Joining a hackspace/makerspace suddenly introduced me to a high quality real-life social network. It's an excuse to engage with your hobbies but also hangout with like minds and pick up new skills.
This won't be an option for everyone. I have to travel for an hour each way to get to mine, but it's worth it. If I had more energy I would start one in the city where I live.
A different take: joining one of these spaces (in the bay area) has exposed me to a weird and unpleasant underbelly of society that I barely knew existed. It's like the worst of Reddit, but in real life. People who want you to work on their projects "for the exposure," crypto scammers and people who are very naive and enthusiastic about crypto, depressed unemployable people, people who secretly live on the lobby couches, elderly people just watching videos all day, get-rich-quick people, people who are always "starting to learn" for years at a time, it's quite an array.
Maker spaces declined over time. When I first started going to TechShop, it was people making nozzles for X-Prize rockets, Stanford grad students who needed better machine tools, Burning Man people making props, steampunks making props, and very serious model railroaders making model locomotives. Four milling machines in use all the time, CNC mills, plasma cutters, water jet cutters - heavy equipment. All the usual woodworking stuff.
A paint shop with proper ventilation.
Autodesk Inventor on all the computers. Lots of very smart people with interesting skill sets. The serious maker spaces were descended from the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT.[1]
By the time the maker movement collapsed, it was people grinding out crap to sell on Etsy, "hand made" on a CNC laser cutter. High school students doing the maker thing to get it on their college resume. Printing trinkets with a 3D printer. Classes for teenagers where everybody built kits. Arts and crafts at the advanced kindergarten paper folding level.
Yup, your second paragraph describes the place I'm talking about pretty accurately. Nothing wrong with Etsy trinkets in isolation, but not if that's the limit of what the tools are used for.
I've had the urge/idea to start a maker space in the Los Angeles area on and off for years. My motivation isn't as much as a source for social engagement as much as starting to lay out a path to retirement that will have me busy at a lower level of intensity. My work does have me engaging with thousands of people every year through trade shows and sometimes a dozen trips every year both nationally and internationally.
I own enough equipment to start a very nice maker space with nearly zero cost to outfit the place. What you and the other poster have said is, however, of concern. Have generalized maker spaces died off or turned into something unappealing?
I've had varying ideas about this over the years. I was a mentor for our local FRC (high school robotics) team for about five years. I enjoyed that very much. Yes, my kids were involved. I tried to re-enter that world and was faced with, well, stupid obstacles that very much telegraphed that, at least here, these teams have turned into unappealing political/ideological nightmares --rather than the "let's build cool robots!" feeling from the pre-pandemic era.
One thought was to create a maker space with specific focal activities. Three that come to mind are robotics, auto racing and RC flight. I wonder if that type of focus might mitigate the Etsy crowd effect you mentioned. I have nearly zero interest in having a bunch of people use my Haas CNC machines to mass produce crap for Etsy. One way to mitigate this might be to attach a cost to using the equipment for making anything to sell anywhere. For example, using a Haas VF-2 might cost $200 per hour plus consumables, etc. Not sure if that would work. You could also limit this sort of production-level work to a certain schedule and, maybe, it can only be done by or with staff. Not sure.
The business problem with maker spaces is that the "gym model" didn't work. The gym model is that you pay some fixed fee per month, and don't come very often.
People who bought TechShop memberships showed up too much. Many were using the place as their day job.
There are some successes. Maker Nexus in Silicon Valley pivoted to after-school activities for teens. Humanmade in San Francisco is mostly a job training center, and gets some government funding. There are some library-based maker spaces, but they're mostly basic 3D printing and crafts.
There's also pricing. Techshop started at $100/month and rose to $125 before they went bust. Humanmade is at $250. That's too high for casual users. If you raise the price too much, you mostly have customers who are there all the time, and now you don't have enough capacity.
The financial numbers just didn't work out. Most of the remaining maker spaces have some degree of public financing, as part of a college or work training center.
Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder if a more transactional model might work better.
Perhaps something like FedEx Office (formerly Kinkos). No membership. You go in and you pay to use equipment and resources. Of course, there would have to be levels of qualification someone would have to pass before being allowed to touch certain equipment. I suppose you could have classes (Solidworks, 3D printing, CNC machining, welding, etc.).
Writing that, at some level, it starts to feel complex. I say this in the context of my stated objective, which would be to stay busy at a low stress level after retirement. I am not sure that what I just described fits that model.
There's also a reality most don't want to think about. While, for the most part, dealing with the public is fun and interesting, there's always a very small percentage of people who behave badly. It's the old Tragedy of the Commons story. That's the part that none of us enjoy at all.
Noisebridge was a free, open maker space in San Francisco, and they had too many people just hanging out there. Twice, they had to shut down for over a month, clean out all the crap, and start over. The maker spaces that charge don't have that problem.
At TechShop, the big operational problems were tool deterioration and staff burnout. Tools tended to stabilize at the point where they're just above worn out. The drill bits and milling cutters were dull. The sandpaper on the belt sanders was worn almost smooth. The CNC mill needed a coolant change. The laser cutters had laser systems performing at about 50% of rated power, and you had to halve the feed rate. In a commercial shop, you'd fix things before they got that bad, because you're losing production. The same business logic does not apply to maker spaces.
The staff problem with TechShop was that they paid slightly above minimum wage, which is nowhere near enough to keep people with a broad range of shop skills. The big employee benefit was that you could take classes for free, so it was sort of an apprenticeship program.
Over time, the staff tended to become the ones who couldn't get a job in a real shop.
Those are some of the operational problems you have to beat.
Yeah, this is why I never moved on this idea. There's a lot of potential for it to derail into something that isn't pleasant at all (or self-sustaining/profitable).
I'm glad Hackspace culture is still very much alive in the UK. It feels like people are starting to become interested in such things again. I'm hoping the growing right-to-repair/modify movement will steer more people in this direction.
There's several here in cold north as well, but they're kind of hit by the population density problem. Only the few biggest cities have a lot of activity.
It's kind of funny to note that the negative comments here are ones calling it the Make (tm)(R) Magazine spaces and the positives are hackerspaces, as the real ones are.
This is really bluring the line between implementation and specification. You may think you're writing the implementation but it is really a proxy for the specification. In other words, the compiler creating an illusion of an imperative machine.
Are we almost converting music to MIDI at this point?
As I understand it the model is learning the landscape of sound combinations that are interesting to humans and as such there will be no combination of raw bytes in the recorded file that will result in white noise (for example) being heard because this is never trained for.
I wonder if you might have a microbiome problem, i.e. you lack the microorganisms necessary to break down certain foods such as fibres. There are now treatments which have been demonstrated to have success in restoring the missing microorganisms that lead to food intolerances, the most successful being FMT.
As I understand it the capacity of the human gut to break down insoluble fiber is quite limited, especially compared to ruminants that can turn cellulose into fatty acids in their rumen. I'm sure that a healthier gut than mine can handle insoluble fiber much better, but I'm skeptical that even healthy humans can do that by digesting a significant portion of their dietary insoluble fiber.
Humans can't really digest fiber (like ruminants), but fiber is metabolized to some degree by bacteria in the colon. Specifically the bacteria ferment fiber into butyrate which is important for immune system function and other things. If you don't get enough fiber then that is likely to cause gut microbiome problems.
I initially wrote this as a reply to a comment by "NotGMan" mentioning fasting/paleo that got flagged. They could have approached the subject more delicately but I believe they have a point.
About 3 years ago I had gut issues so bad I thought I was close to death. NHS couldn't see any problems and were basically telling me I'd gone nuts. They refused to do any further testing.
After a year of suffering I tried a 7 day water-only fast and the pain finally went away. I broke fast with only paleo foods and stayed that way for 6 months. I gradually introduced other foods after that period with the last being gluten about 2 years after the initial fast. I am almost cured, however I will never abuse my gut in the same way again. Less carbs, more salads...
This is just my personal experience of course but I have discovered so many other people with similar gut issues who are also being ignored by their doctors that you can't blame one for wondering if there is a conspiracy at play.
I wouldn't have believed any of this a few years ago but now I have serious doubts in modern medicine's ability to deal with chronic health issues, especially in the gut.
We do eat so many more processed foods (and other things) that it doesn't require that much of a stretch to the imagination that diet is a part of the problem or indeed the root cause.
Lack of openmindedness bothers me immensely and the nature of human biology is under no obligation to fit into tidy boxes for the sake of our understanding. The real world is fuzzy.
Decades ago, about 30% of the people who had celiac disease would waste away and die, especially children. Until a doctor noticed that if the people ate 12 bananas a day they seemed to do better. Of course, 12 bananas a day is a kooky diet, but people who eat 12 bananas a day tend to eat less of everything else, including less bread and gluten and so they would do better. Later science figured out bread was a problem and then eventually identified the specific protein (gluten) that effects people with celiac disease.
I think there are other foods that bother different people, but we haven't managed pin down exactly which foods bother which people. It's a hard problem, but surely there are other cases of "if you just avoid this specific food ingredient, you will recover", just like celiac disease.
So, on the one hand, sharing advice about which diets worked and didn't work can be helpful (like the 12 bananas a day diet). On the other hand, "I tried an unusual diet, which also happens to have a good amount of marketing behind it, and things are better" is one of the most common bits of advice you'll find for many diseases, and the problem is everyone recommends a different diet.
A relative of mine has Chrons disease and was close to death before it was diagnosed, the doctors recommended a junk food diet basically, high calorie foods with almost no fiber, and that's how he eats now and is doing much better. I don't recommend everyone follow the same diet, but for whatever it's worth, eating junk food has helped my relative, true story.
And this is what I mean, there's so much conflicting advice about which diet to try. I can't fault people for trying different diets, because I believe there are many unknown disease, like celiac disease, which can be treated with an exact (but as of yet unknown) diet. I also don't fault people for giving up and not enthusiastically trying every diet-of-the-week that gets suggested, it's tiring. Also, it's notable that the diets with the most marketing tend to be the ones most recommended.
Taking this tangent and riding it: it's well-known that undiagnosed celiac disease in children stunts growth. After diagnosis and transition to a gluten-free diet, there is usually a period of catch-up growth (which unfortunately does not close the gap fully, usually). If there are a bunch of these silent sources of malnutrition, it could - alongside things like poor perinatal care for mothers and children, as well as the various sequelae of America's high level of economic inequality among developed nations - be one piece of the puzzle for why the adult height of Americans has stalled when compared to Europe (which would be an empirical finding and not just gussied-up scientific racism).
I don't recommend everyone follow the same diet, but for whatever it's worth, eating junk food has helped my relative, true story.
Crohn's disease affects each patient differently. Depending on what part of the gut is being attacked [1], different digestive processes are implicated. That will lead to different kinds of foods being potentially problematic (as well as leading to a need for different kinds of supplementation).
The bottom line is: your mileage WILL vary.
(I've had Crohn's for nearly 45 years, since I was an adolescent.)
[1] My doc once told me about a patient he had that was affected in the throat!
ETA: for my personal experience, the one thing I can't eat is whole-kernel corn in any non-trivial quantity. It actually clogs me up. Oddly, popcorn is perfectly fine, as are corn tortillas and the like. It's happened to me twice. The first time I went to the ER and said I thought I had an obstructed bowel, and the admitting nurse said "can't be, if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to walk in yourself". I think that gives some perspective about what kinds of pain you can get used to. Second time it happened, I didn't bother, since there turned out to be nothing the ER docs could do other than monitor me. I just let it work itself out over the course of a couple days.
The "your mileage will vary" part is definitely true, as well as the "incredible what kinds of pain you can get used to". I had 30 cm of my upper intestine removed 12 years ago. Doctors said it was so constricted you couldn't pass a pencil through, but I was still managing to ski double black diamonds two weeks before surgery.
When it comes to fiber in particular, I think what can confuse people is the difference between water soluble fibers like oatmeal, and extremely insoluble "macrofibers" like raw green asparagus, leafy greens, orange pith etc. The former is OK for some, the latter is no-go for everyone AFAIU.
Another curveball is nearly underbaked dough, like you'll find in a lot of commercial bread and rolls, even if it has zero fiber. If you can knead it back into dough with your hands, it might just form a nice lump in your gut as well.
I have the same thing as you with corn, and also with nuts unless eaten with lots of liquids. I think it goes back to the possibility of forming tough paste in the gut.
I wonder if water balance plays a big role. Like, you drink water but it easily gets absorbed by your stomach or small intestine before it gets a chance to work it's way down with the food. Then as the food is passing through, the water dries up. It's as if your body wants the water more than the intestines. Drinking the extra water with the nuts may help because of that? Just spiralling
Have Chron's with stricturing and anything more than a quarter cup of corn, popcorn, pineapple or leafy greens would bring me to my knees in about 5-8 hours. Nuts are a little hit or miss, I need to chew them up really well and not eat them on an empty stomach and I'm good for a few handfuls.
I tell people that if it looks the same coming out as it goes in, I can't have that banging around my guts.
Any fast or junk foods are totally fine since they're mostly low fiber, but high fiber foods are mostly okay, too.
Due to my strictures and the nightmare stories I've read from people online, I specifically eat foods that are mushy or smoothies and soups. Basically, I'm pre-digesting the foods before they're eaten so they're easier to pass through a narrowing intestional wall and it has worked well for years now. Only time I've had issues are when I eat too quickly, too much at once or have one of my problem foods.
I'm also on a biologic, which made all the difference after being untreated for about 6 months, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
Thank you for taking the time to reply and not just downvoting me. That is enlightening and I'm glad your relative is in better health now.
I'm certainly not suggesting there is a single treatment plan that'll work for everyone. As I said biology is fuzzy and it annoys me when people try to debug health issues like they were pieces of software. Discussing these things openly does help however.
I have chrohns. The diet change recommendation is something we hear often.
For me my doctor recommends a mediterranean diet and to avoid emulsifiers, but it’s definitely not a cure and not universal.
If you go look at chrohns forums you’ll see a lot of experimenting and a lot of different diets because (to my understanding) chrohns has a lot of different and unknown causes.
For me high fiber foods can put me out of commission for the next day, for others it’s the opposite.
Yeah, there was a vegan girl once who heard i ha Crohns' and just would not stop telling me to go vegan. Apparently it had helped her IBD but she seemed incapable of believing that i had tried all that and that eggs and meat were the best diet for me. High protein, high calorie. I'll eat vegetables with make but always well done. If i ate vegan I'd probably be dead in 2 weeks.
>I think there are other foods that bother different people, but we haven't managed pin down exactly which foods bother which people. It's a hard problem
Sounds like a job for a neural net. If people would log all what they eat and how they feel. If the neural net had access to all the components of the foods they are inputting, surely with enough data a pattern would emerge of what common component in what they eat is correlated with worse symptoms.
Not that easy. I have sibo and depending on what I eat and how I eat it, it changes the effects it has on me. Also the amount and frequency. For example, if I have raisins at the start of my meal then I don't see issues, but if I have them at the end of my meal then I do. If I have it here and there then no issues, but if I have it a few meals in a row then it'll give me issues.
And raisins affect me within 20min, but if I were to face something like potatoes or tomatoes then it doesn't give me issues until hours later (after my next meal or even the next day).
You may benefit from speaking to a nutritional therapist. You might have a biofilm problem at specific points along your digestive tract but I would let them make that determination and come up with a personalised treatment plan. Nutritional therapy is about "eating yourself well" and you might be surprised how effective it is. Good luck!
> If people would log all what they eat and how they feel.
Dietary data is one of the hardest things to collect. Either you need to hospitalize people and control their whole diet, and your sample size is small, because of costs, or you need to rely on self reporting, and your data is unreliable.
Biological systems are highly nonlinear and time-dependent, and also very individual! People have been trying learning techniques in glucose control since the early 2000s, and have only seen limited success in very controlled scenarios. I think a simple neural net would fall short of catching all that complexity, at least using the current architectures
Yes. I have celiac disease and I know people report following a strict gluten free diet for a whole year or more before they start to feel better. For me, I never did feel better, but blood tests show that certain celiac-related antibodies have returned to normal levels.
I do want to offer a limited defense of the medical community's "lack of open-mindedness". By the nature of their job, their work is inherently life risking. Most of us working in IT can afford to make experiments that doctor's cannot afford. I may be willing to try some unconventional approaches if the cost of error is an application crash and nuisance to the end user. If the cost of error is death of the user, I'm going to be far more conservative.
When a patient dies, society will treat a doctor very differently if it's perceived that the doctor was being unorthodox compared to too cautious. This doesn't mean that too cautious doesn't also cost lives. It's just really difficult to balance when the stakes are so high.
Anyway, good on you for taking ownership of your own health, and thank you for sharing your experience. I hope you continue to get better.
I'd respect this defense of medicine if medicine had resisted the U.S. dietary guidelines, which started as pseudoscience chosen by politics in the 1970s. Instead of being conservative about evidence and risks, the profession mostly was conservative about questioning that imposed consensus.
I'm convinced that dietary restrictions are extremely powerful for treating Crohn's and similar diseases, but patient adherence is so bafflingly low that the treatment may as well not exist in doctors' eyes.
Just as an example of a more studied case, the probability that an overweight person reattains normal weight through diet and exercise is well under 1% [1]. Now consider that diets for Crohn's (like a water fast and strict elimination diet) are considerably more difficult to follow than a weight loss diet - it's no wonder that diet appears to be ineffective for most people.
After a similar experience to yours I haven't had any foods with the 8 major allergens (and a few more select things) for over seven years, aside from a handful of accidents early on. That's not an easy diet to follow, but gets easier with time and experience.
The 8 most common allergens as identified by the FD: milk, eggs, fish, Crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, and soybeans. These are called out on all packaged foods, which makes it easier, though I'm OK with some derivatives like soy lecithin. I also avoid yeast (brewer's or baker's) and a few other small things like black pepper.
I've been in remission for long enough that I could probably start eating a lot of these things again, but I have no desire to go through another Crohn's episode, so I'll probably continue to avoid these foods for the next 40-50 years (unless there's a miracle Crohn's cure in the meantime). After that, as I understand, a weakening immune system from old age makes Crohn's symptoms significantly less likely or severe.
Indeed. It is difficult to have good-faith conversations about this subject with others sometimes because trust in "The System" (as it were) is often a core of peoples' relating to society. Western medicine does have excellent treatments for problems like appendicitis (in my case...), but is very much lacking in the holism that prevents the issues to begin with.
A quote from Ray Peat:
>“Besides fasting, or chronic protein deficiency, the common causes of hypothyroidism are excessive stress or “aerobic” (i.e. anaerobic) exercise, and diets containing beans, lentils, nuts, unsaturated fats (including carotene), and undercooked broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and mustard greens. Many health conscious people become hypothyroid with a synergistic program of undercooked vegetables, legumes instead of animal proteins, oils instead of butter, carotene instead of vitamin A, and breathless exercise instead of stimulating life.”
We see that health-consciousness, when lead somewhere by ideology, is not in itself sufficient to make progress.
I recall on an ask reddit a group of gastroenterologists were answering questions. One thing that stood out was they said "let your stomach rumble it's a necessary part of gut health".
Fasting would help initiate that, but I think so many people these days never stop eating long enough for their stomach to rumble.
I have also read that our gut doesn't like being in constant operation. Our ancestors didn't have access to food 24/7 and it makes sense our bodies adapted to take advantage of this by entering a self-cleaning state during long periods without consumption.
The "buildroot" project is perfect for your embedded system. Build a custom minimal Linux system with tiny image sizes that are read-only by default. Pick exactly which services you need and no more. Less moving parts the better.
I'm using it on 10 year old Pi's with USB RS485 dongles to get Ethernet access to solar equipment.
I'm going to be "that guy"... I used to distro hop and discovered that every distro has its strengths and weaknesses. Then 2 months ago someone told me about NixOS. I was skeptical at first, as it seemed a bit culty. Now I'm absolutely converted.
The reason is simple. Human instructions on provisioning a system like these (as good as they are) are now obsolete. If you know someone who has a working system, then you can have a working system too, just ask for their configuration. Want to experiment with some new configuration or try a bleeding edge software update? Go ahead, and just roll back if it goes wrong.
With NixOS the operating system is a text file, everything else is just cache.
It's an interesting metaphor. Electron shells are sometimes described as a cloud of probabilistic density, as in the shade is an indication of the probability of finding an electron at that point if one were to freeze time. Obviously it gets weirder the deeper you get.
I thought the industry was already experimenting with the idea that you have another LLM observing the output of the primary LLM which is trained more towards safety than creativity.
On top of that it would be good if the safety LLM could give a confidence score in the answer given by the main LLM. Then you can try multiple attempts with different parameters and only show the highest confidence answer to the user.
I have an original Pi 2012 running buildroot. It's a perfect fit. Need just enough to run a Linux kernel and ser2net for doing RS485 stuff with solar inverters. I think the image size was around 100MB and no volatile filesystem whatsoever.
Buildroot was surprisingly easy to use. Use a menuconfig to pick what you need and a burnable image for your SD card comes out the other side. Think I only spent an hour on the whole project.
This won't be an option for everyone. I have to travel for an hour each way to get to mine, but it's worth it. If I had more energy I would start one in the city where I live.