To me the noise was 10% of the problem. Who wants to breathe in what lies on the ground? Just lick it instead.
Readit Newsrangledangle commented on Students invent quieter leaf blower hub.jhu.edu/2024/05/14/qu... · Posted by u/namanyayg
Any reason why Waymo is so much more expensive than alternatives? I went across SF last weekend and Uber/Lyft was around $16. Waymo was $56.
rangledangle commented on Twitch lays off 500 staff venturebeat.com/games/twi... · Posted by u/heresie-dabord
The purple snake should have never cancelled the two-time, back-to-back, 1993, 1994, Blockbuster Videogame Champion.
yayayayayaya
rangledangle commented on How meta built the infrastructure for Threads engineering.fb.com/2023/1... · Posted by u/trojanalert
What do folks use for something like Meta’s Async? RabbitMQ?
> The workloads commonly executed on Async are those that do not require blocking an active user’s experience with a product and can be performed anywhere from a few seconds to several hours after a user’s action.
Sounds like something you could do with SQS and Lambda. They just have massive datacenter infra and compute at disposal.
rangledangle commented on Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics thedrive.com/news/tire-du... · Posted by u/geox
I'd only add "...because they're incredibly useful, AND government policy has consistently favoured such a mode of transport over all other alternatives". The amount spent by governments on maintaining road infrastructure dwarfs all other transport spending, the amount of land dedicated to parking and driving space is mindboggling, and of course the amount spent on ensuring the global oil industry has been able to reliably and safely deliver fuel to vehicles is beyond comprehension* (and almost certainly one of the reasons the transition to EVs will be slower than technology might otherwise allow - vested interests with billions to lose will do anything to keep their share of the spoils).
Not to mention the fact that we've yet to actually start truly paying for the long term environmental and health costs of allowing our cities to be so dominated by a single mode of transport.
*) it's estimated up to 20% of the US's defence budget is spent protecting oil supplies for a start, which effectively acts as a subsidy of around 70c a gallon.
Cars are only useful because America foolishly built and rebuilt around cars, instead of humans. There were even places that functioned perfectly fine with transit and walking, destroyed and replaced with infrastructure for cars.
Undoing our mistake is always an option.
rangledangle commented on Low-Code Programming Models cacm.acm.org/magazines/20... · Posted by u/mitchbob
Sure but if it's just ChatGPT spitting out code that the users don't really understand I can't see it being a workable solution either.
What I'm thinking is that low-code implies something like natural language pseudo code that LLM tech is able to accurately interpret and turn into executable code. Of course the "accurately" part is still something of an issue, but usually with a few rounds of "no that didn't work" or "that's not what I meant" you can likely get what you actually intended.
I feel like any code created from GPT can also be interpreted from GPT. Use a prompt like "Explain like I'm 5". Also DiagramGPT and just generating documentation in general from code.
Perhaps at some point you can screenshot the lowcode and paste the image into GPT for it to interpret, but will they build for that use-case? The former exists today.
rangledangle commented on Tell HN: Enterprises spend 10x more to build no-code solutions than coded ones · Posted by u/nancyp
[IT Perspective] In my personal experience, these tools also overreach. Most people I've met in IT (15 years) want to go into Engineering, or at the very least, something MORE technical and code-related.
They are hungry and willing, but often overlooked. I have seen many climb out and teach themselves code, build tools for IT and revolutionize the way teams and orgs work. It's a marvel to see someone with drive do what they desire.
Fast forward to today. I see IT forcing all members to use a low-code tool. The passion drains from their eyes. I can see the fear of the mounting weight of becoming unemployable. They've shared with me their experiences. The directions they want to go have nothing to do with Low-Code, and the roles and orgs their interviewing with aren't interested in people who build with them. The question "what have you been working on?" is like a death knell. I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't see a future beyond helpdesk because of these tools.
My point is, think carefully about who is using this product. You can kill careers with this stuff. I think it's great for business teams who want to "do x in x app when y happens in y app."
rangledangle commented on Low-Code Programming Models cacm.acm.org/magazines/20... · Posted by u/mitchbob
If ChatGPT is gonna disrupt any technology you'd think it might be low code platforms.
It's really sad, because almost all of these platforms are code-averse. They sell the idea that "code is the hard part". Business folk eat it up.
Then you sit there like an idiot dragging blocks around when you could have just asked GPT to bust it out in code in seconds.
They're so bad for source control and documentation, too.
rangledangle commented on Low-Code Programming Models cacm.acm.org/magazines/20... · Posted by u/mitchbob
I have been doing a lot of work with AWS StepFunctions lately, everything from replacing cron jobs to implementing HTMX backends. I think StepFunctions is an interesting case study (I'm not really familiar with other offerings, other than spending some time with the block-based programming like Scratch and MakeCode).
To build solutions I have to use the Amazon States Language, which is a learning curve and being as charitable as I can a royal pain in the ass. Ultimately I end up with a JSON file that is a "giant, flexible config file" for their runtime.
On the plus side, solutions using it are very nearly zero maintenance. No runtime updates, no package updates, no manual scaling, etc.
Another plus, it's zero cost when not in use. No VMs I have to pay for hourly or monthly.
The downsides (for me) are obvious: It's difficult to learn; It's very restrictive, and solutions often end-up needing some aspect of more flexible services like Lambda or Fargate (containers) when end-up adding cost and maintenance; It's proprietary and there is nothing I can use elsewhere (no other company support ASL as far as I know).
Overall, though, I love it. Why? I despise having to choose between unpatched systems and the drudgery of constant patching. With StepFuctions I don't have to choose.
I was so stoked to build stuff this way; I had the same sentiments about the learning curve, but overall it seemed like an amazing tool and pretty fun.
The problem is the people around me thought it was too difficult, and couldn't see long term. So we implemented a low code solution and now everything is in there and it's a mess/nightmare. I hate my work now, and everything we build is tightly coupled to this spaghetti platform that will inevitably decide to raise it's prices on us and we will have no recourse.
Job hunting has been tough too, because very few places have done this, so they ask "what have you been working on?" and I'm basically setting record times for ending interviews if I tell the truth.
Seems like they are quite startled with LLama 2 and Code Llama, and how its rapid adoption is accelerating the AI race to zero. Why have this when Llama 2 and Code Llama exists and brings the cost close to $0?
This sound like a huge waste of money for something that should just be completely on-device or self-hosted if you don't trust cloud-based AI models like ChatGPT Enterprise and want it all private and low cost.
But either way, Meta seems to be already at the finish line in this race and there is more to AI than the LLM hype.
Less technical companies throw money at problems to solve them. Like mine, sadly... Even if it takes a small amount of effort, companies will throw money for zero effort.