tkahnoski · HackerTrans

3개월 전discuss

I think if anything LLLM has taught us... its that AGI will not be predictable.

The idea of an intelligence being consistent as it becomes more capable is probably not a good assumption. However I think everyone will settle for consistently "correct".

(I'm ignoring current LLM non-determinism within the same model which so far is attributed to parallel processing race conditions).

tkahnoski

작년discuss

I think you just made my point. If designing an eScooter you'd look at available power needed across the problem space. Even more so you might put in a safety features like a temperature monitor so electronic components don't fail because someone decided to go up a steep 12 mile mountain path and overheat the battery.

If I was designing a software system, I could introduce a time constraint. An imagined conversation: "How long will it take to get an answer? Between half a second and the heat death of the universe. OK. Can we just issue a timeout error after 1 second?"

This is putting controls in place so the system doesn't exceed its constraints and although hypothetical it might be able to do a job for any input, it can't because we haven't been able to find a more efficient solution for certain known and unknown scenarios.

tkahnoski

작년discuss

I think maybe this misses the mark. Yes software can lead to unbounded complexity unlikely many physics based engineering disciplines.

However, at the end of the day, there is an input and output and compute and memory needed to run the thing and if we look at that we realize, we never actually left the bounded physical realm and we can still engineer software systems against real world constraints. We can judge its efficiency and breaking points.

What's very different is the cost to change the system to do something new and that's where this unbounded complexity blows up in our face.

tkahnoski

작년discuss

Mewing is something intended to address this, but evidence isn't there. Everyone wants a non-invasive solution rather than jaw expanders, braces, retainers etc.. so depending on where your bias, you might be against "Big-Ortho" and try this, or you could invest in proven orthodontics.

tkahnoski

작년discuss

There's definitely an existential question around if fusion will ever be able to beat renewables plus batteries, but who knows with our energy demands ever increasing at some point renewables may hit a breaking point in land cost.

I'm generally pro-publicly funded research. There is not any direct ROI on say the LHC, but it does fund advanced manufacturing and engineering work that might enable other more practical industrial applications. The ROI might be a century away.

tkahnoski

2년 전discuss

Another way of looking at it is CDK's main product is an ERP tailored to the automotive industry. These aren't systems with short setup times and there is major risk to trying to replatform you're accounting system. How do you pull of an ERP migration while you're existing one is down? Further, almost everything the dealer does from inventory management to service is integrated to this system of record either directly or via data integrations.

Some of the smaller mom-and-pop stores just use small business accounting systems like quickbooks but those get pretty tedious to maintain with any sizable number of sales or employees per month.

tkahnoski

2년 전discuss

A few quick googles... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve as usual early thinkers on General Relativity were already going down this road.

tkahnoski

2년 전discuss

Lately I've wondered... what if this flow of time wasn't true? at least not at universe scale? Messier than just gravitational affects but actual weird topography in time?

There is nothing scientific about this conjecture, simply a thought I haven't had time to fully contemplate. What if there were loops and turns such that light and energy from distant galaxies would loop back around not just in space but in time creating weird feedback loops.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

Ditto as to living in "Dallas" proper.

Tweets from Delkus and the Fort Worth National Weather Service are the main way I pay attention to new developments. Typically stuff will get posted there before live TV coverage starts. There's almost always a graphic posted of what the window is they expect for storms to form which helps me understand what I need to pay attention to.

I have a relative in another state whose a meteorologist and he doesn't have nearly as much fun as Delkus's team does online.

As far as over-indexing on preparedness goes, there has been at least twice our kids school has dismissed early in light of a severe weather forecast, however they do this several hours ahead of time (parents can't react that fast anyways). Only for the storms to be your more normal strength T-storm by the time carline starts. I can certainly appreciate the intent, but it's almost never that certain what's going to happen unless the storms are already popping up.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

Watches are common, indicators are common, warnings tend to be very last minute.

I consider myself a very weather aware person living near the edge of tornado alley in Dallas, I get all the alerts, generally keep a strong watch on radar development and storm arrival times (hail is just as much as a concern as tornadoes).

In general if there is a detection of a rotation or a strong hail core on radar, emergency sirens will go on near the affected area. Sometimes it just happens too fast, so if there is another method like the article sounds to detect a strong potential a tornado is forming it will absolutely reduce casualties.

As an example I lived through in October 2019. There was one hour between a Tornado Watch being issued and when the EF2/EF3 hit the ground. Watches generally last a long time and cover a large area so they aren't particularly helpful to me other than to indicate to 'check the radar on the regular'.

Because I was already glued to my phone I saw the warning right away, I was able to text friends that lived a few minutes from the tornado touchdown point that there was a tornado right next to them. Their sirens hadn't gone off yet, by the time they had taken shelter they heard the sirens and the wind kicking up right after. They got off light on damage compared to the rest of their neighborhood but I can't imagine someone out walking their dog or running an errand and then only having 1 or 2 minutes to find shelter. I'm still amazed this thing didn't cause more injuries particularly in the early minutes when the news crews and meteorologist were playing catch up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_outbreak_of_October_20...

Maybe this tech would have helped give a clearer indicator versus the usual approach of waiting to see something on radar or manually spotting it. Or maybe some storms will just form too fast to have any useful indicators.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

Particularly since battery replacement is one of the easier DIY auto repairs many people take on.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

I see what you are saying. My comment was more geared towards how a Zillow number or KBB number could move the market and I didn't consider that in the context of the article about rent.

It would be interesting to see if how rent markets change if more data becomes available. In the auto-industry, a car dealer can offload the unit to the wholesale market to minimize loss, whereas a landlord is less liquid.

The inventory pressure is there in both situations. An unsold car after 30-60 days is a problem both because of typical retail business dynamics and additional factors with general vehicle depreciation and high maintenance overhead of a vehicle compared to other capital goods, but the exit strategy is there and risk exposure can be limited.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

Definitely think housing is more easily manipulated since there's little standardization of the condition of a house or the materials or features that would drive pricing. (sq foot, # bedrooms/bathrooms/pool/garage size, year built). Everything else is neighborhood comparative sales.

The auto world works a little different since there is an entire wholesale operation behind the scenes that also drives pricing. There are several alternatives to KBB although less targeted to consumers. Also way more standardized in condition reporting.... but I know too much about the industry.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

Even a hybrid mission with humans in orbit doesn't make sense. You have to bring less fuel for landing/take-off from Mars. But for that same cost you could send way more robotic workers and just deal with speed of light/delays (3-20 minutes).

If there was significant uncertainty in what resources needed to be deployed to where then I could see a benefit to having an onboard team of humans who could assemble workers or payloads on the fly from orbit. However this would be a big shift from current mindset of designing robots for exact problem/solutions with precise payloads to instead having an excess of resources on board.

If the perspective shifted to "we're colonizing Mars so every ounce of metal in orbit will get used at some point" this is less of a concern.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

The install of postgres was relatively trivial, it did however raise many licensing questions and I don't think we even had a lawyer on retainer to talk through it. This also made it weird because of license reasons, we couldn't actually download and agree to the license because that would be our company 'selling postgres' as part of the package so we needed the client to do that step.

I can't remember exactly why HSQL/H2 wasn't used but I think it had to do with fault tolerance and redundancy and what we could do with postgres replication was preferred over what we would have otherwise used SQLite for.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

Vague memory from 10+ years ago:

  * Getting real deep with detecting OS/instruction set and edge cases
  * Constantly validating permissions on every directory and file
  * Constantly verifying checksums on everything put in place
  * Concurrency controls to make sure the user didn't launch the installer twice, or the system wasn't live running when being reinstalled.
  * Dependency verification was it's own rats nest of problems
  * Uninstalling

Easier problems:

  * Logging
  * Status tracking (except for really large files things get weird...)
  * Aborting/Cancelling install

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

raises hand Similar only we created a Java Swing GUI since it was multiplatform.... So you'd install the JRE (it's multi-platform right?), then you'd install Postgres (what?) then run our installer to put code where it needed to go and configure the database and application settings.

The testing cycle was the biggest pain, this was right as VirtualBox had become a thing so at least starting with a fresh system was slightly easier. (The entire company had 4 engineers + some researchers).

I think I was two years post-college as were most of my other colleagues... I'm fairly certain that product never made it out of initial trial (I left the company before it finished).

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

Worked at a medium size enterprise and was trying to get some detailed performance metrics with a legacy tech stack that didn't have a drop-in APM soluion. This was in the age of graphite which was great for aggregating metrics cheap but not getting detail.

Splunk was used by a much larger product (easily 10x our scale) for monitoring events so there was no red tape to start using it.

After launching the detailed instrumentation (1 structured log event per HTTP request with a breakout of database/service activity) I was able to gain all of the insight needed and build a simple user/url lookup dashboard page to help other engineers see what was going on. We went from being mostly blind to almost full visibility in less than two weeks.

The downside was, we increased our billable Splunk usage by 50% since we were capturing so much more data per log event than the other product just consuming standard IIS/Apache logs.

That type of flexibility was totally worth it. Due to some acquisition shenanigans we broke off from that group and wound up on ELK stack which didn't perform quite as well, but was still usable with the same data. In today's day and age we could have just built an OpenTelemtry library.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

It's self-selecting. If the relationship was not in a healthy state to begin with, divorce doesn't fix that dysfunction. It's full admission the relationship between two people isn't something both parties can come together and resolve. The fact that there are any "healthy" divorces amazes me.

We can easily see the population of divorced families, it's much harder for us to shine a light on "should be divorced but aren't". I have a hard time believing kids with a dysfunctional parent relationship at home would be better off.

tkahnoski

3년 전discuss

I'd agree and my comment is more of a critique on the evolution of American society leading away from community building. Whether it be subtle things like suburban homes with giant privacy fences or larger topics like the affordability of housing to be able stay in the community you grew up in.

I'd much rather see policies towards solving these problems versus one that has the government getting in the middle of my marriage or parenting.

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