.

If you’re toiling on a product that’s actively making the world worse, quit now. There are better gigs out there.

These astronauts are trained to use the system NASA puts them in.

And ultimately they have a lot more important things to be doing then learning a different email client than the one they use at their desk on earth. This is an email client on a laptop, not a navigation system.

No they don’t. They’re our best and brightest, and they train for years at their one, important job, which is to use the system they’re given.

The mission of the astronauts on board is to test the damn Orion spacecraft in preparation for a human landing on the moon.

> NASA flight controller and instructor Robert Frost explained the reasoning plainly in a post on Quora (via Forbes). “A Windows laptop is used for the same reasons a majority of people that use computers use Windows. It is a system that people are already familiar with. Why make them learn a new operating system,” he reportedly wrote.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/technology/space-exploration/nasa-...

Maybe he should have designed the rest of the controls to look like the cockpit of 2003 Toyota Camry. It is a system that people are already familiar with. And actually reliable.

The world where any unpatched system is a guaranteed botnet.

You’re going to bring up Phil Spector and not mention the story of Spector threatening the band with a gun in the studio?

How did the Navy recruiting office turn you away from joining up?

The Navy guy tried too hard to sell the upsides without telling me any of the downsides and I knew there were a lot of downsides. Said my asvab score could get me in nuke and great pay, that I could see the world. The Air Froce guy told me like it was. Guess who I trusted more?

I’ve noticed there’s a similar challenge in keeping bad ideas out of your head.

Weight loss, debt recovery, and other habit changes are just that - changes to habit which are much more difficult if you don't admit that's what you're doing.

This has been discussed from time immemorial and confronting it as it is (that in the case of habits we are more animal than rational) is the beginning of change.

An example is that you can't just "cut it out" you have to replace it with something else.

Only if your idea of personality is expressed through a logo tshirt.

Only if your idea of personality is expressed through a textured fabric

Well yes.

Both of those choices express a lot.

Yes, big box sporting goods stores exist outside the west coast. They’re quite common, in fact.

Dead men can’t sue!

And optimize for repair when one of the thousands of actuators gets stuck or burns out…

Here’s a thought, though: you’ve seen the sand table + kinect projection mapping demo? What about that, plus a two-axis moving magnet sand mandala marble drawing table? The actuator could draw the path /sculpt the terrain, then release the marble and grab the figurines?

the trick it to be able to actuate the rods without placing a linear actuator on every one, but it's a complicated problem. Magnetism? hydraulic shafts fed and drained by a series of gates making a matrix? acoustic levitation?

I'm reminded of the old BERG London pixel track display that used a little cart with a vertical array of solenoids that would travel the length of the display flipping each individual pixel on an off physically. https://www.designboom.com/technology/pixel-track-berg-cloud... It's on my list of'next time i'm unemployed' projects to pick up and open source a design for.

Thanks. I had not seen that. It is definitely the poor mans software controlled physical reality I am looking for! :)

Yeah, that would provide a much richer environment for table top role play games. And allow for telepresence meet ups.