Day: August 2, 2021

GitHub Copilot And The Unfulfilled Promises Of An Artificial Intelligence Future

August 2, 2021 by 36 Comments

In late June of 2021, GitHub launched a ‘technical preview’ of what they termed GitHub Copilot, described as an ‘AI pair programmer which helps you write better code’. Quite predictably, responses to this announcement varied from glee at the glorious arrival of our code-generating AI overlords, to dismay and predictions of doom and gloom as before long companies would be firing software developers en-masse.

As is usually the case with such controversial topics, neither of these extremes are even remotely close to the truth. In fact, the OpenAI Codex machine learning model which underlies GitHub’s Copilot is derived from OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language model,  and features many of the same stumbles and gaffes which GTP-3 has. So if Codex and with it Copilot isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be, what is the big deal, and why show it at all?

Continue reading “GitHub Copilot And The Unfulfilled Promises Of An Artificial Intelligence Future” →

Home Depot Is Selling Power Tools That Require Activation In-Store

August 2, 2021 by 344 Comments

Shoplifting is a major problem for many brick-and-mortar retail stores, and it seems that stealing and then selling power tools is a lucrative enterprise for some criminals. To combat this, Home Depot is starting to sell power tools that will not work unless they are activated at the checkout counter.

According to a 2020 survey in the US, “organized retail crime” cost retailers $719,548 per $1 billion dollars in revenue. One thief was recently arrested after stealing more than $17,000 worth of power tools from Home Depot. While many stores put high value items in locked display cases, Home Depot felt that this tactic would negatively affect sales, so they partnered with suppliers to add an internal kill switch. Although persistent criminals might find a way to deactivate this feature, it sounds like Home Depot is hoping that will be just enough trouble to convince most criminals to look for easier targets somewhere else.

We would be really interested in getting our hands on one of these power tools to see what this kill switch looks like and how it works. Something like a Bluetooth activated relay is one option, or maybe even something that is integrated directly in the motor controller. If it were up to us, we would probably pick something that receives power wirelessly using a coil and requires a unique code. For their sake, we hope it’s not something that can be deactivated with just a large magnet.

Thanks for the tip [Garth Bock]!

Apollo DSKY Display Glows Again

August 2, 2021 by 13 Comments

We love seeing old technology brought back to life, especially when it’s done in the context of how the device was originally intended to be used. And double points when it’s space gear, like what [Curious Marc] and his usual merry band of cohorts did when they managed to light up a couple of real Apollo DSKY displays.

The “Display and Keyboard” formed the human interface to the Apollo Guidance Computer, the purpose-built machine that allowed Apollo missions to fly to the Moon, land safely, and return to Earth. Complete DSKYs are hard to come by, but a lucky collector named [Marcel] was able to score a pair of the electroluminescent panels, one a prototype and one a flight-qualified spare. He turned them over to AGC guru [Carl Claunch], who worked out all the details of getting the display working again —  a non-trivial task with a device that needs 250 volts at 800 Hertz.

The first third of the video below mostly concerns the backstory of the DSKY displays and the historical aspects of the artifacts; skip to around the 12:30 mark to get into the technical details, including the surprising use of relays to drive the segments of the display. It makes sense once you realize that mid-60s transistors weren’t up to the task, and it must have made the Apollo spacecraft a wonderfully clicky place. We were also intrigued by the clever way the total relay count was kept to a minimum, by realizing that not every combination of segments was valid for each seven-segment display.

The video has a couple of cameos, like [Ben Krasnow], no slouch himself when it comes to electroluminescent displays and DSKY replicas. We also get a glimpse of well-known component slicer and MOnSter 6502-tamer [TubeTime] too. Continue reading “Apollo DSKY Display Glows Again” →