Like the crew goes to a startup company that makes computer mouses or something, and they document the entire process from market research to concept design to detail design to prototype to supplier negotiations to batch production to full production to sales and so on. I want to learn how it works
So I’m on FindAPhD again and I don’t understand the purpose of advertising self funded projects. Is there some sort of quota that academics have to meet in terms of number of students or something? Do people really apply to these?
Suppose there are two people A & B who had been through the same assessment process for some position. The test scores were the same (and not saturated). A came from an impoverished broken home and had to work alongside studying. B came from generational wealth and had plenty of private tutors growing up?
Does this mean it is reasonable to conclude that A is actually more qualified/competent than B because they had to overcome more hurdles and got the same result?
What did he see that other AI people didn’t? How credible is he? I get that he’s ridiculously smart but surely so is Ilya and other AI people? They can’t all be right at the same time right?
By my current understanding of the ego, if you have none of it, it is impossible to be offended, or to feel violated in anyway no matter how others treat you. You would have no problem blindly obeying orders without question no matter how nonsensical. You would let others put themselves above you as if it doesn’t matter. If you’re a minority, you wouldn’t care if others discriminate against you by the basis of your race, sex, religion/lack of, socioeconomic class etc. You’d just sit there and take it, because you have no ego and dgaf.
So I really don’t get it when others say you need to be high ambition and low ego to succeed. How can you possibly have high ambition with a low ego? Isn’t the whole motivation for ambition to elevate yourself so that you no longer have to suffer the abuses of others?
Another way to phrase the question might be “is lower ego and higher ambition in a zero sum?”
Instead of requiring people to read blocks of text, break it down sentence by sentence in such a way that each block ends where there’s sort of a cliff hanger.
Put each sentence on a separate page, with maybe an AI generated meme style picture based on the text.
This will sort out the short attention span problem that’s stopping people from reading books. Especially children.
I’m four years out of graduation. Didn’t manage to get into an engineering career. Everything I’ve learned is just kinda rotting away in my brain.
What am I missing out on?
If you one day discover that you’re actually not smart at all (in terms of fluid intelligence, not crystallised intelligence), would you find that difficult to accept?
No reference letters, no personal statements, no offers based on predicted grades. Zero room for bias.
Everybody who signs up for the Gaokao is automatically a candidate for university. Everybody in the country takes one big super difficult exam at the same time, gets their scores ranked nationally and the universities then send you offers based on your ranking/percentiles.
Like imagine an artificial “tornado” that anchors to the ground like in those videos of engine inlet vortices. Is it possible to control where that vortex hits the ground and keep it more or less on the same position? Or at least keep the vortex axis mostly straight and where you want to point it? And do this without surrounding the whole vortex with some kind of boundary condition control?
I’m looking for a side gig and I require time flexibility. I also need a relatively quick training period. According to GPT this is one of the best options.
Does this track in your experience?
I’m based in the UK if that’s important context
In two years I will graduate with a research masters degree in Control Engineering. This is a degree designed to prepare the student for a PhD. So I will gain at least some research skills.
I picked control engineering because it seems to be a field where there’s a huge pool of undiscovered high value “inventions” I could build with it. For example, Model Predictive Control was originally invented for the chemical process industry, it later enabled reusable launchers and reduced the cost of space launch by orders of magnitude. I don’t think anyone at the inception of MPC could have ever saw that coming.
There’s a whole forest of advanced control techniques that live almost entirely in academia. My theory is that the “high value applications” just haven’t found them yet because they exist in domains where there’s very little awareness of control engineering. And control systems experts tends not to be aware of the domains or have sufficient expertise to see the value. There seems to be growing awareness of this issue in the field.
I’m lucky enough to have sufficient passive income that, if I wanted to, I could move to a low cost of living country like Georgia and have half of my passive income as surplus after cost of living to allocate to any R&D project I want in controls. Controls research is mostly simulation and modelling work that only requires a computer, plus maybe a little bit of hardware which shouldn’t cost too much. By my current understanding, the additional benefit of funding beyond what I have available diminishes quickly, so there’s no financial incentive to join an institutional research group. My goal is to eventually discover a niche “application” for some controls technique that currently live mostly in academia, analogous to what reusable rockets is for MPC, and build a TRL3-4 prototype and then try to attract external funding. I’m not looking to advance the field of controls itself, I only aim to take what already exists and duct tape it to something niche that needs it.
What I worry about is the lack of a network of research peers and lack of PhD level training. Originally I planned to do the PhD, but I estimate my chance of getting into a PhD program at about 10%, and it will also cost me 5 years of my life. If you’re wondering why im not considering just getting a job at a startup or engineering firm, trust me I have already considered that and it is just no longer possible. I also want control over the direction of my research which isn’t really possible at a job.
I don’t know to what extent a lack of a network of research peers would impede me compared to someone integrated into academic institutions. And when and if I do eventually end up with a high value prototype, I don’t know whether I will need the PhD qualification to attract funding or if a good prototype demonstration would be enough.
If you work in R&D or controls, I’d love to have some advice please. Am I underestimating the level of research skill needed or workload for one person?
I fit all the descriptions of an INTP except that I don’t really start projects.
Usually I have an interest, or curiosity about an idea, but it’s always seen as a “side thing”, which means it is to be put on hold until I finish the main thing, which almost never happens. If it weren’t for that, I’d probably fit the description of starting lots of projects and finishing none.
I also don’t really start projects unless I can envision how it all works out in the end, which seems more INTJ.
A couple of weeks ago there were discussions on this sub about AI researchers reinventing what is essentially control techniques.
MPC was originally invented for chemical processing, but later unlocked reusable space launch vehicles. I don’t think anyone back in the 70s saw landing rockets vertically as a potential application. Yet in hindsight it’s almost obvious.
How much of an adoption gap do you think is out there? How many more equivalents of “reusable rocket” are out there unaware of controls?
Are we at a point where there isn’t much left to “modernise”? No more nature to conquer?
I’m gathering a list of all known applications of advanced control techniques in industry to see if there’s a pattern. Then I’m gonna try to use the pattern to infer new potential applications to work on.
In the west the norm up until recently is that when the child becomes an adult or graduate from university, the family no longer have any obligation, social or cultural or legal, to give the child any money. And it is shameful for the child to even ask. Recently this has loosened up a little due to the economy but the cultural root is still there.
I just watched a Japanese movie where the adult children function as merely additional sources of income to the family account but often ask for large sums of money from mum and dad who still work. They also live in the same household as mum and dad. Is this normal in Japan?
This is my crackpot idea.
Think of the double slit experiment.
It changes under observation because prior to being observed, it was the subject!
The more you are observed, the more pressure exerted upon you by other subjects to be less of a subject and more of an object. In order to be a subject, there must be a possibility of choice, ambiguity, agency. An object has no agency but a subject does.
Prior to being observed, the photon probably had a tiny tiny amount of consciousness!
So usually, somebody analyses a market or existing products, and concludes “hmm it would be really nice if it was possible to make a product that can do this new thing X”. Then this problem gets passed to engineers and scientists and they get paid to find novel solution Y.
I’m in control engineering. In my field there are plenty of examples of this: Wright brothers wants to be able to control their plane - invents 3 axis control. Northrop Grumman wants a plane with no vertical stabiliser - active yaw control with split drag elevons. SpaceX wants reusable rockets - Uses MPC to control trajectory during descent. Fusion power is one neat control system away from plasma stability and free energy.
In each case, the use of a fancy controls technique unlocks a brand new capability or order of magnitude increase in important performance metric. The wright brothers literally unlocked flight. The B2 unlocked effective stealth. SpaceX reduced the cost of space launch by orders of magnitudes and increased the payload ratio because they can now afford to fit more of those expensive engines per rocket because they don’t get wasted after each launch.
I ask this question because I want to know if there had been any research at all on how to systematically solve the reverse problem: I have fancy new solution Y, find all possible problems X that Y could solve that unlocks huge value?
Control engineering is full of these fancy solutions but they rarely make it out of academia for some reason. How do I find the high value problems that gets solved by Nonlinear control, robust control etc?
I’m doing a research masters in control engineering. My backup plan in case I don’t get into a PhD afterwards is to setup shop in a studio flat in a cheap city like Hartlepool. I have some passive income and in Hartlepool I can self fund some R&D in my field which actually doesn’t require that much money given it’s mostly software and embedded boards.
My idea is to try to find potential applications for advanced control techniques that are only found in academia but not so widespread in industry. My reasoning is that nobody knew MPC could enable reusable rockets before they tried it. Maybe the same is true for robust control nonlinear control etc.
Do I need a PhD or prior work experience to be successful applying for grants? Or is anything possible as long as I have a sufficiently valuable prototype?