chromaton

Joined 13 years ago

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1,300

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443

Member since

Apr 13

Hacker and business owner with an interest in digital manufacturing.

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Comment · 2 hours ago

As I mentioned in the thread regarding the previous attacks, I worked in a closely related field back in 2008-2009.

One thing I see repeatedly brought up here in this discussion is "Why can't we just set the refrigerator temperature with a knob and walk away?"

The problem is that these refrigerator cases are not as simple as your refrigerator at home. As a simple example, many systems allow you have control over the deadband: the exact low temperature at which the compressor turns off and the high temperature at which the compressor turns back on. You also have control over defrost cycles, compressor pressure and many other things (I worked with this a long while ago, and I don't remember all the details).

Take a look at some of these manuals, for example: https://www.hillphoenix.com/resource/installation-manuals-2/... As far as I can tell, those manuals just cover the refrigerator cases, and not the outside compressors and heat exchangers, which are another layer to deal with.

This is not something that a non-expert supermarket employee would be able to handle well. The purpose of all these settings is optimize around energy usage, maintenance costs, customer experience, etc. Even if you only save $500/store/year, you can see that it really adds up over a chain of 1000 stores.

That's why this equipment is remotely accessible: it's not like your fridge at home and requires a lot more knowledge to get the most out of it. Of course, that does not excuse poor security implementations.

Comment · 8 days ago

It worked for me, and I'm getting about 6% faster training on nanochat with my 3060 card. Thanks for this!

However, it required a few extra steps, as the repo is set up for Linux kernel 6.x and I'm on 5.15. Claude Code was able to get me past the hurdles, including code modifications and startup scripts.

Right now, I'm clearly power limited at 170 watts and I have no desire to brick my card or set it on fire.

Comment · 20 days ago

Grocery is very low-margin, and if a new system can save $500 on electricity and maintenance per year per store, and you've got 1000 stores, the technology justifies its cost very quickly.

Comment · 20 days ago

Well, many of them were still on dial-up modems in 2008.

Comment · 20 days ago

Saving on labor is the purpose of most technologies since the pointy stick.

Comment · 21 days ago

I worked in the field of control systems for supermarkets back in 2008.

These systems are internet connected and remotely controllable because the managers need to be able to see shifts in usage over time and take action to save electricity and provide better food storage. One example might be that due to shifting customer patterns and products, you might want a certain refrigerator case to be kept colder with a narrower temperature range. Another example is for Demand Response: when a brownout may occur, the utility companies want people to lower their load, which, in the case of supermarkets, means turning off lights, increasing the thermostat on the AC, turning off dehumidifiers, etc.

One notable story from that time: this was during the 2008 economic crash, and the company went from hiring to laying off within a week. A group of technicians were working on a refrigerator compressor system and were told by security to stop what they were doing and immediately exit the building. They tried to explain that they were running a special test and needed to shut things down before leaving, but the security guys weren't having it and made them leave right away. The test ended up running overnight, and the managers came in the next morning to over $100,000 worth of damage to the refrigeration equipment.

Comment · 5 months ago

A classic satirical SF short story from Stanislaw Lem, containing a satirical look at AI, sexbots, and transhumanism.

The Washing-Machine Tragedy (1981) newyorker.com

3 chromaton 5 months ago 1 comments

Comment · 7 months ago

I did something very similar last year, but with programming languages that were REALLY out of distribution; they were generated specifically for the benchmark. I call it TiānshūBench (天书Bench): https://jeepytea.github.io/general/introduction/2025/05/29/t...

Some models were OK at solving very simple problems, but nearly all of them would, for example, hallucinate control structures that did not exist in the target language.

Comment · 8 months ago

Historically, the cycle has been requirements -> code -> test, but with coding becoming much faster, the bottlenecks have changed. That's one of the reasons I've been working on Spark Runner to help automate testing for web apps: https://https://github.com/simonarthur/spark-runner

Comment · 8 months ago

I've recently found that my ability to add new features and squash bugs has outpaced my ability to do full end-to-end tests. To help with this, I created Spark Runner for automated website testing. It will create and execute a plan for tasks you give it in plain text like "add an item to the shopping cart" or you just point it at your front end code and have Spark Runner create the tests for you. It also makes nice reports telling you what's working and what's not.

New project, so feedback is welcome.