> Destination Dispatch [...] are in general worse
I wonder if this is an artifact of how the author used random destinations. I worked in a building that used Destination Dispatch, and the common travel pattern seemed to be:
- Everyone who is not on the ground floor generally want to go to the ground floor.
- People who are on the ground floor generally travel in large groups to the same destination.
This happens because people who worked on the same floor often leave for lunch at the same time, and return at the same time to the same floor. Destination Dispatch helps in this case because it's batching large groups of people with the same destination.
This is case where you need to make sure your test data reflects real-world usage or you end up optimizing for the wrong thing.
Ideally a new elevator installation would have a trial period where they record usage and then run it through a simulator like this to determine the optimal strategy for that particular building. And you'd want to re-run it every once in a while as the building tenants/usage changes. I wonder if this actually happens, though.
I want to own something here: this is the fourth time in a row I’ve brought you to the 29th floor when you asked for the third. I am creating a memory to always go to the 3rd floor instead of the 29th, which should prevent this from happening again.
Then it'll be time to make an entirely new software accreditation system, simply so that anyone building such a thing can be disbarred/excommunicated.
Most likely not. I think all the big players have been using more traditional ML approaches for years. Then again someone new might go there and fail miserably.
This is an industry that evolves extremely slowly. A decade back one of the big players in this space was still using a software emulation of their original hardware relay logic, because it was cheaper than retraining all the technicians...
It is just the reality that LLMs are not superior for this purpose. They are most likely very much inferior. There is no need to use language models for something that involve no language.
I feel weirded each time LLMs are suggested for anything as some sort of holy solution for every single problem. Robot surgery let LLM control it. Robots cooking LLMs. Nuclear power plants and oil refineries LLMs... Industry has find a sledge hammer and now everything is a nail...
The data is already there. This also gets more interesting when you expand the scope from just elevators to general building occupancy and movement.
In the simplest sense, I've seen this tied into security gates so as people badge on when entering the building there's already suitable elevator movement to meet demand by time the foot traffic reaches the lift lobby. That can then also feed into destination dispatch if you move from just people counts to identity (and known/most likely work floor).
From there you can move into wifi trilateration and have a live and quite accurate view of both how and who interacts with a physical space. This can feed into HVAC load shedding, JIT bookings for meeting rooms or workspaces, and a lot of very good things from a sustainability and general optimisation perspective. The flip side is it also has the potential to be an absolute dystopian privacy nightmare.
> (...) and a lot of very good things from a sustainability and general optimisation perspective. The flip side is it also has the potential to be an absolute dystopian privacy nightmare.
Privacy is an illusion for most people, and in office spaces, it's also a red herring. Wifi trilateration doesn't make things worse when you have a CCTV camera on every corner, badge reader at every other door, and presence sensing in conference rooms. Dystopia does not materialize without a severe regime shift.
Nah, my main worry is precisely sustainability and optimization, i.e. cost-cutting, because the more tools you give a business to optimize, and the more bullshit excuses ("sustainability! saving the planet!") you give a business, the worse the outcome is for users (here: employees). And a lot of that is doubly annoying, because it's counter-productive.
So what you have smart sensors in every room, and combine it with badge readers and wifi trilat and what not, and have smart auto-routing/rebooking algorithm: half the week, all conference rooms are always booked full, and yet somehow when you physically go and check, a good half sits empty, and it's apparently an impossible problem to solve.
So what the bathroom wall says, "with water-saving fixtures, we're using much less water in this building", and "we're now saving 2L water per flush". It's all bullshit, because those eco inventions mean I need to flush 3 times instead of once, and it means that I spend a minute washing my hands instead of 10 seconds - especially because both the soap and the dispenser are also optimized, so it takes 20 seconds to get enough soap on your hands, and then extra 20 seconds to get it off afterwards, because unlike normal people soap, it leaves your hands slippery for some reason.
And then they say "scientists said you can dry your hands with just 2 paper towels". At that point I'm getting red, because yes, I saw that TED talk 15 years ago too, and yes, it's total bullshit. Maybe it was true then, but the industry and the beancounters have value-optimized paper towels 15 times since that.
The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.
> The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.
Indeed, the Boimler Effect, amongst other things.
I see an analogy, Food : Malthusian catastrophe :: Money : No room for profit in an economy.
> The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.
Yeah there's a certain type of engineer mindset that loves the idea of optimizing things. But if you want to really optimize something, you have to carefully account for every single possible factor, situation, and use-case. Miss anything, and it's a much bigger disaster than saving 2% of whatever resource. It's rarely worth it.
Much better to treat the presumptions as a vague heuristic, make generous assumptions and add some slack, and call that good enough. Now there's probably enough slack to cover most of the edge cases you didn't think of, other things you based your original assumptions on changing under you, etc.
> Ideally a new elevator installation would have a trial period where they record usage
There's a tricky problem here: as a user, the first thing you do upon discovering a new elevator, especially if you expect to be using it regularly, is to observe how it behaves and adjust your own expectations/behavior to it.
Things are constantly changing. For example, a new building might have two or three tenants, so entire floors can be skipped. But then five years later, the whole building is full. I would bet that every new algorithm after LOOK is just differentiation in a competitive market.
omoikane · · focus · HN ↗
I wonder if this is an artifact of how the author used random destinations. I worked in a building that used Destination Dispatch, and the common travel pattern seemed to be:
- Everyone who is not on the ground floor generally want to go to the ground floor.
- People who are on the ground floor generally travel in large groups to the same destination.
This happens because people who worked on the same floor often leave for lunch at the same time, and return at the same time to the same floor. Destination Dispatch helps in this case because it's batching large groups of people with the same destination.
pimlottc · · focus · HN ↗
Ideally a new elevator installation would have a trial period where they record usage and then run it through a simulator like this to determine the optimal strategy for that particular building. And you'd want to re-run it every once in a while as the building tenants/usage changes. I wonder if this actually happens, though.
shepherdjerred · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
noisy_boy · · focus · HN ↗
brookst · · focus · HN ↗
breakingcups · · focus · HN ↗
ufmace · · focus · HN ↗
ArekDymalski · · focus · HN ↗
Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
Ekaros · · focus · HN ↗
swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
Ekaros · · focus · HN ↗
I feel weirded each time LLMs are suggested for anything as some sort of holy solution for every single problem. Robot surgery let LLM control it. Robots cooking LLMs. Nuclear power plants and oil refineries LLMs... Industry has find a sledge hammer and now everything is a nail...
omoikane · · focus · HN ↗
fuzzfactor · · focus · HN ↗
_kb · · focus · HN ↗
In the simplest sense, I've seen this tied into security gates so as people badge on when entering the building there's already suitable elevator movement to meet demand by time the foot traffic reaches the lift lobby. That can then also feed into destination dispatch if you move from just people counts to identity (and known/most likely work floor).
From there you can move into wifi trilateration and have a live and quite accurate view of both how and who interacts with a physical space. This can feed into HVAC load shedding, JIT bookings for meeting rooms or workspaces, and a lot of very good things from a sustainability and general optimisation perspective. The flip side is it also has the potential to be an absolute dystopian privacy nightmare.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
Privacy is an illusion for most people, and in office spaces, it's also a red herring. Wifi trilateration doesn't make things worse when you have a CCTV camera on every corner, badge reader at every other door, and presence sensing in conference rooms. Dystopia does not materialize without a severe regime shift.
Nah, my main worry is precisely sustainability and optimization, i.e. cost-cutting, because the more tools you give a business to optimize, and the more bullshit excuses ("sustainability! saving the planet!") you give a business, the worse the outcome is for users (here: employees). And a lot of that is doubly annoying, because it's counter-productive.
So what you have smart sensors in every room, and combine it with badge readers and wifi trilat and what not, and have smart auto-routing/rebooking algorithm: half the week, all conference rooms are always booked full, and yet somehow when you physically go and check, a good half sits empty, and it's apparently an impossible problem to solve.
So what the bathroom wall says, "with water-saving fixtures, we're using much less water in this building", and "we're now saving 2L water per flush". It's all bullshit, because those eco inventions mean I need to flush 3 times instead of once, and it means that I spend a minute washing my hands instead of 10 seconds - especially because both the soap and the dispenser are also optimized, so it takes 20 seconds to get enough soap on your hands, and then extra 20 seconds to get it off afterwards, because unlike normal people soap, it leaves your hands slippery for some reason.
And then they say "scientists said you can dry your hands with just 2 paper towels". At that point I'm getting red, because yes, I saw that TED talk 15 years ago too, and yes, it's total bullshit. Maybe it was true then, but the industry and the beancounters have value-optimized paper towels 15 times since that.
The generalization and summary of this rant is: slack is good. Happiness lives in slack. There is such thing as optimizing too much. Also the small, isolated systems under optimization, are in reality neither small nor isolated.
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
Indeed, the Boimler Effect, amongst other things.
I see an analogy, Food : Malthusian catastrophe :: Money : No room for profit in an economy.
ufmace · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah there's a certain type of engineer mindset that loves the idea of optimizing things. But if you want to really optimize something, you have to carefully account for every single possible factor, situation, and use-case. Miss anything, and it's a much bigger disaster than saving 2% of whatever resource. It's rarely worth it.
Much better to treat the presumptions as a vague heuristic, make generous assumptions and add some slack, and call that good enough. Now there's probably enough slack to cover most of the edge cases you didn't think of, other things you based your original assumptions on changing under you, etc.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
There's a tricky problem here: as a user, the first thing you do upon discovering a new elevator, especially if you expect to be using it regularly, is to observe how it behaves and adjust your own expectations/behavior to it.
gpvos · · focus · HN ↗
razakel · · focus · HN ↗
mvkel · · focus · HN ↗