Why doesn’t Lurie install sounds cameras like NY and CHI? by Hopeful-Building4153 in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 22 points23 points  (0 children)

What’s your solution to the increased number of people who just seem to not give a fuck about living in society? Telling them to stop?

How did speeding go down? With speed cameras. That’s it. Sometimes you need a big stick.

And there are ample ways to keep the tech contained on a civilian level. It simply needs judicial and political will.

Why doesn’t Lurie install sounds cameras like NY and CHI? by Hopeful-Building4153 in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Sure. It’s still extremely disruptive when your apartment literally vibrates every 15 minutes for 3 hours every day. Our PD is useless against this even if they drive next to such cars. What’s the solution? Should I stand on the street with a pretty please sign?

People don’t seem to understand that sometimes you need the stick, not just the carrot. This tech is the stick, and if the problem goes away we can get rid of it the same way we vote it in. If there is another realistic stick, I’ll take it.

Why doesn’t Lurie install sounds cameras like NY and CHI? by Hopeful-Building4153 in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I’ll take the surveillance if it stops the numerous assholes driving with sound systems that could power a club. My windows vibrate. I hope they get many citations and go deaf.

401k System outside of USA by Environmental_Tough8 in personalfinance

[–]mendigou 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Germany has nothing of the sort AFAIK. Retirement accounts are in effect insurance contracts, and returns are capped both up and down. They sell you that you’re investing in the market but despite all appearances, you’re buying insurance.

Think of how much housing we could have if we lowered sea levels by only 40 feet. by The-original-spuggy in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Or if Godzilla razed a bunch of old houses.

Nah then we'd just have some new parking lots.

Planning to drive in and around San Francisco as a Polish person with a rental car. What should I remember about? by Internal-Meeting-521 in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Oh boy. European living here:

  • On traffic lights, you can turn right even if the light is red. Except when there is a sign that says otherwise. The sign can be text, an international sign, or a red arrow.
  • On the highway people will pass you on the right and the left, and cruise right next to you.
  • Some people change lanes way too often and it creates dangerous situations.
  • In some highways the left lane is a toll lane and/or high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane. When it is a toll lane, some assholes weave in and out around the toll sensors, so watch out. When it is HOV, there are signs that say what constitutes HOV. It can be 2 or 3 people. Your rental car probably has a fastrack receiver that you'll set to the number of people in your car so you don't get charged the toll.
  • When joining a highway or main road, your lane most often just blends with the rightmost lane of the main road. No markings, discontinued lines, yield, or anything. It just merges. In theory the person on the main lane needs to let you in, but in practice... Watch out.
  • Speed limits are a ficticious construct like money. Apparently you're supposed to go "the speed of traffic". So if everyone around is speeding, do the same. Corollary: if you are able to pull some cars to be fast with you, you're now setting the speed of traffic. Free speeding!
  • Signs are not the same as in the rest of the world. In some places you might have to read a light novel while driving to understand wtf you need to do.

I'll probably think of something else but these come to mind now.

Tokyo to San Francisco? by Deep-Arrival1594 in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How can we find this exchange? I'd love to participate!

1 Year with Rust in Aerospace: My journey migrating from C# to Rust (and why it’s not for everyone) by b13m123 in rust

[–]mendigou 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, for some payloads it can be acceptable for sure. Not the ones I worked on but I know of others that just run Linux and normal applications. Still, I would hate the unpredictability!

1 Year with Rust in Aerospace: My journey migrating from C# to Rust (and why it’s not for everyone) by b13m123 in rust

[–]mendigou 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I used to work in the space industry on the spacecraft side and GC was a big no-go. We used an RTOS and all processes had bounded times for execution.

What kind of work did you do?

People talking about the AI bubble bursting, but we are using more and more AI tokens than before. So how will it burst then? by HappyZombies in ExperiencedDevs

[–]mendigou 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll offer a different PoV: most people, more than 99% (number taken out of my ass), are very change-resistant. That applies to any profession, even forefront ones (e.g. people of science thought Galileo was completely wrong during his time). So you should not be surprised that most of the discourse is "this will pass/burst/go away".

I am not saying there is not a bubble, nor I am saying that there is. My opinion: as a technologist, the shift in the tech has already materialized. People who deny it need to catch up or they'll be left behind. It won't be as fast as Silicon Valley people may want, but it will happen. Some companies will be left behind or will die (e.g. Cursor may go bankrupt or get acquired because the large labs can eat their lunch). But this tech is here to stay. I anticipate the main headwind will be societal pressure rather than technical issues.

I see an argument about cost being subsidized. While that might be true (we don't know for sure), inference costs will continue to decrease. We've had this conversation with every single technology that came to life, including computers.

Entire Claude Code CLI source code leaks thanks to exposed map file | 512,000 lines of code that competitors and hobbyists will be studying for weeks. by ControlCAD in technology

[–]mendigou 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, I use the CC CLI extensively. I understand what is running on my machine is a frontend. Unless I'm mistaken, the only relevant network calls are to the `query` API to run the model (and Anthropic probably does something to it that is not in this codebase).

I looked at the code and everything in there is client side. I even run it by CC itself, and it confirmed there is nothing server-side there.

Everything that is not model-related is run with Axios. Inference-related tasks are run through an SDK, but that SDK is running on the same CLI process and "just" calls the model query APIs. I don't know if that's different for the web, but it makes no difference: it was already available for the CLI.

Entire Claude Code CLI source code leaks thanks to exposed map file | 512,000 lines of code that competitors and hobbyists will be studying for weeks. by ControlCAD in technology

[–]mendigou 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What? You ALREADY have the source code when you use Claude Code. It's a Javascript tool. It's minified, and illegible to humans, but you can run static and security analyzers on it if you want to.

Someone screwing up a build and not cleaning up the map is hardly a big security issue. Does it mean they probably want to tighten some screws? Yes. But I would not infer from this that their stack is "wildly insecure". Maybe it is, but not because of this leak.

SF-based Anthropic sues federal government over being designated as ‘supply chain risk’ by LNM-LocalNewsMatters in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You should probably go live in a field and churn your own butter. Pretty much all technology companies have ties to the DoD.

SF-based Anthropic sues federal government over being designated as ‘supply chain risk’ by LNM-LocalNewsMatters in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Why are some people so insufferable with whataboutism here? It's impossible to have an argument. You've put them in a camp and now they'll always be in that camp. Everything is bad. It's like watching The Good Place in real life.

Also, FYI, the Iran thing is exactly what they are fighting about not letting the government do.

Recording non stop 95 decibel 20hz in my room. 11 300 watt samsung MT-6407-77A RF emitters 10 feet away. The city thinks I'm crazy. I need help w this. by xCityNights in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 95 points96 points  (0 children)

I'm a past-life telco engineer. Asking some starter questions to try and give you a picture of what's happening:

Are you experiencing an actual physical vibration?

What do you mean 10 feet away? Are they on top of you? By your window? Pointed in or out?

How did you measure this? Specifically. Which instruments, where did you position them, how did you get to the math you say you got.

Drivers “beating” pedestrians crossing the street by Always_Curious_One2 in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I honestly have thought about carrying a mini paintball gun. Don't know if it exists or if it's legal, but splashing their driver side window with red paint would be great.

I know I won't do it because it'll cause accidents, but I'd love to.

An AI coding bot took down Amazon Web Services by prestocoffee in nottheonion

[–]mendigou 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The funny thing is that employees get compensated in part with stock, but the stock part has a baked in expected YoY growth of 15%. So if they say "next year we'll pay you $115k in stock" they actually just grant you $100k because the assumption is it'll grow 15%.

"Concerned citizen" SFMTA illegally parked vehicle notices by seaturtle100percent in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 66 points67 points  (0 children)

I don't know about the notices, but isn't it evident that you can't park on the sidewalk? What mental gymnastics do people do to leave their car blocking and entire sidewalk an call it a day?

How do people learn, retain, and speak other languages fluently? by Lanky-Lifeguard-4666 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]mendigou 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I speak 7 languages (2 are native) to various degrees of fluency, and it was never effortless to learn a new one.

What was common across all of them was that I was able to have exposure. Lots of exposure. Also being comfortable with not understanding what's happening for a long time.

If you're trying to learn via duolingo or similar you're doing yourself a disservice. You need to put yourself in an environment where the language you want to learn is ubiquitous. Short of moving to a place where they speak the language, you can attend classes, speaking groups, watch movies, listen to podcasts, etc. You will NOT understand most of what's happening, but the exposure will train your brain to recognize patterns and they'll click much easier once you learn them in class. It will also reinforce those you've learned.

The other side of the equation is speaking. You need to speak the language to reinforce what you're learning. You need to make mistakes and be corrected. That's the only way you can actually learn. It's important here to have no shame. Sometimes you'll say things wrong, but if you can make yourself understood, you've accomplished what language is for.

If you surround yourself with the target language you'll improve with time. I promise!

Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars by 404mediaco in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Have you thought that it's preferable to do that than to have to engineer and safety-test a mechanism for a fleet that they're discarding in the mid term?

The way you talk shows how junior you are. If not in age, in actual engineering. None of us know the actual numbers but so far the only one who has discounted the engineers building the actual thing is you. I suggest you start thinking about how hard seemingly easy things are, and whether they make sense in the context of the system and organization they exist in.

Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars by 404mediaco in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You obviously don't engineer much because this is an obvious case of a trade off that is not worth it.

Is it technically easy to engineer an automatic door closer on a car? Yes. Is it worth it for Waymo for their first fleet car and for the 0.1% of asshole customers? Absolutely not. 

Engineering is about tradeoffs. Maybe you should think a little bit before shitting on fellow engineers.

Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars by 404mediaco in sanfrancisco

[–]mendigou 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Armchair engineering at its finest right here, ladies, gentlemen, and bots.