dws (u/dws) - Readit News

dws commented on Troubled Amazon drone delivery program faces latest challenge: Annoyed residents cnbc.com/2024/08/16/amazo... · Posted by u/rntn

jdietrich · a year ago

>Bryan Woods, College Station’s city manager, said at the meeting that city officials ran tests of a Prime Air drone and found it had noise levels between 47 and 61 decibels.

That's surprisingly quiet. I don't know the situation in Texas, but 40% of the EU population is exposed to road traffic noise exceeding 55 dBA. My own back garden exceeds 60dBA for most of the day, with regular peaks closer to 70 dBA due to railway noise.

https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/fact-sheets/item/noise

dws · a year ago

Imagine that every so often, without warning, a 47-61 db house fly buzzes somewhere in your house. I'd grab a swatter and hunt it down before it disturbed me again.

dws commented on Exo: Run your own AI cluster at home with everyday devices github.com/exo-explore/ex... · Posted by u/simonpure

hagope · a year ago

I used to be excited about running models locally (LLM, stable diffusion etc) on my Mac, PC, etc. But now I have resigned to the fact that most useful AI compute will mostly be in the cloud. Sure, I can run some slow Llama3 models on my home network, but why bother when it is so cheap or free to run it on a cloud service? I know Apple is pushing local AI models; however, I have serious reservations about the impact on battery performance.

dws · a year ago

> Sure, I can run some slow Llama3 models on my home network, but why bother when it is so cheap or free to run it on a cloud service?

Running locally, you can change the system prompt. I have Gemma set up on a spare NUC, and changed the system prompt from "helpful" to "snarky" and "kind, honest" to "brutally honest". Having an LLM that will roll its eyes at you and say "whatever" is refreshing.

dws commented on Tech nostalgia enthusiasts have made a PiDP-10, a replica of the PDP-10 theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/zdw

rst · a year ago

Correction -- it's a 2:3 scale model of a PDP-10 front panel, concealing a Raspberry Pi running an emulator. In the original equipment, the panel would have been attached to one of several racks containing the CPU and main memory, cabled up to peripherals (tape drives like in '60s movies, disk drives the size of washing machines) through wires under the false floor of a dedicated computer room...

The PiDP-10 accurately models the console, but it doesn't depict the rest of this at all.

dws · a year ago

Full authenticity would also require raised flooring, and an audio track of people shouting "SAVE YOUR FILES!" whenever the lights flickered.

dws commented on Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home every.to/the-crazy-ones/t... · Posted by u/adrianhon

rsynnott · a year ago

Wait, how did remote first work in the 60s? Did they post in punchcards? TTYs weren't really much of a thing at that stage, were they?

dws · a year ago

Coding forms, accumulated until someone had access to a keypunch.

Turnaround time could be days, which encouraged being very scrupulous when coding.

dws commented on The Lone Volcano in California's Central Valley nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us... · Posted by u/benbreen

lisper · a year ago

Do they actually market their wines that way? I thought it would make an interesting comparison, but when I looked on their web site I didn't see any indication of which wine came from which type of soil.

(I'm a wine aficionado who happens to believe that most wine marketing is BS. I'm particularly skeptical of terroir, so a chance to do a proper controlled experiment would be really interesting.)

dws · a year ago

I don't know it they market this way. I learned it at the winery, from someone who clearly loved the wine. It was a, "Try these two. Taste the difference?" thing, followed by the story. And then you walk outside the tasting room, look up at the hill, and see it.

dws commented on The Lone Volcano in California's Central Valley nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us... · Posted by u/benbreen

dws · a year ago

There's a vineyard in that area, Sobon Estates, that has a unique feature. If you look up into the vineyard from the winery, there's a dividing line between volcanic soil and alluvial soil. The same varietal of grape produces a noticeably different wine depending on which side of the line it was grown on.

dws commented on Things unexpectedly named after people (2020) notes.rolandcrosby.com/po... · Posted by u/prawn

dws · 2 years ago

Sedona, Arizona.

Named for Sedona Schenbly, of Goren, Missouri. She and her husband had moved to Arizona for their health. He wanted to open a Post Office, but the Post Office authorities didn't favor his suggestion of naming it "Schenblyville Station." Thankfully, he chose to name it after his wife.

dws commented on First do it, then do it right, then do it better twitter.com/addyosmani/st... · Posted by u/erfanebrahimnia

danielovichdk · 2 years ago

Fred Brooks. The Mythical Man Month. 1975.

Chapter 11. Plan to Throw One Away.

dws · 2 years ago

"This I now perceived to be wrong, not because it is too radical, but because it is too simplistic. The biggest mistake in the 'Build one to throw away' concept is that it implicitly assumes the classical sequential or waterfall model of software construction." -- The Mythical Man-Month, 20th Anniversary Edition, pg. 265

dws commented on Llamafile lets you distribute and run LLMs with a single file github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/l... · Posted by u/tfinch

dws · 2 years ago

Can confirm that this runs on an ancient i3 NUC under Ubuntu 20.04. It emits a token every five or six seconds, which is "ask a question then go get coffee" speed. Still, very cool.

dws commented on Code Search at Google: Han-Wen and Zoekt sourcegraph.com/blog/zoek... · Posted by u/intrepidsoldier

dekhn · 2 years ago

Before git, most people in my larger circle used RCS, a UNIX version control system from the early 80's. It was very limited (basically each file had its own side-file that contained revision data, and there was no project-wide file) but did its job. Many people moved over to VCS, which used RCS files but added project-wide files so you could manage a dir tree.

After that, I think many people moved to subversion, which had a lot more functionality for distributed VC, for exmaple there was a server. svn was popular for a while but building it was painful (due to berkeley db) and it sort of never grew. I invested a lot of time in (specifically apache with mod_dav and mod_dav_svn) but lost interest in VC after fighting with subversion.

git came along and from what i can tell it mainly had "it's by linus, and the kernel uses it" and "it's fast" and "something about reflogs". I use git day-to-day but I still; can't explain how git became so ubiquitous; I find using it outright painful.

dws · 2 years ago

Lightweight branches was a huge selling point. If you didn't do them often enough that they were rote, branches in RCS/CVS/SVN required ritual sacrifice.