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Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

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Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#41

Post by whimsicalism »

chaboud wrote: post #28
whimsicalism wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even the physics labs i worked in looked like this

The physics computer lab in Chamberlin Hall at UW in the 90's was a secret treasure trove of idle NeXTstation Turbo machines in an almost always empty room cooled to near refrigeration temperatures. I used to light up at least half of that room to run distributed simulations. There's probably still a 30 year old key to that lab in a junk drawer somewhere. Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up an…

> Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?

In my recent physics experience, this is basically what it was unless you had to rely on some proprietary software only on the lab machines like shudders LabView

Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#42

Post by oniony »

ninju wrote: post #26
whimsicalism wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

object detection of people from images is probably what they are referring to. there are maybe some state laws that could be stretched to include that but i would say presumptively legal

The final solution does not depend on object (people) detection. In fact by the end of the article he has totally eliminated the camera

Doors have rights too!

Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#43

Post by jrflowers »

moralestapia wrote: post #23
packetlost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public university labs are generally public as they're state property (in this particular case, UW Madison is a public state University). Further, recording video or pictures of people in public places is broadly legal in the US. There are only "presumption of privacy" restrictions which apply to places such as bathrooms and private property that is not visible from a public location (ex. a sidewalk). Obv. IANAL and…

[flagged]

This reasoning makes sense. Roads and parks aren’t public, as they are city property. “Public” is only when something has no legal owner, like the moon and stars, or love.

Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#46

Post by samatman »

moralestapia wrote: post #19
whimsicalism wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would it be illegal?

Generally, you cannot just record people without their consent; but this also largely depends on the jurisdiction/situation. Almost nowhere (or actually nowhere?) are you allowed to set up a surveillance device into a space that is not public and it is not owned by you.

Generally, in the United States, you can, in fact, just record people. Legally speaking, that is, which doesn't make it a polite or cool thing to do. Necessarily.

If you're on someone else's property, they can of course set any number of rules, and trespass those who break those rules. But even there, recording people, if against the rules, is still not a crime. The crime is trespass, if this journalist we're speaking of sticks around after being trespassed off the property.

Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#47

Post by hansvm »

chaboud wrote: post #28
whimsicalism wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even the physics labs i worked in looked like this

The physics computer lab in Chamberlin Hall at UW in the 90's was a secret treasure trove of idle NeXTstation Turbo machines in an almost always empty room cooled to near refrigeration temperatures. I used to light up at least half of that room to run distributed simulations. There's probably still a 30 year old key to that lab in a junk drawer somewhere. Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up an…

It's been nearly a decade now, but we shared a machine with 128 newish physical cores, a terabyte of RAM, and a lot of fast disk. Anyone with a big job just coordinated with the 1-2 other people who might need it at that level and left 10% of the RAM and disk for everyone else (OS scheduling handled the CPU sharing, though we rarely had real conflicts).

It's firmly in "not a laptop" scale, and for anything that fit it was much faster than all the modern cloud garbage.

The other lab I was in around that time just collected machines indefinitely and allocated subsets of them for a few months at a time (the usual amount of time a heavily optimized program would take to finish in that field) to any Ph.D. with a reasonable project. They all used the same in-house software for job management and whatnot, with nice abstractions (as nice as you can get in C) for distributed half-sparse half-dense half-whatever linear algebra. You again only had to share between a few people, and a few hundred decent machines per person was solidly better than whatever you could do in the cloud for the same grant money.

Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#48

Post by ozzmotik »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #34
packetlost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public university labs are generally public as they're state property (in this particular case, UW Madison is a public state University). Further, recording video or pictures of people in public places is broadly legal in the US. There are only "presumption of privacy" restrictions which apply to places such as bathrooms and private property that is not visible from a public location (ex. a sidewalk). Obv. IANAL and…

By this logic the dorm room bathrooms at public universities are also public and I should be able to setup cameras /s

just for the sake of conversation…

if you did, where would you have set them up at anyway? Asking for a friend

Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#49

Post by alwayslikethis »

cptaj wrote: post #36
nullhole wrote: post #25

> It then set the name of a channel to the results (either 1-person-in-upl or X-people-in-upl), which others could check. I'm not suggesting you don't do this, but you /could/ setup a speaker to play the classic remix of Steve Ballmer's "developers! developers!" whenever there are >=2 people in the room. On April 1st, of course.

I am, in fact, suggesting you do this.

> I'm not suggesting you don't do this

I hope this is intentional

Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab

#50

Post by eduction »

cptaj wrote: post #36
nullhole wrote: post #25

> It then set the name of a channel to the results (either 1-person-in-upl or X-people-in-upl), which others could check. I'm not suggesting you don't do this, but you /could/ setup a speaker to play the classic remix of Steve Ballmer's "developers! developers!" whenever there are >=2 people in the room. On April 1st, of course.

I am, in fact, suggesting you do this.

I love this company. Yeah!
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