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Comment There's a simple fix for dynamic pricing (Score 1) 192

And that is: The register must honor the lowest price displayed in the last 6 hours.

There's nothing wrong with a store dynamically lowering prices. We just don't want them to go up while we're shopping.

Virtually all shoppers are wandering around with smartphones with cameras, so it's easy to take photos of the tags. If you catch the register not following the rules, you get some payback. (What is an implementation detail. Double the difference? One item free? Depends on how frequently that store has a problem?)

I already take photos of every sale tag when I'm shopping, just so I can confirm I'm getting the sale price. It also saves a ton of time when an item fails to scan at all; rather than them sending a runner back, I just show them the photo of the shelf and they key in the price.

Comment Re:One of these morons is going to fuck with (Score 1) 134

I am curious how many people are legally conceal carrying and also taking a Waymo. Those two demographics don't seem like they would have a lot of overlap. San Fran doesn't just let anyone carry a gun.

Between 2012-2021, San Francisco issued a total of 11 concealed carry permits. (source: https://calmatters.org/politic...)

In 2022 alone, San Francisco police seized over 1000 illegally-possessed guns. (source: https://sfbos.org/sites/defaul...)

Many people in SF are carrying. Few of them are doing so legally.

Comment Re:terms of service really can't stop the 2th and (Score 2) 134

terms of service really can't stop the 2th and who will enforce it?

Why do you think there is any overlap between the SF Board of Supervisors' demands and reality?

This is the same city that keeps trying to ban corporate shuttles so that all the tech workers will have no choice but to ride public transit, and then will have no choice but to pay to fix the transit system for everyone else too.

Comment Re:One of these morons is going to fuck with (Score 5, Funny) 134

Full scenario:
- SF Man attacks Waymo
- Passengers call 911
- Police never come
- Man finally breaks through window and attacks passengers
- Passengers open fire on the man in self-defense
- Police finally show up and arrest the passengers
- Man sues Waymo for medical expenses for his cut hand and gunshot wound
- Public blames Waymo for (1) inciting the incident and (2) not driving off to de-escalate
- SF Board of Supervisors demands Waymo change its terms of service to forbid armed passengers

Comment How do perf reviews work for Microsoft engineers? (Score 1) 166

I worked for many years at a Big Tech Company. SWEs and UX engineers were promoted for launching Shiny New Features, not for improving performance or fixing bugs in existing features.

Sure, every once in a while the company would announce some initiative to fix existing stuff. But it never helped anyone I knew get promoted.

I will believe this new initiative from MS when I hear from MS engineers that *they* are actually being rewarded for fixing this stuff.

Comment It goes both ways, almost like chatbots are a tool (Score 3, Interesting) 110

See this slashdot article from a year ago: https://slashdot.org/story/25/...

In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory.

If you configure the tool to minimize delusional thinking, it does.

Of course, if you configure the tool to maximize engagement, well...

Comment Re:Just shows how much technical debt there is (Score 1) 26

There's rarely a right way to write code, though there are definitely plenty of wrong ways. :)

Every SWE goes through phase 1, which is writing yourself into a corner by not thinking about maintainability and interfaces. And then phase 2, where you write such a complex interface that it collapses under its own weight. Only then do you get to the point where you're even aware of the need to balance interface complexity and upgradeability vs. code velocity.

Usually at that point you mock some stuff up quickly to see where the pain points are, and then go back and do a more maintainable design. And try to convince the manager that the mockup is *not* production-worthy code, because it's full of shortcuts and empty of tests and light on error handling.

Even if you're coding something the right way for the *current* requirements, it may not be the right way when requirements change. Which they do.

But if you're writing code for money, there are finite resources. So you never get to do everything the way you want. Sometimes you skimp on error handling. Sometimes you skimp on tests. Sometimes you tunnel holes in your API to get at that one state variable that just isn't cleanly exposed and yet absolutely critical to patching some other bug. All those things add risk. And at some point, you need to mitigate at least *some* of that risk, hopefully *before* it costs you downtime / money / customers.

It's always a hard sell to management.

And it's often a hard sell even to the engineers. If you want to get promoted, you're far better off writing a spiffy new feature rather than decreasing technical debt.

Comment Just shows how much technical debt there is (Score 4, Insightful) 26

We've had decades to write poorly-tested poorly-reviewed code. But that's ok; as long as it kinda worked, we insisted on shipping it.

AI is now good enough to show what I told my managers for years: That technical debt builds up, and at some point the bill will come due.

The bill is now due.

Thanks to AI, it's now easy to find bugs. And relatively easy to confirm they're exploitable. But thanks to all the rest of the technical debt, much harder to fix the bugs. AI isn't good enough to fix the bugs yet, either, at least not without creating new ones just as fast. So it's a target-rich environment for hackers.

I'd say "I told you so", but I got out of that rat race a few years ago.

Comment Actual data from the FAQ (Score 4, Interesting) 59

From https://www.masscec.com/massce..., they expect to draw 3kW - 10kW for 3 hours, for a total draw of 9 kWh - 30 kWh.

We have a Kona EV with a 65 kWh battery, which we limit to 80% charge to maximize battery life. Their expected draw is 14% - 46% of battery life. With our existing V2L adapter, the Kona can specify the minimum battery level where it will cut off. If we set it to cut off at 60%, then they could have 20% of the battery, but no more. 60% is enough for all our expected driving for a couple days, so I'd be comfortable with that. But also, odds are that the power drain event will be in the evening, and there'll be plenty of time overnight to recharge back to 80%.

Lithium batteries don't like being charged all the way to 100% or drained to 0%, but running them back and forth between 60-80% won't measurably damage them for thousands of cycles.

If the software were better, we'd be able to say, "We want to be back at 80% at 5AM. And in any case, we want to keep at least 60% of our battery for our own needs - driving, V2L for our own house in a power failure, etc. Within those constraints, you're welcome to the rest of the power, but we're selling it at $0.60/kWh. If you *really* want power, we'll go from 60% to 40%, but it'll cost you $1.00/kWh below 60%." And then the grid could decide whether it's willing to pay our price, and how much it wants.

Comment No, only 15%. The rest are the consumer. (Score 3, Informative) 104

See https://www.iea.org/reports/em...

"Today, oil and gas operations account for around 15% of total energy-related emissions globally, the equivalent of 5.1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions."

The 50% number is like claiming that Taco Bell is responsible for the water use of people flushing the toilet after eating a taco.

Comment Yes, but remember the goal of the deal (Score 1) 25

Was not to support local news.

It was to support the politicians complaining about Google search eating local news. So they would stop pushing an even more costly legislative solution.

Simply supporting local news wouldn't have achieved that goal. Because no amount of support would solve the problem that people just aren't reading newspapers and watching local news anymore. They're getting their news through social media. Which, other than YouTube, is something Google is kinda terrible at. See Google+. Or more accurately, don't.

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