I went to Lidl UKs first walk out shop a few weeks ago. You get the bill and receipts about 40 minutes after you've left.
It certainly felt like it could have been sent off to a lower paid country for a human to tot up.
Also consider you're in the store for what, 10 mins - that's a lot of video processing presumably using state of the art CV models. It's quite possibly cheaper to pay a human than rent the H100 to do it.
I often favour low maintenance and over head solutions. Most recently I made a stupidly large static website with over 50k items (i.e. pages).
I think a lot of people would have used a database at this point, but the site didn't need to be updated once built so serving a load of static files via S3 makes ongoing maintenance very low.
Also feel a slight sense of superiority when I see colleagues write a load of pandas scripts to generate some basic summary stats Vs my usual throw away approach based around awk.
That's true. I made several complaints about that to TFL before capitulating and just settling for noise-cancelling headphones.
Never been happier.
The clincher was noticing that the drivers themselves had access to ear defenders ... TFL said that that's because they're down there for extended periods of time. Sounds reasonable but I'm not buying that as a way out of not fixing the issue and exposing my ears to the worst bits of the tube.
Also has the ancillary benefits of blocking out those rare times (for me) when people do have their phone on speaker or are having a chat I'm uninterested in.
I'm not really a big gamer but was looking into buying an xbox again. I already had a controller and thought why not try xbox cloud gaming on my Samsung TV.
With a decent internet connection I now struggle to see why anyone would want to buy a hardware Xbox. Games on the cloud version load instantly, play brilliantly and cost the same as the usual Game Pass as far as I can tell. The catalogue seems smaller maybe but aside from that I see little downside.
I could see it working well for PCs too - as long as the terminal device is seamless. I guess us devs have been renting computers in "the cloud" for decades anyway.
On the other hand I'm a software engineer and my incredibly powerful MacBook could be not much more than a fancy dumb terminal - to be honest it almost is already.
If I can play a very responsive multiplayer game of the latest call of duty on my $300 TV with a little arm chip in it, then I could well imagine doing my job on a cloud Mac if the terminal device looked and felt like a MacBook but had the same tiny CPU my TV has.
Not sure if I'd choose it as a personal device but for corporations it seems a no brainer.
I dunno, I brought a pi 500+ with an SSD, 16GB RAM, little screen, PSU, mouse and cables. It was around £300.
It's not super powerful but my young kids use it to surf the net, play Minecraft, do art projects, etc. (we are yet to play with the gpio).
I don't get on with the keyboard but otherwise would make a decent development machine for me, considering my development starts with me ssh'ing into some remote VM and running vim.
The whole lot is tiny and extremely portable, we pack it away in a draw when not in use.
All in it felt like good value for money for something that took about 3 minutes to get up and running.
That's actually about the same price as the pi 500+ without the screen. Except that one has 500gb Vs 256gb SSD, but doesn't have the snazzy led keyboard.
Yes, it is unimaginable that the UK has replaced most of their automated car washes with immigrants washing cars manually. I've been back there and I've still family there, it's not that different "on the ground" as it were, despite the big political changes.
I can see the reason why people see it this way though. For £20, you can have 4-5 people getting your car into the best state it can be in under 20 minutes. I would even say it is a joy to watch them work so efficiently.
Most people prefer that over automatic car washes, so after some point, while the automatic washes are there, you become blind to them.
Conversely, I've no idea where you or the parent has the idea that the UK is full of automated car washes and the OP is talking bullshit. I live in London and can think of a only a handful of the old fashioned automatic car washes.
Whereas I can get a hand carwash at pretty much any supermarket car park I land on. From a guy with a bucket and trolley to a full team of four going at it with a power wash. Tesco, Sainsbury's, wherever.
The Albanian angle feels loaded, but it's true that many of the employees do seem to be recent immigrants.
I don't see much point denying this reality, it feels a bit like trying to argue there's always been high streets full of betting shops, charity shops, vape stores and American candy shops.
London is an odd one as space is limited and the hand wash places can pop up anywhere quite easily. If I look at the more suburban place I'm from most petrol stations still have the automated ones (contactless payment now instead of the tokens). And most of the larger supermarkets there that have petrol stations still have the automated car washes too.
I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.
> I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.
Here's how to make it do that. Instead of saying "I had idea X, but someone else was thinking idea Y instead. what do you think" tell it "One of my people had idea X, and another had idea Y. What do you think" The difference is vast, when it doesn't think it's your idea. Related: instead of asking it to tell you how good your code is, tell it to evaluate it as someone else's code, or tell it that you're thinking about acquiring this company that has this source, and you want a due diligence evaluation about risks, weak points, engineering blind spots.
Maybe I'm still doing some heavy priming by using multiple prompts, but similarly you can follow-up any speculative prompt with a "now flip the framing to x" query to ensure you are seeing the strong cases from various perspectives. You must be honest with yourself in evaluating the meaningful substance between the two, but I've found there often is something to parse. And the priming I suggested is easily auditable anyhow: just reverse the prompt order and now you have even more (often junk) to parse!
For ideas that are already well established, you can ask it to evaluate an idea against generally accepted best practices. I don't have a background in game design and I'm more of a hobby developer so I used to do this when I was building retro game clones.
I've found this memory across chats quite useful on a practical level too, but it also has added to the feeling of developing an ongoing personal relationship with the LLM.
Not only does the model (chat gpt) know about my job, tech interests etc and tie chats together using that info.
But also I have noticed the "tone" of the conversation seems to mimick my own style some what - in a slightly OTT way. For example Chat GPT wil now often call me "mate" or reply often with terms like "Yes mate!".
This is not far off how my own close friends might talk to me, it definitely feels like it's adapted to my own conversational style.
It certainly felt like it could have been sent off to a lower paid country for a human to tot up.
Also consider you're in the store for what, 10 mins - that's a lot of video processing presumably using state of the art CV models. It's quite possibly cheaper to pay a human than rent the H100 to do it.
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