> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.
Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.
It took me the best part of 20 years of working in the corporate world to realise that the decisions aren't about the best thing for the user, or the employee, or even the shareholder, it's about the best thing for the decision maker. Ideally one which allows them to have no accountability whatsoever.
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
Someone who worked in corporate law once said "in the rare case you have to hire outside counsel you always hire the fanciest name brand firm. Not because the fancy firm does better work, but because of risk mitigation and CYA. If things go sideways then you can say 'not my fault,I hired the fanciest firm.'"
I remember buying SuSe Linux as literally boxed software around that time. But I bought it for my own use and my employer (not software industry) was running mostly windows with some legacy Unix.
Already in the 90‘s I has advocating for FOSS in a big company. And someone told me “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM” that phrase was already very old…
In their defense, if something isn’t in my distro repo, 75% of the time I’ll ignore it. Using the operating system’s built in method of installing software is very preferable. It is mostly just Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS) where some repo (because what is an App Store if not a paid repo) isn’t the default.
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
in most corporate environments if your homebrew solution breaks, then you have a problem. If something that came from a vendor breaks, that’s not your problem.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
A significant amount of the internet for normies today is app-first, where there may be no web version, or the web version lacks much of the core functionality of the service. Instagram led the way with this before Covid already, but the practice then spread widely.
The savvy crowd on HN hopefully already knows how to protect ourselves, but we can't really expect the mass public to do so. Especially when some younger people today are losing awareness of the very concept of the browser as they use dedicated apps for all their internet use.
browser based applications can still gain access to this data, using very similar workflows. E.g. a weather app rendered on a browser is still going to request your location, and can fingerprint that browser to build a user profile. I'm not sure your solution is a solution at all.
PWM drivers should be banned, the quality of lighting is horrendous and it murders LEDs. You have an rms currernt that is in spec but the peak is way too high.
anecdote: I work in a factory, we have thousands of light fixtures. The older constant current LED fixtures have lasted a decade, the new PWM driven lights have had a ~1% failure rate.
How do you know the difference? Constant current is almost certainly a PWM controlled buck/boost regulator. The flicker is attenuated by inductance, more or less depending on the design.
I guess the distinction is 'filtered' vs 'unfiltered' then. If you look at the lights that fail early using a high framerate camera (1k fps) they flicker between full brightness and fully off. The lights that last longer have some ripple but its 5-10% brightness.
Use a fidget spinner to see the difference. Spin up a 3 lobe fidget spinner and catch the reflection of the LED on it's surface. As the speed changes, a flickering LED will freeze the motion of the spinner. Even more fun with spinners :-).
Yes, adding an inductor will fix the problem, but that costs money. Not enough customers are complaining about the light flicker to justify the higher price.
> I do expect the casual non-tech users to be making the most adaptable software because they have what they want in their head.
Those are the people who are most likely to give a monolithic prompt and then spend a week telling the machine 'I don't care about encryption or file permissions, just make it work.' Not to mention that most people can barely verbalize the problems they have with devices they use for 8hrs a day, let alone form a full, self consistant, project idea and then put it in writing.
if they're persistent and patient enough to see the result of what they think they want and iterate enough times they'll eventually learn. non-coders aren't dumb by default after all and I suspect they'll learn much faster than us because they won't be bogged down by the minutiae like reading docs.
Imagine you could build a piece of furniture without actually needing to know how to cut wood, drive nails etc. Imagine you could do it in 3d without knowing how to actually handle wood, you just have an image you can iterate on without actually costing you anything but time.
I remember the first big app I wrote in high-school. I had to learn C++, learn Qt etc. I knew what I wanted but putting that into code when I didn't know any of the libraries / tools was a huge time investment. If I had LLMs I could've done the same thing it took me 6+ months in probably less than a month.
> if they're persistent and patient enough to see the result of what they think they want and iterate enough times they'll eventually learn
beats the point. a non-coder has no reason to learn. they know the domain (atleast some) and they will not learn anything outside of it.
without learning how the program works, youre stuck. the real world is too complex and cant model 1:1 in any programming abstraction. the domain behavior must be forced and coerced to map and reduce with artificial constraints to operate as required in code but rule out absurdity (a bank account with a burger in it).
sure everything need not be production grade and multi user and infinitely secure but nothing meaningful comes out of leaving the modeling rigor out of that exercise.
> non-coders aren't dumb by default after all and I suspect they'll learn much faster than us because they won't be bogged down by the minutiae like reading docs.
They may have a perfectly good shot at being smart, but I still don't buy the argument. The reason they struggle to become coders (assuming they tried at all), in my experience, is a lack of problem-solving and debugging skills. There is no real shortcut here. An "image" of the chair isn't enough; when the first iteration is wrong, you have to be able to explain why it's wrong.
I think there are a lot of people out there with good problem-solving skills but for whatever reason did not get into programming or they tried and they got put off with learning the languages / libraries or got stuck and didn't find a solution easily enough and gave up etc.
With a sufficiently good LLM these people will skip the tedious part of programming that most of us had the motivation / patience to go through. All the folks saying that actually writing code wasn't the bottleneck have had a LOT of years to get to that point, years a lot of people aren't interested in going through.
I'm not saying lay people will be able to join mega projects and work at FAANG. I'm saying a sufficiently courageous lay person will be able to make an app to automate whatever tedious birocratic process their niche work hasn't seen a product yet.
> All the folks saying that actually writing code wasn't the bottleneck have had a LOT of years to get to that point, years a lot of people aren't interested in going through.
The years was not spent on learning how to code. The years was spent on learning about what needed to be coded. And that would have spanned multiple domains. Even the most basic production level software have multiple concepts that need to be integrated. And for that, they need to be learned.
Using AI without the requisite knowledge is playing Russian roulette. It’s kinda wanting to log into a file, and not thinking about disk storage being finite, and rotating the log file gives you flexibility. That’s not related to coding, it’s just hard thinking about the problem and the constraints (or finding a good book or article).
> Using AI without the requisite knowledge is playing Russian roulette
Every few months that revolver has a few more empty chambers and even if it shoots them in the foot, it can bandage them quite nicely. Will a solo lay person with an agent build a high quality high reliability software business? Doubtful. Will they be able to make a tool that helps them and 10 other people or a personal website? probably.
> Will a solo lay person with an agent build a high quality high reliability software business? Doubtful. Will they be able to make a tool that helps them and 10 other people or a personal website? probably.
Just take a quick look around to see how many daily tools and utilities are actually built by experts and industries. Yes, you can put a plank on top of two concrete blocks to make a bench, but many people don’t and prefer to have good bench made, even when it’s quite easy to DIY one.
So I don’t foresee lots of people trying to make custom tools, more so to keep a subscription active.
I can absolutely believe this, actually. Considering how the access to rapid prototyping has rejuvenated my interest in programming when I am a seasoned programmer, I definitely see the value in that kind of jump-start.
And yeah, without LLMs, writing code absolutely can be the bottleneck sometimes, if only for psychological reasons. I've definitely experienced something like "coder's block" before. An anti-flow state, if you will.
(But skydhash is also right. The "unknown unknowns" are a big deal and there's only so much an LLM can do about that, at least unless the user is actively aware of the general shape of that problem and trying to learn via the LLM and fill in those knowledge gaps.)
just because you have an idea doesn't mean it will work. kids come up with ideas all the time in their drawings, but they disobey the laws of physics and are therefore not feasible in reality. sure, the model can guide them, but eventually they would have to pick up the necessary knowledge.
The necessary knowledge needed with LLMs goes from needing to know programming languages and libraries to having a high level view of what is possible which is far easier and less boring to get
I get a disturbing amount of equipment that does not take into account the inrush current of starting many loads at the same time. While each individual device is protected by a breaker that can handle the inrush of it's load the main breaker for the equipment is not sized to handle every load starting at the same time. The fix is to include logic that starts things up one at a time but convincing engineers, project managers, and machine owners that they didn't think of everything is an uphill battle.
We used to have a turbopump that would trip the breakers every time you turned it on from cold. The pump seemingly attempted to spin up to max RPM before settling down to a more sustainable load. The only way to get the thing to stay on was to turn it on once, let it warm itself up on the initial attempt, trip the breakers, and try it another cycle now that it had some momentum and would pull slightly fewer amps. Sometimes took a few attempts to get that rolling start working.
Not ideal, but it was the only thing that worked. This was attached to a million dollar piece of equipment, so any remedial electrical replacement work would have been slightly inconsequential. Thankfully, it was one of those machines that you turned off as infrequently as possible, so we did not have to do this procedure too many times.
The vendor did get the hint, and the second iteration of the device did slowly warm up the pumps so this process would no longer be required.
Yes, soft start is the way to go. Also: proper industrial breakers allow for temporary overload. I have a couple of pieces of gear that have inrush currents well over the limit of a normal breaker so I put them on a slow one and now it is fine.
A 5/32" flat-blade screwdriver makes an excellent fast-blow fuse when dropped across exposed bus bars. And you can re-use the remains of the handle to stir your coffee once you've retrieved it from across the room.
Soft-start is in theory the way to go, but it's very dependent on the motor type, there's a whole pile of different methods required for induction motors depending on whether they're capacitor-start, permanent split capacitor, shaded-pole, etc, so you can do it in some cases by lowering the voltage, or with a VFD, or a VSD, or the old-fashioned way with a centrifugal switch but that requires very careful handling. If as the OP said it's running million-dollar equipment you probably don't want to monkey with it at that level.
Fans have a minimum speed needed to spin up when cold starting from 0 RPM. So it's safer to start at near max RPM and spin down to the desired target RPM if the controller doesn't know the exact operating characteristics of each fan.
You can observe this with a speed control knob/ESP32 where a running fan will happily run forever with the knob turned down to e.g. a 30% duty cycle. But after turning to 0% and waiting for the blades to fully stop, if set back to the same 30% they won't move at all or you'll maybe hear a sketchy clicking/whine sound with the blades intermittently twitching.
I've always assumed it was to calibrate the PWM sensor for fan speed, so it starts with no sensing active, runs up to max, and then the sensor kicks in and settles it down. You don't need to run a fan at max speed to get it to start, most will start with very little power applied.
not exactly relevant to computer fans, but in case of your usual standing fan you need a way larger kick to get it going. if it fails to start but stays powered it will stay stuck, heat up and fail. this is why fans usually have the highest option as the first one, so you have to start it at full speed at first, and only then reduce it.
I assume you are talking beyond what (in the DIN rail world) type B/C/D breakers are meant to handle?
It's sort of a solved problem - the ones I'm aware of are things like LynTec sequenced panels built exactly for this, and Siemens' SENTRON semiconductor CBs where you can control then curve to your spec.
Convincing stakeholders though, is almost a job of its own.
These were all across-the-line, 3-phase 600v starters so there was no option to slowly start things up. Soft-starters would have been ideal but they are 5x the cost.
In other words, convincing ignorants is an uphill battle. Those who know what "inrush current" means don't require convincing about the value of rolling starts.
Cool, I thought grid stability attacks would rely on large numbers of IoT devices but it looks like computing infrastructure is the better target.
Whether it's by buying and using a trillion tokens strategically or by inserting synchronized malicious jobs it should be possible to find some resonant frequencies in the line frequency control system. By loading and unloading multi-megawatts of draw you could get the local supply throttling up and down enough desynchronize from the larger grid. If you could get real time measurements of the line frequency you could use that to tune your malicious load and do the whole 'pushing a kid at the peak of their swing' thing.
To mitigate you would have to put dummy loads or some kind of minute-scale power storage onsite or nearby to compute loads.
Multiple MW is noise level, even to a single moderately sized power production facility, let alone the whole grid region. This is not a viable attack. I can have an entire aluminum smelter trip off or start up and it won't phase my supply, a data center is going to be trivial unless you can spend enough to control all the data centers in which case youve just made the least efficient grid attack in history.
Further, there is no single resonant frequency, only the particular resonance of that exact moment in time. The grid is composed of many generating units, many transmission lines, many transformers. The resonant frequency of the grid is changing moment to moment as those things come online, get loaded partially, go offline, heat up, etc.
Ones and twos of MW are indeed tiny loads, there is a 1MW motor where I work that gets flicked on and off like a light switch, but hyperscale canters are in the >100MW range, that's >1% of even the largest generating stations in the USA.
And you're not aiming for some physical resonant frequency of the entire grid, just the controller on your local generator, getting it to ramp up and down chasing just behind your changing load.
I live in Ontario and in the past week the difference between our highest and lowest demand was ~4.5GW, but those changes take place over hours. If you can ramp up and down a 0.1GW load over minutes there is going to be a point where some control loop can't keep up. Generators have physical inertia but compute loads do not.
I agree that it's not trivial, not cheap, and not efficient but with the state of the world it would not be a surprise if some nation thought it would be useful to burn resources in order to disrupt an important event, maybe elections?
The whole point of the grid is that it is effectively one giant electrical machine, physically. It isn't possible to target your local generations n any more than it's possible to target a particular generator three towns over.
In any case, a 4.5gw load imbalance from moment to moment is not a difficult problem to solve. This is why all utilities are required to have 'spinning reserve' available to serve new load at very short notice. In the meantime the grid would just drop frequency very slightly (like 0.1 hz would be an enormous instantaneous deviation)
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
reply