Nice article. I ran into similar issues when optimizing some code. After looking at a lot of cpu profs I found that llms can be quite powerful, to quickly do micro benchmarks and experiment with potential performance improvements. A lot of dead ends but I found some 10%-20% improvements that way.
Maybe not exactly what you meant but it reminded me about the following: When one of our apple servers failed a decade ago and just vomitted out walls of error logs too fast to read anything,the apple support guy we called took his smartphone and made some photos to read and fix the error.
My best was 5000:1 by updating the outdated SQLite in one of the companies' products.
I found that we were hit by a bug that was fixed 6 years before I discovered it (https://sqlite.org/src/info/6f2222d550f5b0ee7ed). Sqlite's query planner assumed that a field with a not null constraint can never be null, which isn't the case for the right hand table in a left join.
than 400. He said there were some unanticipated problems to resolve over that time. "One day I walked into the monkey lab to hear a voice say, '911-What's your emergency?" That situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API, isUserAMonkey(), which is used to gate actions that monkeys shouldn't take during tests (including dialing the phone and resetting the device)."
Just read an article about one of these in the local newspaper.
They currently have some challenges with bureaucracy, at least in Austria:
Given that it is an industrial facility it has to be secured from unauthorized access, but as it is a field, it has to be accessable to small animals. So now it is fenced with barbed wire on the top but it's open at the bottom.
Just because this stuck with me: Viktor Frankl once wrote that meaning in life is not a Rorschach test (i.e. has to be made up) but rather a puzzle picture ("Vexierbild", is already there and has to be found).
I don't think this contradicts what you wrote, though.
i remember talking to a former colleague who wrote a game to let people train to control their prosthetic arm at home. I asked him what the most wished for feature / most asked question for this prosthetic arm was and he told me that the most asked for question was if (mostly female) users could put nail polish on its "nails".
Anecdata, but I assume most users just want to have a life-like replacement.
Not that I'm aware off. It's hard to judge because I didn't check a lot of times during the night. What I know though, is that the fan was not blowing up, but sideways into our direction.
See my comment below.
The heat pump of my neighbour was perfectly within spec (Fujitsu woha080lfca).
It emitted around 69 dB (measured on our side of the property, also checked by an expert). Allowed (on the border of the property) were 35 dB (rule of thumb: you should not hear it in the surrounding soundscape; note that this is a logarithmic scale so I think it's a factor of 6 or something)
It was especially bad when it had less than 8 degree Celsius because it would defrost every 30 minutes or so.
As I wrote before: location is also an important part: his house is hard walled, ours is a prefab house built out of wood. There are only 4 Meters between our houses, it was approx. 2 meters from our wall blowing in our direction. They only thing they could have made worse is putting it in a corner.
I didn't only hear it, I felt it.
In the end I managed to convince him that I pay an acoustic expert to explain to him that 65 dB is way louder than 35 dB and that putting an acoustic hood around it does not solve the problem (approx -10 db).
My neighbour (illegally) put it right next to our house (between the walls of his houses and ours in a very dense area which is a very bad idea) and I basically had to move out for a few month in winter because sleeping was impossible, before I was able to convince him and get it moved (which I basically paid to be able to sleep again)
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