[serf]

as someone that messes with every low cost robotics thing. this part stuck out as painfully true :

“Oh yeah, if you try to move the robot without calling enable() it segfaults. That's a safety feature… I guess? But also if you call it twice, that also segfaults. Just call it exactly once, ever.”

[tonyarkles]

Well, hate to tell you this, but it’s generally not much different in a lot of the professional world either. The amount of bullshit I’ve had to deal with to make $20k hardware work mostly reliably still boggles the mind.

From the article: Design your APIs for someone as smart as you, but less tolerant of stupid bullshit.

One of the most painful parts of doing this professionally is that the people that work at a few of our vendors are incredibly smart and are selling us hardware that we can’t really get anywhere else, but they’re generally Electrical Engineers or Optical Engineers or Physicists and don’t even realize that the APIs they’re providing are bad. You file a bug, they tell you you’re holding it wrong, you point out the footgun in the API, and they come back and ask what that even means.

…It’s not until you debug their closed source library using Ghidra and tell them they missed a mutex in a specific function that they start treating you as anything more than a moron.

Anyway </rant>