Lack of market response is a valid point, but $100k is pretty unlikely to have much impact especially if spread out over multiple trades.

If you want to run some time-consuming tests prior to pushing your bug fix it's convenient to run those in your separate worktree. You can continue working on your original branch while the tests run.

Given the size of the layoffs I'd imagine it's preferable to be at home and receive the news virtually if you're being laid off. It might be unpleasant being part of the group making their way to the exits en masse.

When I was part of a mass layoffs, it was an incredible feeling of camaraderie because I was there in person with my coworkers.

Have you got any recommendations for open-source, or free, optics design software?

No. There just isn't. It's a shame there are so many wheels for artistic rendering ray tracing with amazing performance, but simply no one bothered to invert camera as sources and objects as detectors, add more geometry and a tiny bit more of physics, and make a opensource non-sequential ray tracing engine suitable for optics design.

Commercial tools like Zemax cost a leg (> $13k, and they were changing to subscriptions even before being bought by ANSYS) and have a rather steep learning curve. There are newcomers like COMSOL offering a ray tracing toolbox, haven't tried but they are offering generous free trials and the price seems to be more reasonable.

Edit: maybe the abadonware Beam4 mentioned by another post worth trying.

You can use some software for free with limitations eg OSLO

https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download

FRED also has a demo mode

https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/

That might be enough for simple designs.

Beam Four is also decent and allows you to use most common surface types including gratings.

I'm interested in Optica (for Mathematica) but I don't know anyone that's used it.

No, I never found anything satisfactory. I ended up using SOLIDWORKS with some 3D sketch lines and reflection constraints to approximate it.

I have done this myself, and I have a lot of experience in optics. I have also written a ray tracing program in Excel, which was able to reproduce aberration diagrams. By doing this first, I could use “professional” tools.

Solidworks is excellent for reflective optics, and for prismatic, mainly planar systems. You can simulate Snell’s law either with an equation, or a simple construction using line segments of unit length, and of length equal to the refractive index of the surrounding medium. If you have nothing else, but you understand optics, you might get by with Solidworks. And there are commercial optics addins that have been written using the SolidWorks API.

On my twelfth year of North-American kettle operation I've gotten past the tedium of waiting extra minutes for the water to boil.

Visiting my family, however, I now have to flick the switch on twice - autopilot usually means the water has cooled below the supposed optimal infusion temperature by the time I return to the kitchen.

I drink both, but now use my kettle almost exclusively for the awful indulgence of pre-mug warming before dropping in the espresso from my stove-top pot.

This is the right answer. The camera (and its 8 siblings) are capable of color HD imaging - the sensor has a Bayer filter. This image used a binning mode to produce a downsampled frame that could be more rapidly transferred back over the lower bandwidth comms used during landing. Binning combines the Bayer pattern and so color information is lost.

Also doesn't help that there is a (transparent) lens cover in front of the lens obscuring the view.