Joel Martinez

Principal Software Engineering Manager at @microsoft (via @xamarinhq), working on @msft4startups. Founded @onetug. #eldermillenial 🇺🇸 🇩🇴

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

Working on a fun new project ... anyone out there doing parametric #CAD with @openjscad?

I'm writing a vscode plugin that lets you stay right in editor to visualize/export your work. I've got some ideas for some cool features, but I'd love to get some feedback from real folks working in this space :)

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

Along the same lines, the different ways that people use them in different roles I think is huge. Leadership often engages with them for brainstorming, which feels like having a tireless collaborator who thinks all your ideas are amazing. While people building with these tools often run into the jagged edge where it doesn’t always work perfectly.

This leads to a mismatched set of expectations between what leadership thinks as possible, and the day-to-day of an engineer on the ground

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

@CalebChamberla6 Form, not firm

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

Those systems grow out of a desire to scale some department… but they usually manifest by externalizing the pain. I worked at a startup where getting expenses reimbursed was as simple as emailing a picture of a receipt to a DL, and money magically materialized in my next paycheck.

After the company grew they onboarded some “mature” SaaS to manage all that… and getting reimbursed turned into this multi page firm. It was so inconvenient that I remember thinking how much more the company was paying/wasting by having expensive software engineers spend all this time filling out paperwork.

But I’m sure it was great for the finance department who now had all their data entry done for them!

Same logic of self checkout stations at grocery stores. Congrats, now you’re doing the labor 🛒

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

Did they just re-invent privateering?

[Chris Wysopal @WeldPond]

This is a pretty big shift in U.S. cyber policy.

The White House is setting up a program that would let private cybersecurity companies conduct government-authorized operations against foreign cybercriminal groups, including surveillance and disruption of their infrastructure.

Not exactly “hack back,” but definitely a major expansion of the private sector’s role in offensive cyber operations.

https://t.co/4oJACeyRT4

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

@Dayhaysoos You’re gonna have to talk to @thdxr about that 😅

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

Exactly!!! I can definitely understand the sentiment … but I suspect the usual distribution will continue to be present despite new capabilities.

[Angus Cheng @BallerIndustry]

It's funny when people complain "no one is thinking anymore becuase of AI".

Let them not think and beat them in the market with your hard work.

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

@synaesthesiajp Yes!!! I love this … reactive engines that are tightly integrated with audio is a concept I’ve always loved

[TonyVT SkarredGhost @SkarredGhost]

This soldiering training is the most impressive and immersive I've ever tried. It is 10x better than a YouTube tutorial video. It really allowed me to see the procedure from all the points of view, and even get super close to get the details.

It is a collaboration between @gracia_vr and Imperial College London: they recorded a soldering session with Gaussian Splatting Videos (4DGS), so that you can enjoy it from your VR headset. You can see the action happening in front of you; you can pause and re-watch what you need, change the point of view, get closer, get more distant. And the quality with which it has been shot is impressive: I enjoyed this experience with my DELL Pro Max Tower T2 with NVIDIA Pro RTX 6000, and I could really see all the small details of the PCB that was being soldered!

I was really impressed by it. But I also noticed some drawbacks. First of all, some scenes have artifacts that make seeing the details of the PCB hard. I think when it comes to training involving small details, the capture and reproduction of the splat should be flawless. Then, as much as I loved it as a passive experience, I would have liked to have also some sort of practice session in VR. The power of VR is to let you learn by doing in full safety, and this kind of training does not exploit it. But maybe the best way to enjoy it would be in MR, where you have this training video close to a real workbench where you do the actual soldering while following the tutorial.

Gaussian Splat can really revolutionize training: this kind of recording is much better than any flatscreen experience, and more accurate than any 3D CGI recostruction. I suggest you give it a go at this experience in the Gracia app (it's free). Then let me know your impressions!

#VirtualReality #training #DellProPrecision #GaussianSplat #technology

[Disclaimer: I'm a DELL Pro Precision Ambassador, and this is why I mentioned the model of my PC. I have been given a PC to do cool tests and share my results on social media. No monetary compensation or sales affiliation is part of the collaboration]

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

It's wild to me that this is just "standard" practice

[Const 🇺🇸🏭 @c0nst]

net 30 is a story shop owners tell each other.

half of b2b invoices turn into cash in 25 days. getting to 90% takes 74 (!).

and the biggest invoices have the longest tail. $250k+ sit up to 119 days at the slow end, vs 83 for small ones.

now think about a shop that bought the material, ran the job, and made payroll twice while waiting.

and the industry is pushing more shops into defense and aerospace, where terms run long and nobody is in a hurry.

you are the prime's bank.

is it a recipe for disaster for shop owners?

[Robinson Meyer @robinsonmeyer]

I’m still surprised — and think it’s under-discussed — that the Turing test has not only been passed but rendered obsolete. That it was a historical parenthesis. *The* benchmark for machine intelligence, understood proleptically for much of my life/career, and it’s just over now.

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

What if AI inference/compute had a proper market for buyers and sellers? https://t.co/MJvh4CPgIx

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

@gdb The agents, talking to users…

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

That’s absolutely a component of it … social media made it easier to passively “keep in touch” with people, which means there’s less of a need to make an effort to reach out and catch up.

This is the same thing, now happening to productivity. I too long for more community … but others need to long for it as well

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

I think I finally realized one reason that the age of AI agents feels less satisfying. Everything feels like a race to “do a thing” first. Even though many things still get open sourced, it feels like there’s _less_ collaboration. We just end up with many independent variants of the same thing, where back in the day … an open source project could be interesting and unique enough to attract other contributors and usage spread organically.

How do we encourage more people to work together?

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

@ScottWRobinson

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

@mhmazur Oh for sure. Huge headaches in the forecast at least for the near future

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

Since execution is “easy”, there’s less cost to starting something new … as opposed to the past where one individual or small group could pay the cost of starting something new and then attract folks who want to contribute and collaborate. We end up with an ecosystem where everyone makes their thing and doesn’t want to work with anyone else.

My theory is that even with AI, we’d accomplish more if people worked together… bringing our unique human perspectives and experiences to bear :)

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

@scottjla Incident code what?

[Joel Martinez @joelmartinez]

Not only faster, but just … available for free (even if it was technically slower than making an APi call). There’s stuff I wouldn’t spend the compute on, if I had to pay for it and had a limited token budget. But in an abundant inference environment, I can take advantage of it without thinking twice.