For the last month I've worked on a firefox plugin that allows me to send webhooks to my home assistant.
In my living room I have a linux pc connected to my TV and I'm using this in 2 ways:
- Automatically set lights when media starts/stops playing. This way I can turn on some accent lighting when I pause a movie to go to the bathroom and automatically turn them off when I resume the movie
- When media is playing I calculate the color that best represents the content and export it to home assistant use it as a poor man 'ambilight' with a led strip strategically placed behind my TV
I think the next logical step is to find a way to automatically track the content I'm watching so I can have some high level stats about my viewing habits.
> LLMs make it really easy to misunderestimate the complexity
In my experience this is a real problem. Just yesterday I asked my LLM to create a piece of software that could help me build an 'ambilight-like experience' through my home assistant. It did something that seems to work as I expected, but there is a lot of theory that I just brushed past. It would be pretty easy for me to assume that I would be able to replicate this feature from scratch 'now that I understand the problem'.
Do you have any code/insights about this home agent you could share?
I'm thinking about creating something pretty similar, I want a digital housekeeper that keeps an eye on what is happening in my house and notifies me about dead/unreliable devices, fix broken automations, suggest new automations based on sensor data, etc...
I've setup the unofficial home assistant MCP already, but LLMs seems to struggle a bit to use it properly and I haven't looked into it yet to understand what is happening.
I've created lots of small things, but the most interesting is a firefox plugin that detects when some media is playing and send an event with the details to my home assistant. This way I can create some automations that automatically change the lights when I play/pause some media. It's really cool to have your lights automatically dim when you start watching a movie and then for some accent light to turn on when I pause the movie to go to the bathroom.
I don't think GPUs ever had branch prediction in the first place. You can however run into poor performance due to thread divergence, which is a similar kind of issue (with much less black magic).
To be fair, the culprit in the article is _less complex_ than branch prediction: "with random data, bits are flipped often, and bit flips in transistors inherently draw power" is less mental gymnastics than "with random data, the cpu fails to predict the future, causing redundant speculative execution"
Sure, when comparing 0’s to anything else. But what about normal distribution to uniform in 0,1? The author hand waves something about signs but it’s not very well reasoned - that’s just a single bit in floats.
And what of the Pi test - I’d expect that to flip many more bits than the 1-bit one.
If the inputs are constant, then all the multiplies are constant and the only thing that toggles is the accumulation. Which explains the pi situation.
Normal vs uniform is less clear, but also not as much of a difference. The arguments about signs isn't just about a signs bit, though. The way you negate during accumulation is that you flip all the bits. Only the final float representation is sign+magnitude, the accumulation itself has two's complement steps. I don't actually know the analysis here, just pointing out that it's not that simple.
Field effect transistors are basically a capacitor. They store energy.
If you switch a not gate's input from zero to one to zero and so on, the gate capacitance will have to charge and discharge. The entire idea behind CMOS is that if you have n and p channel transistors together, you can take advantage of the fact that electrons are more mobile than holes. Filling and draining electrons gives you a greater switching speed.
If the input stays the same, then the charge at the input inside the flip flop is the same as the charge inside the not gate. No charge differential means no electrons move, which means there is no ohmic resistance that causes the internal metal and polysilicon interconnect to heat up and less power gets lost and no switching obviously happens faster than some switching.
TL;DR If you randomize the data, you will constantly charge and discharge the capacitors.
Good point but this forum leans heavily towards software, so we are used to the latter! I have worked close to IC development so had to learn and tangle with the former idea too, was interesting.
I expected a “torch is smart enough to keep track of cases where it just initialized the C in C <= A*B+C to zero, avoiding the add” type situation but I was wrong.
> If it requires so much back and forth with the AI why on earth wouldn't you just write the code yourself?
Maybe I'm too far gone down the AI rabbit hole, but that seems a really strange take to have. If you replaced 'back and forth with the AI' with 'pair programming' or 'brainstorming' this phrase would be really strange, after all these are all techniques to sharpen your ideas.
Even 'rubber ducking' is widely accepted as an effective way to go through a problem, and you can definitely use AI as a rubber duck.
For me the idea of chatting with the AI about a problem/solution is just another tool to help us work. It's not the best solution because it has a lot of downsides you should be aware while using it, but that is true for any technique including 'writing the code yourself'.
> While the law bans setting higher prices through surveillance pricing, it doesn’t address reducing prices. If a company raises its prices for everyone, and then offers individualized discounts, “suddenly you’ve arrived at the same outcome,” McBrien says.
While I agree with the intent of this law, I don't think it will be effective. If you have a system capable of jacking prices up you can just multiply this calculated delta by -1 transform that into a discount.
To effectively prevent this practice you probably need to ban any kind of personal discount. I don't think we will ever see such law, nor do I think this would be a good idea.
Yeah, sounds like a law that's passed because it sounds/polls good (ie. "affordability"), even though it's addressing a non-existent problem and is trivial to work around.
Uber pays drivers differential rates depending on how desperate they believe the driver to be. I can believe that UberEats demands a higher premium depending on the item and what they infer about you.
Most markets have also had a wide variety of regulations. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that large retail operations would be prohibited from attempting a predatory scheme depending on individualized pricing. There's a tangible difference between one off purchase contracts and selling into the consumer market at large.
Sure, haggling was historically the standard but that just isn't the way these modern operations work. If an outdated practice gets caught in the crossfire when protecting consumers from imminent harm I'm okay with that.
Most pricing laws are built on the idea that this isn't OK. For example, I can't negotiate pricing directly with an automobile manufacturer. I have to go through a dealer so I am "protected".
If you dig around in your hotel room the next time you're there, you'll likely find a statutory "list of prices" - often showing $1,000 or more per night for a room you paid $150 for.
> enough samples that you can apply statistics to find precise locations, in many cases you can de-anonymize the IDs
I think a lot of people don't realize the power of a big enough sample size. With enough samples even something pretty innocent looking like your daily step counter could make you identifiable.
As far as I know we don't have large enough databases to make this happen in practice, but I don't think this is impossible in the future.
I have nothing to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a feature.
If these luxury items are being used by the society (or at least in some circles) as a proxy for 'success'(ie having enough disposable money) it probably would be better if they we also quite fragile. This way you could distinguish between someone who received a expense gift vs someone that has money to always keep buying new items.
I'm not sure how real it this, but I've read somewhere that part of the appeal of expensive glassware was the fact that it was pretty fragile. Serving someone at your house with expensive glassware was a way to tell 'look how much money I've got'.
Just to be clear, I don't think we should get impressed/try to impress people by how much money someone has. But that is a practice as old as time, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
> It implies life was seeded on earth and not generated via abiogenesis.
I don't think this conclusion is correct. The abiogenesis/panspermia debate is about where life formed. This article only says "we found all the DNA/RNA bases in an asteroid," but there is a HUGE gap between DNA bases and life(ie self-replicating organisms).
Making a crude analogy you could say they found Lego pieces in the asteroid, but that doesn't imply that the first 'Lego kits' on earth came pre-assembled. They might, or might not. We don't really have enough information to get a definitive conclusion. What we know is that we can't discard the panspermia idea yet.
Let me put it in another way, imagine we find clay in an asteroid. Does that alone imply the existence of ceramic in other places of the universe?
We need these molecules to build build a DNA strand, but their existence doesn't imply the existence of other life forms. Maybe exists a process that produce these molecules naturally and we just don't know about yet.
And remember that life(self replicating organisms) is way more complex than just DNA/RNA. In another crude analogy you could say that DNA is just the source code, to have life you still need to have all the hardware to run this code on. (fun fact: that is the reason why people argue about virus being something alive or not. Generally it has only the RNA necessary for the replication, and this is why it can only reproduce if it is able to take over another cell. In this analogy it has the source code but not the hardware, so how do we classify it?)
In my living room I have a linux pc connected to my TV and I'm using this in 2 ways:
- Automatically set lights when media starts/stops playing. This way I can turn on some accent lighting when I pause a movie to go to the bathroom and automatically turn them off when I resume the movie
- When media is playing I calculate the color that best represents the content and export it to home assistant use it as a poor man 'ambilight' with a led strip strategically placed behind my TV
I think the next logical step is to find a way to automatically track the content I'm watching so I can have some high level stats about my viewing habits.
reply