The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.
How do you do a binary search for an open-end scale (are PID params open-end?) and three knobs at the same time when they interdepend in their influence? I need to know since i have a PID tuning on my personal projects plate
It’s been ages, but we’d done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers “lacked artfulness.”
So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.
It’s got huge amounts of applicability in many lifestyles and situations that most people never realize until the moment arrives. I once played a fun game that had you guess a number between 1 and 1 Billion with them telling you higher or lower to earn your freedom. Takes a couple of minutes at most.
Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all. You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It’s very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn’t go down well.
Always on hjkl to move, and always ready to insert (i), append (a) or insert before (O) or after (o) line and fast escape with esc.
For search and rescue missions usually use the /.
They need a vim drill before combat.
Something that a union would definitely solve. What are the banks gonna do? Fire every veteran and hire a team of underpaid newbs to manage their critical systems? If they were dumb enough to do that, let them save themselves millions a year by facing billions in losses… I’m sure that’ll work out well.
If only there was one, I wish I had one just so I wouldn’t have to do all the fucking social hoops just to get my resume noticed by an actual human before the HR’s “I don’t want to do my job!” machines filter me out for not going to an Ivy League School like apparently everyone else did.
The thing is, this type of job never needed a union previously. It was niche enough for a long time, that you were sought out and rewarded well. But yes, I think we're moving into an era where we do need union representation.
Oddly enough, with my experience I am sought out still. Just for bizarre startups who clearly never checked my previous work history. Some of the messages I get on Linkedin for example are just weird requests.
I think the problem is that unions are famous for fighting for equal pay across the board for the workers they represent regardless of individual competency or market demand. For this example they’ll give COBOL developers a raise to 120K and give web developers a pay cut to 120K.
Or best case scenario they give the COBOL developers a short-term raise to 150, then raises across the industry stagnate in coming years to offset the fact that employers feel like they’re overpaying for some people. But sure, a few years later the union can come in to look like a hero arguing for a fraction of the raise the web devs could have already gotten.
programmer_humor
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.