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The world cup half-time tea break spike. The load of millions of electric kettles boiling in unison.

All the nation's toilets also flush repeatedly at much the same time, which was a central plot point in the film "Flushed Away".

It's an interesting phenomenon, though I'd never considered that dealing with it could prepare us for a malicious attack some day.


Looks like the control room has a little TV in it, to help with the timing.

https://youtu.be/slDAvewWfrA


Is it still done like this? I feel like there's a lot riding on this one guy clicking his mouse. Surely there's a way to automate this?


How would you automate that better/more reliably than having a human interpret the programme?


That would require "AI".

E.g. in football/"soccer" the half time break isn't at a predetermined point in time, as the start of the game can be delayed and the referee can and usually does give some extra time to make up for unplanned breaks due to fouls etc. Same after regular time in the second half. And if it's a knockout game, then you may even have real overtime and even a penalty shootout to find a winner. Then you have unplanned/semi-planned breaks like players getting a break to drink when it's hot, or... heavy rain or... the ref getting hit in the head with a bottle. And people will use these breaks to do their "business" and make tea/coffee/use the microwave oven. And after the game, players may stay on the field to celebrate or cry about the loss, which I would guess a computervision "AI" would have trouble distinguishing from the actual game.

Just having some people watch the game in the control room (which they probably would do or at least want to do anyway) is still easier and more reliable than trying to train an AI to detect all that, in my humble opinion :D

Of course, automation like automatically detecting and scaling the grid by looking at the grid itself would and does help a lot; but that's different from automating watching the telly.


I have to admit that I was asking that as a loaded question as my thinking was much like yours, but I didn't feel like typing it out. A human is probably the most reliable "AI" for the job :D.


I wonder if SCTE-35 makes it to broadcast mpeg streams on digital television...

I know it does (did?) on Twitch, last time I looked.


there you go ruining my weekend talking about work. next, you'll want to discuss injecting 709 captions into that stream as well.


How would you make them watch the correct channel?


The Intervision Song Contest (Интервидение), a second world alternative to Eurovision[1], ran the voting by telling people to turn off or on their lights, during specific time slots for each candidate. Supposedly they could tell by the electrical load on the grid who got the popular vote.

[1] for the yanks, this show gave us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FsVeMz1F5c&t=60


I thought that it was a joke that became urban legend. Do you have a source on it?


Good point. Nothing primary, and I only googled in english. Didn't try russian or yandex. It's plausible to me because Modi's Covid light stunt was distinctly visible on the indian grid, but it would be better if someone who actually watched Intervision (or at least knows how expensive long-distance calls were in the USSR?) could say something here.

(In a 1975 movie, Zhenya Lukashin offers to repay Nadya Shevelova for making a long distance call from her apartment, so I gather that, as in the west, non-local rates weren't trivial.)

Edit: https://rus.azattyq.org/a/intervidenie-konkurent-evrovidenia...

> "В социалистических странах, где установки телефона надо было ждать годами или давать для ускорения взятку, зрители прибегали к интересной сигнализации о своих предпочтениях. Они включали свет, если песня понравилась, и выключали его, если не нравилась. Итоги присуждения баллов участникам подводились на основании данных об изменении нагрузки в электрической сети."

But note that from the logo, this appears to be a "Radio Liberty", i.e. US propaganda, article.

Edit1,5: same story from RT.

https://russian.rt.com/inotv/2014-08-04/Na-Intervidenii-ne-b...

> "Из-за того, что телефонные сети не были достаточно развиты, чтобы обеспечить голосование, зрителей просили голосовать с помощью электричества. Включенный свет – за понравившиеся номера, выключенный – за непонравившиеся; затем отмечали показатели электрических сетей."

Still no primary source, but if russian and US state owned media agree, and absent any personal recollections, I'm inclined to accept the story. (Unless our alien lizard overlords are behind the whole thing?)

Edit2: interesting, according to a documentary referred to in the google cache of http://www.alla-superstar.ru/component/alla/songs/song/91.ht... it took RUB 25 and a bottle of vodka to get Все Могут Короли past the censors in the mid-70s. (roughly between 1 and 2 benjamins in 2020 USD? From this point of view BTC makes a poor substitute currency, as one can't toast with it...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5nn7KxYUXs


Can anyone explain to this confused westerner why "Все Могут Короли" would even need to be snuck past the censors via a "mistaken" airing?

The theme doesn't seem to be very different from other pop music, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw-9qu4gcWI .

A mid-80's western report on the "vodka economy" suggests that in this case the bottle itself was meant more as a traditional component of a bribe/tip, and probably didn't contribute much to the pecuniary value. (Indeed, one suggestion in the paper is that, just as the dollar lost its gold standard, during the seventies the ruble also lost its vodka standard of 3 RUB = 1 L.)

https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1985-Berk-Duke-Treml.pdf

> "30. Krokodil [No. 14, 1970, 5] carried a cartoon showing a living room where every inch of space -- floor, window sills, furniture -- was filled with vodka bottles . The woman pictured amid these hundreds of bottles explained her predicament : "My husband is an excellent plumber, but he does not drink ...."

> "38. Increases in vodka prices are important in yet another respect. Interest rates on savings accounts in the USSR are, on the average, about 2.5% per annum, and increases in vodka prices since the late 1950s have more than compensated the consumer who has kept his wealth in vodka rather than in savings accounts."


You made a product where people compete to pay you the most?

That's hilarious


Some buddies and I were talking about a similar site (https://whopaid99cents.com) that spawned the idea for this.

I found the original concept so absurd but amusing that I wanted to make my own version!! It’s been a welcome distraction as you can imagine and could be the basis for something more. Tbd...


Not all that different from FOMO3D ...


But jira isn't the problem that's being solved - a person hired full time would be a project manager, who in the absence of jira, would solve the project management problem with different tools.

Jira is not perfect. But the atlassian suite as a whole, with integration between CI, PM and version control, is quite powerful and more than adequate in many cases.

That said, boy have I seen it used terribly. It's double edged for sure.


Learning pandas really does feel like learning a new language - new syntax, idioms and implementation details to be aware of. Much more so than other libraries imo.

Given how utterly powerful it is, I think that's OK.

Not sure a large list of optional params (with good documentation) is a bad thing though.


This is your take-away?


That is what being a racist is like.


What is yours?


Why not?


Right, but then you're ignoring ambient light. Your statement isn't true in a dark room, where the very much does care.


But that's still not a fundamental property of screens, that's a property of a specific working environment.

Screens should not be brighter than ambient light as a rule of thumb, i.e. if you hold a piece of paper next to your screen, the screen should not brighten up the paper. If it does, reduce brightness of your screen and/or turn up the light in your room.

So, a dark room is not an ideal working environment anyway.


This is uninformed and unsubstantiated.

The answer depends massively on the intended use case.


What are the use cases where one would shine and the other wouldn't? I'm interested in real life usage of any of those on >100 GB datasets.


With bigquery the cost is per query. If you do a "SELECT * FROM AAA" you'll pay whatever the size of the table AAA is, price being 5$ per TB.

If you do a "SELECT field1, field2 FROM AAA" you'll pay only for the total size of field1 and field2 rows.

So you usually want to use BigQuery in situations where you don't need to query data all the time, but rather a fixed number of times a day.

Now about performance: BigQuery queues queries, so you don't have a guaranteed time. It can take a couple of seconds before your query starts running, it can take longer. If you need something that responds in < xxx ms, BigQuery is not it.

But the queries themselves are fast. If you need to query across petabytes of data, as a simple BigQuery query will gladly run on however many dozens or hundreds of instances it needs, at no additional cost for you (since you only pay by the size of your data queried).

It's really a great example of serverless. You can run your query across 100 instances, but you only use those instances for a few seconds.


  > SELECT * FROM AAA
Can't think of a realistic use case where such a query would be appropriate, even from just the performance standpoint. In fact, for a very long time the internal counterpart of BigQuery didn't even support "SELECT star", and nobody complained too badly. If you'd like to give Google a gift, however, sure "SELECT star" all you want. :-)

  > "SELECT field1, field2 FROM AAA" you'll pay only for the total size of field1 and field2 rows.
Moreover, if you also use a WHERE clause, you'll pay even less.


This can happen in data cleaning/loading where you load unclean data into a table that is ready for analysis. I have loaded data through staging tables regularly. There may be multiple stages.

Another example is materialized view creation. It's common for these to scan large quantities of data to compute aggregates.


That's not the recommended way of loading data into BigQuery, though.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/loading-data


That is not true

A where clause still searches the entire column, unless it is conditioned on the partition column.


Not if you filter on clustered columns, like you should if you care about performance.


True, but now we have moved pretty far from just saying "use a where clause".

"Partition your table and create clustered columns and filter on those"


The adverts are right there on the page still.

Why would it be more profitable to send users to the BBC website?


It wouldn't in the BBC's specific case, but in general the behaviour sending users to the site where they would likely be exposed to more advertising (probably by Google) would be the more profitable scenario.


It's pretty clearly not the path Google has followed for some years now, though. They clearly have incentive to keep people on the search results page.


> Take for an example the UK referendum to leave the EU. Even though it's overall a complete shitshow, and all sides usually agree on that, nobody can really claim that it wasn't a democratic decision. Was it a smart one? Who knows, I doubt it. But it was democratic, and that's more than I can say about this mess

You are oversimplifying this - that vote was between a definite (the status quo) and a vague future direction (insert personal fantasy about what "leave" actually meant)

Is it any more democratic to make people choose between "definitive choice x" and "the mystery box", than it is to make people vote for a vague bag of promises (a representative) as they already do?

If not, then what you're probably after is a democratic choice between two or more defined options. But who chooses which options are presented to people? Who oversees the ensuing floods of propaganda?

A direct democracy moves even more power to the propaganda machine, not the people.


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