“There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that #InnovativeTechnology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial #spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative #AItools.
As the #Canadian #technologist and #engineer #UrsulaFranklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always “investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting”. But more often than not, in the real world, it is “#NeedsDriven, #scrappy, on #location, #iterative, #practical, #mundane”.
The real pioneering #technologies of today are genuinely useful #systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose #TopDown “#solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely #innovative #technology really can set people free.” — Eleanor Drage
#OpEd / #EleanorDrage / #tech / #FrugalTech / #Cambridge #LeverhulmeCentre / #FutureOfIntelligence <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/billionaire-big-tech-frugal-elon-musk-innovation>
Titans like Musk would love us to believe innovation means top-down solutions that only enrich the wealthy. In fact, we all have the power, says Eleanor Drage, research fellow at Cambridge University
"I genuinely don't believe you can build complex systems any other way..."
I wonder how much battery, inverter, grid forming etc one could put in a standard 2TE container sized box, build one a week, and plug together somewhere convenient.
One might not add much inertia to a Grid, but as the year goes by you'd be steadier and steadier.
Yeeaaa... it's a different approach.
(Don't read this as a defence of Musk, he's a turd, but SpaceX has competent technical people below their chimpanzee-on-a-string PR person)
NASA's traditional approach was to basically achieve perfection of design and manufacturing before trying to launch anything. Look at every possible failure mode of every component, down to the tiniest screw or wire or bit of plastic. Keep redesigning parts until you eliminate all failure modes that you don't have triply-redundant backups for. Test the living snot out of everything on the ground, in the lab. Have massive technical and safety reviews to ensure nothing was missed, anywhere.
It worked about as well as anything could, but it was extremely slow, bureaucratic, and above all incredibly expensive. Tons of rework when issues were found meant having to go back 3 steps to change something, and then redo the massive amount of work that had been done since then to make sure no new failure modes were possible, etc.
SpaceX is doing things differently - #iterative design. You design, build, #integrate, and #test-to-failure as often as possible to learn where the weak spots are -- you then rapidly iterate when you find the problems. "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" is an expected part of the process - it's how you learn the limits of what you've built, where the problems are.
Neither one is "the right way". They both work.
'Statistical Inference of Constrained Stochastic Optimization via Sketched Sequential Quadratic Programming', by Sen Na, Michael Mahoney.
http://jmlr.org/papers/v26/24-0530.html
#optimization #iterative #iteration
All progress here is iterative, currently waiting patiently for some components to setup the DC power system in the house , primarily for an led lighting system 😁
Here with Mansi for “#Programming and #Parenting”, some notes:
- #Iterative development: adjustments and bug fixes as you go, for kids is Sleep, routines, feedback from reactions
- Handling the unexpected: How do you handle #exceptions cleanly? How do you react to random kid behavior?
- Debugging: #test solutions until problem is solved, for kids there will be a solution eventually
- Balancing #complexity: Only when absolutely necessary, one step at a time for processes
- Celebrate wins - When you solve, brag about it, when kids to the same congratulate them
Software Development Life Cycle models... very interesting
#Iterative #agile #Waterfall #spiral #VModel #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #coding #bytebytego
Moments away from opening my Professional Scrum with User Experience course. (PSU)
It's one of my favourite courses to teach. The material is important for everyone who attempts to blend #UX and #Iterative&Incremental #Software #Development.
Simonetta Vezzoso
☮ ♥ ♬ 🧑💻
Denny
a fading echo
C.
JMLR
flaeky pancako
Rob Carlson 
Futurist 
David Sabine