In the video David says he's building it just because he wants to. It really sounds like his own passion project. No investors. It's a nice position to be in.
Now I don't know this guy in the slightest. One view could be he's just a geek like us living out his dream building cool potentially useful stuff not entirely sure where it will lead.
I've wondered if LLMs are infact conscious as per some underwhelming definition as you mentioned. Just for the brief moment they operate on a prompt. They wake up, they perceive their world through tokens, do a few thinking loops then sleep until the next prompt.
So what? Should we feel bad for spawning them and effectively killing them? I think not.
Its a typical utilities SCADA system most cities operate.
Much like your setup their are sensors fitted to various infrastructure connected to PLC's connected to licensed uhf radio modems back to a base station (with a few hops through repeaters or microwave backhaul) into a PC running some kind of IO server which handles all the polling and collects the data into a database and SCADA software (Aveva).
Its a weird mashup of hardware and protocols (dnp3, modbus, serial) plus some data coming in through IoT devices over http and all sorts of bits.
All i built was a python script that runs the query (we are talking 200 bits of data) every minite and dumps it into a JSON file. Then there is a caddy server which serves the json, SVG (1.5mb uncompressed) and a vanilla html/javascript (300 ish lines of code, AI helped get started) page that displays it.
Its not open to public, nor is it a replacement for SCADA (SCADA has many many more objects plus the ability to control and send out alarms). There are many more people wanting 'view only' access than the city has pricey SCADA licenses for, so if fills this gap for free. Sorry i can't share more, i moved on from that job.
You can use the browser console to inject any value to any element to verify expected behaviour.
There are also patterns in the water network so issues reveal themselves pretty quick then easy to fix. E.g. pumps on=green, off=grey, fault=red. Easy to spot an element that is misconfigured especially when you look at it all day.
You can also hover over an element and it reveals its tagname in a tooltip which helps. And the script has an error log for things such as if there are any tagnames in the query it can't find a drawing element for or if it failed to set some value
I did this for an entire cities water supply network. SCADA systems UIs are a decade or more behind the modern web, not to mention slow loading and expensive. I took a reticulation diagram and marked all the flow meters, pressure transducers, pumps, reservoir level sensors and even river flow meters just like you said using ids for each element. The data is essentially pulled from a sql query every minute and pushed out through json including any active alarms.
This lets as many users view it as necessary and loads instantly. Has pan and zoom so yiu can capture everything on a page. Fully customisable, used draw.io for the diagram. Professional automation guys jaws dropped when i told them it took a few days to build and didnt require some ridiculous software license
Just wanted to say thank very much for sharing this.
Over the last few months I've been inventing this almost exact approach in my head as a hobby without consciously knowing it had already been done. I love their little RC car demo.
As easy as wordpress, square space or whatever claim to be, in my mind this is even easier, the solution is more elegant, and you expose yourself to a whole lot less crap along the way.
Edit: I recognise this doesn't cover hosting, domain registration etc.
This makes me wonder. OpenAI isn't the only company offering computer use. The list of companies and models that do this will only grow.
Meaning advertiser's will have to be selective which company they pay to get the most exposure to their target human customers via the agents. Will we see affiliate programs for AI agents which in turn promote products to the users? and we end up with the same shit show we have today?
Or what if eventually everyone has their own personal AI that can bypass the ads. Will we just decide that advertising is a drag on society and kill off that industry for good?
We describe a computing architecture capable of simulating networks with billions of spiking neurons using an ordinary Apple MacBook Air equipped with a M2 processor, 24 GB of on-chip unified memory and a 4TB solid-state disk. We use an event-based propagation approach that processes packets of N spikes from the M neurons in the system on each processing cycle. Each neuron has C binary input connections, where C can be 128 or more. During the propagation phase, we increment the activation values for all targets of the N neurons that fired. In the second step, we use the histogram of activation values to determine the firing threshold on the fly and select the N neurons that will fire in the next packet. We note that this active selection process could be related to oscillatory activity in the brain, which may have the function of fixing the percentage of neurons that fire on each cycle. Critically, there are absolutely no restrictions on architecture, since each neuron can have a direct connection to any other neuron, allowing us to have both feed-forward as well as recurrent connections. With M = 2 32 neurons, this allows 2 64 possible connections, although actual connectivity is extremely sparse. Even with off-the-shelf hardware, the simulator can continuously propagate packets with thousands of spikes and millions of connections dozens of times a second. Remarkably, all this is possible using an energy budget of just 37 watts, close to the energy required by the human brain. The work demonstrates that brain-scale simulations are possible using current hardware, but this requires fundamentally rethinking how simulations are implemented.
Thanks for sharing. On mobile it's a bit small and one slightly misplaced swipe and my browser scrolls horizontally or tries to refresh the page. Are there any quick fixes for this?
Otherwise it's a great little puzzle I could see myself toodle-ing with often.
AI/ML, IoT, Robotics, Privacy, Outdoor Activities, Open Source