972 karma · joined March 23, 2020
I just keep my offsite backup drives in my office drawer. There is a note on them that says they are personal backup and not to be plugged into company equipment. If you have an office this is probably the easiest solution.
If a disaster wipes out my home and my office then there are bigger things to worry about than my data.
* Latency: when you want to make a decision within 100ms
* Robotics: I want to try make a VLA version of it and see what happens
* Costs: For something that needs a yes/no answer every 10 seconds, it seems like it would be cheaper than an LLM API.
1. Trolleys actually don't usually have steering wheels.
2. People who actually hit trolley switches are not usually the ones at the driver's seat.
Meh (a) I want security and cat-monitoring cameras anyway (b) I'm willing to take the effort to install cameras neatly since they're capable of serving as 100 different sensors
> constantly sending images of one's private space to a cloud LLM is Orwellian
I agree. I have a local server with a GPU. The security side of things records to a local NVR. Nothing goes to the cloud.
> IP cameras are flaky, too
haven't had nearly as many problems here
> are you polling your LLM minutewise "Did the cat vomit on the floor"?
Kind of, but it only re-polls if the camera detected motion, and then every 15 minutes as a catch-all.
What can make them suck is authorities abusing them to do enforce arbitrary, unpredictable ideals that are not part of the law, incompetent authorities targeting non-criminals and peaceful protesters, or traumatizing the wrong person because of an incorrect AI face match.
My first gut reaction to this was: Have you tried using a vision-language model?
I used to have an elaborate Home Assistant setup with tons of zigbee sensors here and there telling me if front door is not closed properly, if the rice cooker is left on (via current monitoring), if the garage door is left open (with a magnetic contact sensor), if window is left open, if the soil is dry, etc. I had to keep changing batteries of all these things and manage flaky Zigbee connections in the past.
More recently, I've found the absolute most reliable, ~zero-maintainence solution to be an LLM. Home Assistant already has an LLM plugin, you can wire it up to a local LLM if you want, and you can just feed it an image and ask "Is this garage door open or closed" and I found that to be much better for my sanity than changing batteries every 6 months and dealing with flaky sensors sending me false alerts.
I even found it useful for "Did the cat vomit on the floor" (if so notify me and pause the cleaning robot schedule) and "Do any plants look like they need attention"
For TFA's use case, if you already have a security camera facing front, you can just feed it that image and ask "Are the garbage bins out"
Also, if you're worried about cameras sending home images to the cloud, there are non-cloud options. (I use Unifi cameras and Home Assistant gets a RTSP stream over LAN.)
What are they going to do? They have no jurisdiction over me.
Unless you're planning on quitting jobs mid year every year I wouldn't really call that an advantage. On all other years you either end up buying piles of shit you don't need just to not lose your FSA dollars you gambled that you would use but didn't, or end up underestimating your medical bills. It's such a broken system that one even has to make guesses like this. There is no need to make people guess.
> funds being available on day 1
Most people with FSAs have higher disposable income so this isn't really an advantage either. Lower income folks typically have HSAs instead.
* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.
* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"
* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box
The showers usually pluck them out and show them, and look like constant success to the public.
> has been criticized even in the ImageNet days as a shower than a doer
When has the world ever rewarded doers? It has almost always rewarded the showers. If it rewarded the doers:
* CTOs would be regarded more highly than CEOs
* A few key Apple engineers would be more well known than Steve Jobs
* Nikola Tesla would be more famous than Edison
> this was just a financial maneuver
I mean, if you could have a couple billion dollars now OR possibly $0 when OpenAI/Anthropic's models can eventually do what yours can do, I wouldn't blame you for taking the former.
I mean, the head of the FAA and the head of the DOT can have a coffee chat with the president and get an executive order then? Anything is possible to do, apparently.
Is this really why the rule was made? Did they really have safety of driving in mind or is this just in the interest of the profits of airlines?
It seems like if they really had safety in mind there are better solutions:
* Subsidize the 2nd seat for parents with children from tax dollars
* Criminalize many intentional driving violations
* Build high speed rail
Landlords could have collectively agreed to keep rents at $1K/month and not lobby against building more housing complexes, but they decided to be greedy instead.
and I don't know who to report it to. I guess it's owned by Microsoft so also not surprised.
Okay, then I will just use the website then. Their choice. I'm just picking among options offered to me, and I'm not exactly swimming in cash.
Maybe they can start with a $50 tax deduction for every $25 passport photo I take at CVS.
If foreign governments is the threat model, then my government should offer a free passport photo service that supports all countries' specs, and put the $25 guys out of business.
And no I'm not paying $25 for some idiot at CVS to rip me off and do extremely little work. They also are not knowledgeable about the passport photo requirements of all these countries and they don't deserve $25.
This is IMO one of those jobs that should be replaced by AI.