Thanks! Looks like lots of options out there.

Our power panel is old and we’ve been advised it may need replacing. I briefly looked at Span panels, with built-in energy monitoring, but they’re not cheap. These monitors look like you at least get the data at a much more reasonable price.

How did you get the breakdown? We have a really old panel and may be looking at getting a new one in the next year. Would love to be able to see the breakdowns and figure out where it’s going. FWIW, in PG&E territory.

Good read. Sad ending that all that work ended up nowhere.

Switched over to Fox to see how they were going to spin it.

Hannity was like: “The moderators are lefties. It was 3-1 .”

Then he brought on Rubio, and I clicked away.

NEW feature: As you drive down the road, Ford cars will automatically take over and drive you to the nearest sponsor location. Hungry? It will take over and swerve into the nearest KFC drive-thru. Next stop, CVS pharmacy, then Office Depot.

Disclaimer: Disabling AutoAd feature requires monthly subscription.

When this whole ‘training’ trend started a few years ago, there were companies offering image and video labelling services.

It turned out they were mostly sweatshops in low-income countries, where people sat in front of monitors and just dragged boumding boxes around sections of images and picked from an icon menu. Here’s a car, here’s a person, here’s an apple. That sort of thing. You didn’t even need to know how to read or write.

Of course, the quality was questionable, so they needed a second layer of supervisors verifying the choices. But even with that, the cost was way lower than having an engineer or QA person do it. IIRC, there was a bit of hue and cry when stories came out of big tech companies supporting sweatshop conditions.

Sounds like it’s still ongoing.

• Loading dishwashers properly requires an official government license and a test.
• Putting a flat plate in front of a bowl means a year of hard labor.
• Loading any of the good kitchen knives is an automatic 10 years.

NEW, automated children’s bicycle. Guaranteed to teach the little tyke how to ride! *

• ^Comes with training wheels, and adult monitor standing by at all times.^

I’ve been using ChatGPT, specialized ones on Huggingface, and a bunch of local ones using ollama. A colleague who is into this deep says Claude is giving him best results.

Thing is, depends on the task. For coding, I’ve found all suck. ChatGPT gets you up to a point, then puts out completely wrong stuff. Gemini, Microsoft, and CodeWhisperer put out half-baked rubbish. If you don’t already know the domain, it will be frustrating finding the bugs.

For images, I’ve tried DALL-E for placeholder graphics. Problem is, if you change a single prompt element to refine the output, it will generate completely different images with no way to go back. Same with Adobe generators. Folks have recommended Stability for related images. Will be trying that next.

Most LLMs are just barely acceptable. Good for casual messing around, but I wouldn’t bet the business on any of them. Once the novelty wears off, and the CFOs tally up the costs, my prediction is a lot of these are going away.

Installed RabbitMQ for use in Python Celery (for task queue and crontab). Was pleasantly surprised it also offered MQTT support.

Was originally planning on using a third-party, commercial combo websocket/push notification service. But between RabbitMQ/MQTT with websockets and Firebase Cloud Messaging, I’m getting all of it: queuing, MQTT pubsub, and cross-platform push, all for free. 🎉

It all runs nicely in Docker and when time to deploy and scale, trust RabbitMQ more since it has solid cluster support.

Once they get Threads support, their target audience will be the non-Twitter universe. This would make it easier for businesses, governments, journalists, and non-technical folks like influencers and celebrities to switch out. That’s how you get mass adoption.

I just tried it last week. Good start. Lots of promise.

How great-grandpa caught syphilis? Towards the end, doctors said a lot of his ailments were because of that one, little issue. You can speculate, but…

Since nobody’s brought it up: MQTT.

It got pigeonholed into IoT world, but it’s a pretty decent event pubsub system. It has lots lf security/encryption options, plus a websocket layer, so you can use it anywhere from devices, to mobile, to web.

As of late last year, RabbitMQ started suporting it as a supported server add-on, so it’s easy to use it to create scalable, event-based systems, including for multiuser games.

Wait until AGI!

AGI: Yes.

Wait until the sentient robots!

Sentient robots: Yes.

Wait until biological…

Biologics: Glub, glub. Yes.

An old, dear friend and his family are in town to drop off his daughter at graduate school. Reconnected with him back in April when I visited his side of the country. Looking forward to having them over and introducing them to my own family.

My kid swears by train-crossing channels on YT.

I’ve always kept a strict separation between work and personal projects, including a personal laptop, accounts, and yes, paying for AI services. For a while, a few years ago, while commuting on the company shuttle, I even had my own MiFi cell access point and a laptop battery booster so I could work on my own projects on the bus and not be accused of using company resources.

Most employment contracts spell out that anything you create using company resources is the property of the company. Legally, they own everything that passes though their computers, software, and networks.

Also, many corporations run system monitoring services on their laptops and MDM mobile data management on mobile phones (for example JAMF on Apple devices). These monitor things like file access, copying, communications, and web access. This data is sent to central servers for processing and looking for anomalies based on pre-set rules. This might sound tin-foily, but it’s mandated by legal in a lot of companies, including small and medium sized ones.

If you want to use non-company data to do AI work, or develop a service or idea on your own, or even keep your text messages and email private, you’ll want to use your own equipment, accounts, and services.

Edit: also, if you get laid-off or fired, you’ll want to have a decent personal rig so you can continue working on your own projects while looking for work. Even if working on a novel on the side, suggest keeping everything off company systems.

She was the co-author of the second edition of Bunnie Huang’s New Essential Guide to Electronics, for those looking to make hardware in Shenzhen: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/a-new-essential-guide-to-electronics-by-naomi-wu-details-a-different-shenzen/

We used to have the same problem. Years ago, a relative recommended a Miele canister-style. They were pretty pricey, but took a chance. It could practically pull the floorboards up (fortunately, the power level is adjustable). It lasted forever.

Replaced it with the same brand. Apparently, some models are now made overseas and use cheaper components, but the higher-end models are still made in Germany. Totally worth it.