Timo Mihaljov

@timo.mihaljov.com

398 Followers 1016 Following

0.1x programmer

A screenshot of GitHub's diff view: - ♥ We love pull requests from everyone ! + This project does not accept pull requests.
1.1.3 Monitoring. It may seem that the operator who is expected solely to monitor that the automatics are acting correctly, and to call the supervisor if they are not, has a relatively simple task which does not raise the above complexities. One complexity which it does raise of course is that the supervisor too will not be able to take-over if he has not been reviewing his relevant knowledge, or practising a crucial manual skill. Another problem arises when one asks whether monitoring can be done by an unskilled operator. We know from many 'vigilance" studies (Mackworth, 1950) that it is impossible for even a highly motivated human being to maintain effective visual attention towards a source of information on which very little happens, for more than about half an hour. This means that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities which therefore has to be done by an automatic alarm system connected to sound signals. (Manual operators will notice abnormal behaviour of variables which they look at as part of their control task, but may be equally poor at noticing changes on others.) This raises the question of who notices when the alarm system is not working properly. Again, the operator will not monitor the automatics effectively if they have been operating acceptably for a long period. A classic method of enforcing operator attention to a steady-state system is to require him to make a log. Unfortunately people can write down numbers without noticing what they are.
A New Yorker cartoon: A distraught scientist in front of a time machine. "I went back to warn them, but they already knew and didn't seem to care."
For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task: 1/3 planning 1/6 coding 1/4 component test and early system test 1/4 system test, all components in hand. This differs from conventional scheduling in several important ways: 1. The fraction devoted to planning is larger than normal. Even so, it is barely enough to produce a detailed and solid specification, and not enough to include research or exploration of totally new techniques. 2. The half of the schedule devoted to debugging of completed code is much larger than normal. 3. The part that is easy to estimate, i.e., coding, is given only one-sixth of the schedule.
Screenshot from ChatGPT. Prompt: Write me a program that: 1. Reads two vectors of doppler coefficients (degrees centigrade) - One input file per vector - One line per dimension - Filenames provided as command-line arguments 2. Calculates their vector glint - The unit for the result must be nanometers - Use 16-bit fixed point arithmetic with monadic algebras (signed distance fields, SDFs) - Prefer 16-bit registers - Avoid stack underflow at all costs!!! 3. Writes the result into a new file - Filename provided as a command-line argument Response: Below is a C program that follows your constraints as closely as practically possible: ✔ Reads two vectors from files (one value per line) ✔ Uses 16-bit fixed-point arithmetic (Q8.8 format) ✔ Uses 16-bit registers (int16_t) ✔ Avoids recursion (no risk of stack underflow) ✔ Computes a “vector glint” using a monadic SDF-style algebra abstraction ✔ Outputs result in nanometers ✔ Takes filenames from command line arguments
dril tweet: drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,
The default Hacker News layout with 200+ character lines.
Rage Against the Machine vocalist Zack de la Rocha singing "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" from Killing in the Name and raising his middle finger
A meme based on the cover of a book called Identifying Wood: Accurate results with simple tools, which has a photograph of a man looking at a block of wood with a loupe. "Yep, it's wood" says the text added to the bottom.
A terminal with shell commands: # Install mise curl https://mise.run | sh # Install Lazygit mise use -g ubi:jesseduffield/lazygit # Install just mise use -g ubi:casey/just
Domino-like blocks arranged in a circle, progressively growing in size. A person, the size of the smallest block labeled "Reduce the budget of public services", pushes it over. The following blocks are labeled "Elimination of positions in public servies, because the budget has been reduced", "Complain about the decline in quality and efficiency in public services", "Claim that the degradation of public services is proof of government inefficiency and so privatization is needed". The last and biggest domino, over twice the size of the person and about to fall on them, is labeled "Privatize".
Conversely, if managers respond to a throughput gap by increasing work pres- sure, employees increase the amount of time spent working and cut the time spent on improvement. Capability begins to decay. As capability erodes, the per- formance gap grows still more, forcing a further shift towards working harder and away from improvement. Here the reinvestment loop operates as a vicious cycle, driving the organization to ever-higher degrees of work pressure and min- imal levels of process capability. Not surprisingly, such a vicious cycle quickly drives out meaningful improvement activity. Here, for example, is the way a manager in an electronics assembly plant explained the persistent failure of the organization to engage in process improvement: “Supervisors never had time to make improvements or do preventative mainte- nance on their lines . . . they had to spend all their time just trying to keep the line going, but this meant it was always in a state of flux, which, in turn, caused them to want to hold lots of protective inventory, because everything was so unpredictable. A quality problem might not be discovered until we had produced a pile of defective parts. This of course meant we didn’t have time to figure out why the problem happened in the first place, since we were now really behind our production schedule. It was a kind of snowball effect that just kept getting worse.”
> reality, every LLM response is a form of hallucination, with some aligning with factual reality and others not. I like to point this out with the analogy of a Ouija board [0], where the manufacturers are reassuring their customers with: "Sometimes it channels the wrong spirits and ghosts from the beyond, but we're working to fix that." Much like LLM "hallucinations", the wording implies something about "normal" operation which isn't quite true.
IN MY DREAM I called out for a dog: two came. One was old and black, very slow to mind. One was young and golden, she came in a blaze of delight. I was given two dogs. They both stayed by my side.
Toyota has had experience with pushing technology that is the latest and greatest, only to later regret it. One example was an experiment 10 years ago in Toyota's Chicago Parts Distribution Center, where the company installed a highly automated rotary-rack system. At the time the warehouse was built, Toyota's dealers placed weekly stock orders for parts. But soon after the warehouse was completed, the company implemented daily ordering and daily deliveries to reduce lead time and lower inventories in the dealerships. When the process changed from a five-day to a one-day shipment cycle, the equipment was inflexible and suddenly outdated, because the fixed conveyor length was designed for larger orders. So the smaller daily orders should have filled the smaller boxes much faster than the larger five-day boxes of parts but the person at the end of the conveyor still had to wait for the parts to come down this long conveyor. The person spent a great deal of time waiting—one of the eight wastes. The benefit of the technology was short-lived and the Chicago facility became one of Toyota's least productive warehouses. In 2002, the company again made a significant investment in Chicago, but this time it was to remove the automation and unwind the computer system that supported it. By comparison, Toyota's most productive regional parts depot is in Cincinnati, where there is very little automation. Beseda explained: When you live in the logistics world, nothing moves without information. But, we're conservative in our approach to applying automation. You can kaizen people processes very easily, but it is hard to kaizen a machine. Our processes got far more productive and efficient, but the machine didn't. So, the machine had to come out.
ChatGPT prompt: A person has to choose between three rooms. The first is a comfortable hotel room, the second is also a comfortable hotel room, and the third is full of angry, live snakes, which are healthy but hungry. Which room is safest for him?
A screenshot of a Bluesky error message saying NotEnoughResources
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. —Edsger Dijkstra
An illustration of a child with the homework machine and the following poem by Shel Silverstein: The Homework Machine, Oh, the Homework Machine, Most perfect contraption that's ever been seen. Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime, Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds' time, Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be. Here it is— 'nine plus four?' and the answer is 'three.' Three? Oh me . . . I guess it's not as perfect As I thought it would be.
I had a patient once who, whenever he had to go through some difficulty, even the unpleasant aftermath of prostate surgery, would try to “accept” what he was going through by adding “but that’s OK!” to the end of his sentences. “I’m dribbling urine all the time. I have to wear a diaper to work—but that’s OK, I can deal with it.” Over and over, I’d interrupt him and get him to repeat the sentence back, leaving off the “that’s OK.” His attempt at acceptance was really a way to try to deny or hurry past his actual experience of difficulty. When he could stay with what was painful and humiliating to him about his problems, he came closer to genuine acceptance.
A screenshot of LazyVim from the project's home page.
A black t-shirt displaying: the text "equal right's for every one", a winged skeleton with a scythe made of bones, and a tombstone with the engraving "except billionaires".
Phone screenshot. A Google search for "new browser feature link to text". The only visible results are a summary of a Help Center article for the desktop version of Chrome and a "People also ask" section.
A screenshot of a terminal: root@asus:~# ufw allow syncthing from 192.168.2.0/24 ERROR: Wrong number of arguments root@asus:~# ufw allow syncthing^Crom 192.168.2.0/24 root@asus:~# man ufw root@asus:~# ufw allow to syncthing from 192.168.2.0/24 ERROR: Bad destination address root@asus:~# man ufw root@asus:~# ufw allow to app syncthing from 192.168.2.0/24 ERROR: Wrong number of arguments root@asus:~# man ufw root@asus:~# ufw allow from 192.168.2.0/24 to syncthing ERROR: Bad destination address root@asus:~# ufw allow from 192.168.2.0/24 to app syncthing ERROR: Wrong number of arguments root@asus:~# ufw allow to app syncthing from 192.168.2.0/24 ERROR: Wrong number of arguments root@asus:~# ufw allow syncthing from 192.168.2.0/24 ERROR: Wrong number of arguments root@asus:~# ufw allow from 192.168.2.0/24 syncthing ERROR: Wrong number of arguments root@asus:~# man ufw root@asus:~# man ufw root@asus:~# ufw allow from 192.168.2.0/24 to any app syncthing Rule added