Macleod Sawyer

@macleod
4 Followers
62 Following
67 Posts

Roboticist × Technician.

DNX Industries CEO, an industrial robotics laboratory developing modular robotic platforms — https://dnxi.org.

I tend to break things, usually for the greater good.

Interests: [ #Robotics #Hardware #Electronics #Electrodynamics | #C #D #Elixir #Javascript #Rust | #StarTrek #DoctorWho #Foundation #Gundam | #Science #Environmentalism #Space | #Discovery & #Exploration | #Linux #NixOS | #Skateboarding ]

I tried #Firefish, moving back here.

Homepagehttps://macleodsawyer.com/
DNX Industrieshttps://dnxi.org
Tumblrhttps://macleod.tumblr.com
PronounsThey/Them | 𝕏
Macleod SawyerAug 2, 2023
Steve GrunwellAug 2, 2023

Regular reminder: if your site or app doesn’t work in Firefox, it’s broken.

I lived through the “this site requires and/or is best in IE” era, and I’d rather burn it all down than return to that.

Pro-tip: Firefox does most things better anyway. Give it a spin and enjoy a less-tracked web.

Macleod SawyerAug 2, 2023
Robert ReichAug 2, 2023

The IRS pulled in $3.18 for each dollar spent auditing the top 1%, and $6.29 for the top 0.1%.

There’s one reason and one reason only the GOP wants to defund the IRS: to protect their wealthy mega-donors.

All in all, the GOP’s IRS cuts will cost $40 billion in lost revenue.

Show threadMacleod SawyerAug 2, 2023
This post brought to you by: A specialized hardware network switch supporting thousands of patients a month, made by a company that made (1) switch, had them manufactured, and then went out of business before selling them all off within a matter of weeks.
Macleod SawyerAug 2, 2023
Jan StępieńAug 2, 2023
You know what’s software engineering? Regaining control over a computer 20 billion kilometers away thanks to the design decisions made 50 years prior. #voyager2
Macleod SawyerAug 1, 2023
Show threadTrammell HudsonAug 1, 2023
@sdw @luvcraft and just to be clear, that first photo is the smaller bike parking on the IJ side of Amsterdam Centraal station with room for 4k bikes. the underwater one on the city center side is nearly two times larger with space for 7k bikes, while the three story underground fietsenstalling in Utrecht is almost twice that again at 12.5k bikes.
Macleod SawyerAug 1, 2023
It's amazing to me how much the world works on technology and products (software and *especially* hardware) that most will never hear about.
Macleod SawyerAug 1, 2023
MostlyHarmlessJul 30, 2023
You millennials and your obsession with public healthcare. Back in my day we just died.
Macleod SawyerAug 1, 2023
Sheril KirshenbaumJul 31, 2023

The extreme heat has devastated corals. As a former marine scientist, this is a truly heartbreaking read:

“The coral didn’t even have a chance to bleach, it just died. It just felt like, ‘Oh my God, we’re in the apocalypse.’ What’s happening?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/climate/coral-reefs-heat-florida-ocean-temperatures.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“Demand #climate action right now. Not in a year, not tomorrow, right now. Actually yesterday.”

Florida’s Record-Breaking Sea Temperatures Are Forcing Coral to Move Ashore

Teams dedicated to ocean restoration are urgently moving samples to tanks on land as a marine heat wave devastates entire reefs.

The New York Times
Macleod SawyerJul 31, 2023
Steve Dustcircle 🌹Jul 29, 2023

Why The Future Of #DisasterRelief Will Rely On #Robots

#Searchandrescue missions need more #automation.
https://www.inverse.com/tech/search-and-rescue-robots

Why The Future Of Disaster Relief Will Rely On Robots

Deploying a motley crew of robots that can roll, walk and fly is a smart strategy for search-and-rescue operations — and so is trusting the machines to make decisions on the ground

Inverse
Macleod SawyerJul 31, 2023
Fabio ManganielloJul 30, 2023

The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.