Thrust vs. Steer (Or: Yet Another Anecdotal Case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect)

Thrust vs. Steer (or: Yet Another Anecdotal Case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect)

Let me summarize something that happened to me in three acts:

- The accelerometer in one of my devices started acting weird after a power glitch;

- I used an LLM chatbot to confirm that the accelerometer orientation on that device is indeed peculiar (there is even a patch in a popular open-source project fixing the orientation mappings), so I applied the patch and the accelerometer test results were successful. I spent approximately 14 hours total in the process and felt like a true hacker;

- This was only to find out that, in my specific case, I was testing it wrong; the main application for my use case does the conversion itself based on the device orientation, but only after a specific (albeit very common) sequence of events that I did not account for during my tests. In other words, I wasted 14 hours.

I am not denying that this was all my fault, and yet another case of PEBKAC (or, more specifically, PEBDAC). I was literally holding it wrong.

This is yet another anecdotal case of a guy who thought he was savvy enough to figure things out by himself. Somehow, he did. But, occasionally, the jetpack will throw you against the neighbor's roughcast wall when all you want to do is cross the street.

Thrust is nothing if you can't steer.