They put new AI controls on our traffic lights. Cost the city a fuck ton more money than fixing our dilapidated public pool. Now no one tries to turn left at a light. They don’t activate. We threw out a perfectly good timer no one was complaining about.
But no one from silicone valley is lobbing cities to buy pool equipment, I guess.
I’ve seen a video of at least one spa that does that. They mine bitcoin on rigs immersed in mineral oil, with a heat exchanger to the spa’s water system. I’m struggling to imagine that’s enough heat, especially piped a distance through the building, to run several hot tubs, and I’m kind of dubious about that particular load, but hey.
A large data centre can use over 100 MW at the high end. Certainly enough to power a swimming pool or three. In fact swimming pools are normally measured in kW not MW.
We are a small software company. We’re trying to find a useful use case. Currently we can’t. However, we’re watching closely. It has to come at the rate of improving.
Whilst it’s a shame this implementation sucks, I wish we would get intelligent traffic light controls that worked. Sitting at a light for 90 seconds in the dead of night without a car in sight is frustrating.
That was a solved problem 20 years ago lol. We made working systems for this in our lab at Uni, it was one of our course group projects. It used combinations of sensors and microcontrollers.
It’s not really the kind of problem that requires AI. You can do it with AI and image recognition or live traffic data but that’s more fitting for complex tasks like adjusting the entire grid live based on traffic conditions. It’s massively overkill for dead time switches.
Even for grid optimization you shouldn’t jump into AI head first. It’s much better long term to analyze the underlying causes of grid congestion and come up with holistic solutions that address those problems, which often translate into low-tech or zero-tech solutions. I’ve seen intersections massively improved by a couple of signs, some markings and a handful of plastic poles.
Throwing AI at problems is sort of a “spray and pray” approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.
Throwing AI at problems is sort of a “spray and pray” approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.
I can see the headlines now: “New social media trend where people are asking traffic light Ai to solve the traveling salesman problem is causing massive traffic jams and record electricity costs for the city.”
You need to really specify what is meant by “AI” here. Chances are it’s probably some form of smart traffic lights to improve traffic flow. Which is not all that special. It has nothing to do with LLMs
Honestly I’m not sure, we had circular sensors for a long time, about the size of a tall drinking glass, now there’s rectangular sensors they just put up about twice the size of a cell phone and they have a bend, arc, to them, I know they weren’t being used as cameras at all before, no one was getting tickets with pictures from them, it’s a small town. What exactly the new system is I’m not sure, our local news all went out of business, so its all word of mouth, or going to town hall meetings.
It’s funny because this is what I was afraid of with “AI” threatening humanity.
Not that we’d get super-intelligences running Terminators, but that we’d be using black-box “I dunno how it does it, we just trained it and let it go.” Tech in civilization-critical applications because it sounded cool to people with more dollars than brain cells.
I’d say no, because the difference to me lies in Trump being actively malicious, and ChatGPT essentially being random, as far as the lay public is concerned.
Well on Reddit, programmerhumor was mostly populated by people weirdly proud of how bad they are at their job, so I don’t see how Lemmy was going to be different.
Not to mention the fact that it’s programmer Humor. Not programming advice. which means that there are usually less serious comments to be found that may or may not be good advice. But I suppose some people have no sense of humour.
You know, you do you in Humor communities. I personally don’t expect to find the most serious of comments under posts in those.
Anyhow…Naturally there is a good argument to be made about making good comments. And that it may be a good idea to not comment things that are probably obvious. Just so that the file is a shorter read.
Reminds me of every fuckin PR I do for the Indian contractors that were sold to us as “senior devs” but write code like a junior and you better believe every other line has the most obvious fucking comment possible
Better than writing beginner level crap that is at the same time super cryptic and not documenting at all. We have a bunch of that in our codebase and it makes me wonder why these devs are writing extension methods for functionality already built into the standard libraries.
Better than writing beginner level crap that is at the same time super cryptic and not documenting at all. We have a bunch of that in our codebase and it makes me wonder why these devs are writing extension methods for functionality already built into the standard libraries.
I’ve worked in a few startups, and it always annoys me when people say they don’t have time to do it right. You don’t have time not to do it right - code structure and clarity is needed even as a solo dev, as you say, for future you. Barfing out code on the basis of “it works, so ship it” you’ll be tied up in your own spaghetti in a few months. Hence the traditional clean-sheet rewrite that comes along after 18-24 months that really brings progress to its knees.
Ironically I just left the startup world for a larger more established company and the code is some of the worst I’ve seen in a decade. e.g. core interface definitions without even have a sentence explaining the purpose of required functions. Think “you’re required to provide a function called “performControl()”, but to work out its responsibilities you’re going to have to reverse-engineer the codebase”. Worst of all this unprofessional crap is part of that ground-up 2nd attempt rewrite.
Ironically I just left the startup world for a larger more established company and the code is some of the worst I’ve seen in a decade. e.g. core interface definitions without even have a sentence explaining the purpose of required functions. Think “you’re required to provide a function called “performControl()”, but to work out its responsibilities you’re going to have to reverse-engineer the codebase”. Worst of all this unprofessional crap is part of that ground-up 2nd attempt rewrite.
I think this is actually quite common in commercial code. At least, for most of the code I've seen. Which is why I laugh most of the time when people imply commercial code is better than most open source code. It's not, you just cannot see it.
LLMs aren’t virtual dumbasses who are constantly wrong, they are bullshit generators. They are sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but don’t really care either way and will say wrong things just as confidently as right things.
More useful would be what sort of values is acceptable there. Can I use team number 2318008? Can I use team 0? If not, why not? WHY / WHY NOT is often useful.
The graph goes up for me when I find my comfortable little subset of C++ but goes back down when I encounter other people’s comfortable little subset of C++ or when I find/remember another footgun I didn’t know/forgot about.
When I became a team leader at my last job, my first priority was making a list of parts of the language we must never use because of our high reliability requirement.
Sure, strtok is a terrible misfeature, a relic of ancient times, but it’s plainly the heritage of C, not C++ (just like e.g. strcpy). The C++ problems are things like braced initialization list having different meaning depending on the set of available constructors, or the significantly non-zero cost of various abstractions, caused by strange backward-compatible limitations of the standard/ABI definitions, or the distinctness of vector<bool> etc.
No you are right! Honestly it was several years ago and I struggled to remember exactly what I came up with before I left.
In our application we for example never use dynamic memory allocation. It has to be done very carefully so we don’t crash. Problem is there’s lots of sneaky ways one can accidentally do it from the standard library.
That’s one thing that always shocks me. You can have two people writing C++ and have them both not understand what the other is writing. C++ has soo many random and contradictory design patterns, that two people can literally use it as if it were 2 separate languages.
C is almost the perfect subset for me, but then I miss templates (almost exclusively for defining generic data structures) and automatic cleanup. That’s why I’m so interested in Zig with its comptime and defer features.
You may also like Odin if you haven’t already started zig. It’s less of a learning curve and feels more like what c should have always been. It has defer and simple generics, but doesn’t have the magic of comptime.
I’ve tried multiple times to go IP6 only. I mostly thought, despite my reasonable understanding of IP4, that I was the problem in trying to set it up. I found my dns host was being forgotten multiple times a day, set to something invalid, then it would time out and revert back to the working one. I couldn’t figure out how to connect two computers together for Minecraft.
Now I hear it was just garbage consumer hardware and software? Fuck me. So much wasted time and effort to say nothing of believing I had turned into a tech idiot.
Do you have an example? Because it works great on openwrt, dd-wrt, pfsense, opnsense, unifi, mikrotik…and then if you’re using the isp equipment it works out of the box.
TP-link can’t open ports in the v6 firewall neither can Linksys and it doesn’t support DHCP forward so literally was incompatible with my ISP implementation. Some current TP Link router sold at Walmart don’t even have an IPv6 firewall.
Open source works great. Can’t speak to unifi never seen it for sale here.
You’re using open source third party firmware and higher end networking gear as an example. Of course they work. Shitty consumer grade brands aren’t in the same class
Interesting that India has such a high percentage. I’m guessing it’s because most of their network infrastructure is probably relatively new and so they can include support right off the bat, instead of having to retrofit stuff?
Not much choise i guess. Usa and europe grabbed the majority of available ipv4 space. Asia got a bit. And only scraps and leftovers for africa and latin america.
China block much of the internet so who knows with china. Do not know if anyone have real china numbers of IPv6 deployment. They also had their own “IPv9” that was rumored some years ago that may or may not have been used internally.
Software devs in general seem to have a hard time with balance. No comments or too many comments. Not enough abstraction or too much, overly rigid or loose coding standards, overoptimizing or underoptimizing. To be fair it is difficult to get there.
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