FlyingAvatar

Burning capacitor electrolyte

From watching his videos, he's an Apple guy for his personal devices, though his server infrastructure (and also the bulk of the devices he reviews and experiments with ) are Linux machines.

They are low earth orbit satellites. Generally, the lower the orbit, the faster they decay. You could also argue that this is a benefit in that they gain updated technology with each replacement.

1. I would login to my favorites daily. I ran my own BBS (using the Renegade BBS software) as a teenager, so would monitor that as well. I think I landed on QModem after using Telix.

2. I knew friends who used them but we had the RIBBS list (Rhode Island BBS List). What was amusing at the time (90s) is that despite Rhode Island being the smallest state, there were still "local long distance" calls that cost money to make, so you had to be aware of what numbers you were able to call for free.

3. "Boards" were the terms we used, the term "server" was not in use that I know of for BBS host machines (despite them being essentially servers). There were definitely more popular ones, but also ones that served specific niches (photography, gaming, role playing). One of the more popular ones in RI got shutdown for hosting pirated games. The pirate stuff was never visible to my account, though they did advertise having GB of files available. This amount of data was huge compared to the 120MB hard drive I had at the time.

4. The vibe was variable based on the BBS. My impression was that the early internet had a better vibe than BBSes, because they were relatively small and regional you mostly got the discussion that was happening in your own locale. National BBSes were certainly a thing as well as services like GEnie and CompuServe, but those weren't something I frequented.

5. Honestly, I didn't see a lot of programming discussion. I am sure it was there, but I wasn't seeking it out. From a technical standpoint, a lot of it was talking about the new hardware of the day and also discussing BBS operation and configuration.

I am a former Directory of Technology for small/medium business who has transitioned to freelance work three years ago.

Open to fractional CTO (particular interest in non-profits) roles, AI/LLM process integration and web/mobile app development projects.

  Location: Rhode Island, USA or REMOTE
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to Relocate: Mostly no, but possible for the right opportunity
  Technologies: Vue/Vite/Pinia, HTML/CSS/JS, Python, AWS (S3/Lambda/CloudFront/Dynamo/RDS)
                OpenAI/Anthropic APIs, Security/PCI audits and compliance 
  Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjbent/
  Email: gmail - andrew.bent

Disclaimer: I'm not the OP, and there are certainly places where using recursive type definitions is justified.

My interpretation of OP's point is that excessive complexity can be a "code smell" on its own. You want to use the solution to match the complexity of the job and both the team that is building it and the one that is likely to maintain it.

As amused as I am by the idea of a dev team being debased by the inelegance of basic bitch programming, the daily reality of the majority of software development in industry is "basic bitch" teams working on "basic bitch" problems. I would argue this is a significant reason why software development roles are so much at risk of being replaced by AI.

To me, it's similar to the choice one has as they improve their vocabulary. Knowing and using more esoteric words might allow adding nuance to ideas, but it also risks excluding others from understanding them or more wastefully can be used as intelligence signalling more than useful communication.

tldr: Complexity is important when it's required, but possibly detrimental when it's not.

I don't really buy the comparison. If you're really unlucky, you can get cancer from a "safe dose" of radiation.

Low exposures of both things are statistically less likely to hurt you than large doses. We pick a line to call "safe", but completely safety in either case is not guaranteed.

Agree that if the primary UI is voice, it will need to be the the multiple nines of success to avoid being frustrating.

Even so, I still frequently use Siri now despite it being much less successful than that.

Talking to an audio-enabled LLM is definitely "simpler" in terms of device interaction than navigating menus and such. Also having less GUI focus would feel simpler to me.

I find myself missing the experience of earlier iPhone where it didn't feel like I had so much crammed into my phone.

I can imagine using a device that I interact with primarily by talking with it, and the GUI is secondary or non-existent. For the bulk of what I use my phone for other than consuming video / doom-scrolling (which I could use much less of anyway), I think a voice interface would be preferable.

Initially "Apple Intelligence" was very exciting to think about, in that having a Siri that you could actually talk to would have a lot of possibilities, but we've seen essentially no progress in that direction.

Yeah, the convenience of pairing and switching is something I didn't think of.

It's pretty difficult to imagine.

Apple did a ton of work on the power efficiency of iOS on their own ARM chips for iPhone for a decade before introducing the M1.

Since iOS and macOS share the same code base (even when they were on different architectures) it makes much more sense to simplify to a single chip architecture that they already had major expertise with and total control over.

There would be little to no upside for cutting Intel in on it.

I have wondered this as well and my best guess is so two times can be diffed without converting them to an signed type. With 64-bit especially, the extra bit isn't buying you anything useful.

The vast majority of internet bandwidth is people streaming video. Shaving a few megs from a webpage load would be the tiniest drop in the bucket.

I am all for efficiency, but optimizing everywhere is a recipe for using up the resources to actually optimize where it matters.

I would have loved this in 1993. Not that I don't now, but I would have had a real use for it then.

https://github.com/stravu/crystal

This is still alpha, but I have been using it to handle the multi-agent worktree paradigm.

Just because unintended things aren't happening right now, doesn't mean they won't happen. We are in the honeymoon phase of this technology where mass exploitation isn't yet being attempted.

However, if you are familiar with Pliny the Liberator's work, essentially all modern models are easily jailbroken, such that the original prompt can be overridden. All it will take for your agent is to download a malicious payload, perhaps disguised as a relevant library or documentation for the task at hand, and it can be running whatever the attacker tells it.

An 'rm -rf /' would be a pretty mild outcome. The more likely one would be the attacker silently installs malware on your machine.

If you have a dependency that is simple and stable, it could appear unmaintained since it doesn't have a lot of recent commits, bug reports, comment history, etc.

If a library author wants to make their package "look" maintained for some reason, they could generate superfluous commits and open and close fake bug reports. This could be a "good" signal to the heuristic, but has no real world benefit or worse-case could be used to lend credibility to a package with known vulnerabilities.

It's a cover your ass statement. In most jurisdictions, giving legal advice without a license to practice law is illegal.

i.e. This is my opinion, take it as you will. If you want proper legal advice, you should be consulting a lawyer.

Bootstrapping with co-founders? I've had lawyers straight up tell me it's probably not worth hiring them to setup the LLC / operating agreement. Just DIY.

Getting outside investment, signing a high value contract, receiving threats of legal action? I would consult one immediately.

I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.

Looks cool. I wish there was an explainer video, I was not clear how I beat the first level and I didn't realize there was a move limit until I ran out on level two. If all the numbers at the top had labels, it would help.

Also would be cool if there were sounds. I don't know if that's just because I am playing on my Mac, but it feels like something is missing with all these lasers firing and blocks being destroyed that there is no audio.

I don't know if you're familiar with the company AllAdvantage but in 1999 they tried to pay people by the hour to have a banner ad displayed on their computer, up to some number of hours per week.

One of their problems was that paying ad viewers directly incentivizes fraud. There were many apps to make it 'look' like you were engaged, while you actually weren't.

Similarly, in Bill Gates' book "The Road Ahead", he proposed the idea of emails that come with money attached to them. (i.e. You are paid to open and read advertisement e-mails.) I don't know if this was realistically tried anywhere.

Fraud aside, I think it's hard to avoid falling into one of two boxes in paying people to watch ads:

1. They pay so little that it's not really worth anyone's time. 2. They pay enough to be interesting, but it means people will view ads for products just for the money and the effectiveness of the ads will be very low.

I think the industry has found that the ad "tax" (i.e. ads in the middle of content) is the model that actually works. And in this model the bulk of the ads' cost is paid to the content creator who is in theory providing a good enough audience for that particular advertiser, which is the actual value to the advertiser.

Ridiculous Fishing

I am curious as to your experience with this.

Over the years, I have administered a few dozen small to medium domains (depending on the domain 10s to 10,000s emails per month) and the only thing that has ever affected delivery is the reputation of the sending IP address of the mail server (and ensuring DKIM/SPF alignment in more recent years).

It's been quite sometime since I have heard the term "lamer", but I remember it being a ubiquitous insult in the BBS scene in the early to mid 90s.

Yes, the Agent mode is terrible. Have you tried using the Ask mode instead?

The Sonnet 3.7 'Agent' implementation in Cursor is terrible. It takes 10x longer to produce a worse response. I don't understand if this is a cost saving measure to reduce token count, but it is really bad.

Thankfully, switching to Sonnet 3.7 in 'Ask' mode has been essentially fine and is comparable to how Sonnet 3.5 performed for me.

Played again this week. I think the reason I missed the counters before is that they aren't adjacent to the play field and on a wide screen device, they are "way off in the distance", so to speak.

Cool, I will keep an eye on this.

You have two requirements that are at odds:

* Macbook is not an option

* Want to be able to mess around with some local LLMs.

Your choices for a Window laptop that can run a local LLM is either to get a large amount of system RAM and have it be abysmally slow, or to run a very tiny model on a discrete GPU which will (a) not be very good due to its small size and high quantization and (b) evaporate your battery life.

If you want to run local LLMs on a laptop and actually have them be useful, a Mac is currently the only real choice.

That said, with the money you save buying a Linux laptop instead, you can pay for a lot of tokens for whatever hosted LLM you want and it will be higher quality than what you could potentially run locally on a Mac.

I realize now this is a streak counter not a number of lives, which I think is even less intuitive.

Having lives, coins and streak counters outside the play area I think would be better.