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Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

634 points david927 | 3 comments | 24 Aug 24 22:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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mindcrime ◴[24 Aug 24 22:53 UTC] No.41342492[source]▶
Right now I'm mostly thinking about AI. Right this minute I'm sitting in a cafe reading a book on Multi-Agent Oriented Programming with a framework called JaCaMo[1], and later tonight when I get home I'll probably spend some time getting my Fuseki[2] server loaded with some base schemas (SKOS, FOAF, etc) as I slowly start working on getting things set up to explore some ideas around integrating symbolic logic with LLM's.

And I took my new quadcopter drone out and did some flying last night for the first time. As in, my first time flying a drone, ever. The results were... predictable. Let's just say, I bought a cheap (< $100) drone for a reason. This thing will wind up destroyed. In less than an hour I managed to crash it into fences, walls, bushes, cars, dumpsters, the ground, an armadillo, Elvis Presley, a 1974 AMC Gremlin, and Nickelback. Well, more or less.

It brought to mind this famous scene[3] from the movie Days of Thunder:

Harry: I want you to go back out on that track and hit the pace car.

Cole: Hit the pace car?

Harry: Hit the pace car!

Cole: What for?

Harry: Because you hit every other god-damned thing out there and I want you to be perfect.

[1]: https://jacamo-lang.github.io/

[2]: https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xll0VOsiE84

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1. team_dale ◴[24 Aug 24 23:32 UTC] No.41342818[source]▶
lol'd at the 1974 AMC,

As an experienced drone pilot - if you can, DJI is unbelievable at stopping you from crashing. Start there to get the feel of it (and more importantly not get frustrated and give up)

If you want to learn more freestyle without assistance, i can't recommend enough getting a simulator on your computer and crashing a digital drone a million times first. It's much cheaper. I think there is a lot out there now but i used Liftoff for many hours before i tried to fly a proper drone

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2. codazoda ◴[25 Aug 24 00:15 UTC] No.41343101[source]▶
I was wondering. I have a DJI and it is stupid simple to fly. I’ve yet to crash mine but I don’t fly it a ton. I’m certainly not trying to fly it through complex paths like an open doorway and into a house or something.
3. mindcrime ◴[25 Aug 24 01:21 UTC] No.41343503[source]▶
Yeah, I'm flying a super basic drone with none of the built-in crash avoidance / navigation / etc. stuff for now. I'll upgrade to something fancier later, but for now I'm totally satisfied with something I can crash repeatedly and when it breaks, throw it away (or salvage parts from it to build another drone).

I'll look into the simulator thing. I didn't even realize that drone simulators were a "thing" so I had not gone looking for anything like that.