• 39 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Bluetooth tags are usually a lot cheaper than UWB for accurate tracking. But they do require special ‘routers’ for AoA and AoD support. This will supposedly make it cheaper to deploy indoor location applications.

    The main use-case isn’t Airtags. It’s warehouse and large retail applications, where a roving scanner can store precise item locations and count inventory. That way, if you need a specific part, it would be easy and faster to find. And if running low on items, the inventory system could instantly order more, instead of catching it at the next weekly/monthly/quarterly inventory count. If the tags cost $ instead of $$$ for UWB, you slap one on every item that comes in the door.

    NFC tags are also cheap, but you need to get within cm to pick up signal, or have a powerful, expensive scanner at a portal. Even then, it doesn’t help telling you which shelf in the warehouse the item ended on. The BT ones will.

    Gotta hand it to the Bluetooth SIG. They’re rapidly pushing out useful features with each revision.








  • I can think of only two reasons to have a venv inside a container:

    • If you’re running third-party services inside a container, pinned to different Python versions.

    • If you do local development without docker and scripts that have to activate the venv from inside the script. If you move the scripts inside the container, now you don’t have a venv. But then it’s easy to just check an environment variable and skip, if inside Docker.

    For most applications, it seems like an unnecessary extra step.



  • I’ve been using ChatGPT, specialized ones on Huggingface, and a bunch of local ones using ollama. A colleague who is into this deep says Claude is giving him best results.

    Thing is, depends on the task. For coding, I’ve found all suck. ChatGPT gets you up to a point, then puts out completely wrong stuff. Gemini, Microsoft, and CodeWhisperer put out half-baked rubbish. If you don’t already know the domain, it will be frustrating finding the bugs.

    For images, I’ve tried DALL-E for placeholder graphics. Problem is, if you change a single prompt element to refine the output, it will generate completely different images with no way to go back. Same with Adobe generators. Folks have recommended Stability for related images. Will be trying that next.

    Most LLMs are just barely acceptable. Good for casual messing around, but I wouldn’t bet the business on any of them. Once the novelty wears off, and the CFOs tally up the costs, my prediction is a lot of these are going away.