Last time, it didn’t go so well for the robot:

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/17/15986042/dc-security-robot-k5-falls-into-water

FYI, somewhere between Tiffany (30) and Eric (40).

Easy fix.

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

The Gradient Descent, Hallucination, and Insufficient Training Data jokes just write themselves.

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.

https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3

There’s a model with a more expensive dock, or one without. The one without worked fine. But it had to be the Box 3 not Box 2. It worked pretty well and you could create custom images to indicate whether it was listening, thinking, etc.

Instructions here: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/s3_box_voice_assistant/

The box isn’t powerful enough to run an LLM itself. It’s just good enough as an audio conduit. You can either use their cloud integration with ChatGPT, or now, Anthropic Claude. But if you had a powerful Home Assistant server, say an Nvidia Jetson or a PC with a beefy Nvidia GPU, you could run local models like Llama and have better privacy.

This is from earlier this year. I imagine they’ve advanced more since then.

Their LLM integration is super cool. I messed with it for a previous job. Way better than Alexa or Google Home.

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.^

They missed speculation, hearsay, and guesstimation.

A few jobs ago, everyone hated the tech stack. The people who had come up with it had long left. I talked to everyone, then came up with a plan to transition to a modern stack. Got buy-in from management.

Half the people (and all who had said they hated the status quo) threatened to quit if we made the change.

Fortunately, it was just in time to collect the 1-year retention bonus. Life’s too short. Walked 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.

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.

Leasing is also a factor. The technology is changing fast (including range), so some people may not want to commit to owning a car that may be obsolete in 5 years.

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.

I totally get the need for rural chargers. Nobody wants to go on a roadtrip and feel restricted.

But you also have the dual problem that people who live in apartment complexes, condo highrises, or older buildings without garages have no easy way to charge at home. They only get to use public chargers. Or those who commute long distances and would have to top off to make it back home. These are day-to-day issues in cities and high density areas.

You end up with long lines of people sitting in their cars, waiting their turn long into the night or at a far away charger just so they can use their vehicle the next day. These are people who will often swear they’ll switch to hybrids next. They also tell their family, friends, and neighbors who won’t go near EVs.

I could be wrong, but there are a lot more people (who don’t drive Teslas) having to deal with this day-to-day vs those going on occasional road-trips. Both are important, but if I was in charge of planning and budgets, I’d look first on making life easier for the most use-cases.

IRL, arms manufacturers claim they’re not culpable when their products are used to blow up civilians. They point at the people making decisions to drop the bombs as the ones responsible, not them.

This legislature tries to get ahead of that argument, by putting reponsibility for downstream harm on the manufacturers instead of their corporate or government customers. Even if the manufacturer moves their munitions plants elsewhere, they’re still responsible for the impact if it harms California residents. So the alternative isn’t to move your company out of state. It’s to stop offering your products in one of the largest economies in the world.

The intent is to make manufacturers stop and put up more guardrails in place instead of blasting ahead, damn the consequences, then going, oops 🤷🏻‍♂️

There will be intense lobbying with the Governor to get him to veto it. If it does get signed, it’ll be interesting to see if it has the intended effect.

The otherwise sensible people I know who are still on Twitter all say it’s because of a specific interest or group, and the community of people around it who are all on there as well. They all hate what it’s become but put up with it because nobody is sure where else to go.

There’s also a sense of FOMO when it comes to realtime news updates. Until government, news media, and personalities go somewhere and take all their followers with them, it will be hard to break away.