manapause

It depends what your goals are and what you are using it for. This space is fluid and my answer last week would be different than my answer today! That said there’s no substitute for hard work, here are some resource to get you up to up to speed:

https://carteakey.dev/blog/local-inference/local-llm-optimiz...

https://botmonster.com/ai/self-hosted-ai-agent-frameworks-20...

Personally I find myself swapping models depending if I am engaged in “trad-development” vs building agentic probes or apps involving imagery. Tailscale the LLM to your deployments and ta-da!

What about at the device level?

“You must be this tall to ride this ride”

“ you must be 18 to own an iPhone 18+ “

I apologize for the drive-by question, and I appreciate your takes!

Can confirm, my experience in “loop engineering” was “this is neat” for 45 minutes until a daily ration of tokens was evaporated. The quadratic cost trap is prohibitive to experimentation.

As a localLLM evangelist, I am hopeful this will bring more attention to the joys of rolling your own sovereign AI.

The irony in AI triggering societal collapse due to gross economic malfeasance is just fun to think about.

If AI was around in the early 2000s Countrywide.ai would have been a thing.

The more sensational the headline the less I believe that the authors were present in technology 15-20+ years ago. People forget that Reddit used to be 2 parts programmer-humor 1 part snuff.

Show me an abliterated frontier model that is able to breakthrough the surrounding supporting models and actually hold state to produce contraband and I’ll gladly supply my personal image making making a silly face in a compromising position if it wouldn’t make the testers feel better.

Do they need to be tested like this? Yes. But it would take the carbon footprint of a commuter air terminal and the land rights of am small town in the high Sierras …. all converted settlers of Catan style into tokens …. just to lobotomize a fine tuned model to get close.

That said I appreciate the work you’re doing

20 or so years ago while working for a Startup in the Home-Health EMR Space - it was my job to develop and integrate the proper processing of incoming visit forms. After an outage, I performed an audit of our incoming forms and noticed some anomalies in the billing patterns of doctors belonging to one clinic. In other words, these doctors either had the highest concentration of extremely sick patients - or they were committing Medicare fraud.

At the end of the post mortum with the CMO, as I was getting ready to leave I decided to bring this to his attention. I’ll never forget the change of mood preceding the dressing down I received: “do not ever put yourself in a position to make clinical decisions.”

3 months later, the charting anomalies were so egregious that the CMO’s spot-checks led him to sit the medical director of that physicians clinic down for a chat. They were good doctors, but they were over-billing. A year and a half later their practice goes under pre-payment review, and four years after I wrote a script that noticed an anomaly - the head MD of the practice was sent to prison for 4 years after collecting millions of dollars in over-billed house calls.

I loved working in healthcare, and I still miss it to this day. I don’t know where I am going with this, but right now I believe there is a diagnostic technology out there that is being used in veterinary science or piloted in some other country that could save a statistic level of lives …. However, due to the fact that doctors practice medicine and we don’t, as a group they act as defacto gate-keepers (which they are entitled to be as clinicians), the best thing you can do is to incentivize them with money (like Obama did) with Medicare bonuses for using an EMR that logged CCRs and alerted the doc if the patient didn’t have certain vaccine information in the elderly.

If the first guy to wash his hands was seen as a lunatic, the first geriatric practitioner to give over an iota of their clinical practice to automate Rx dispersal while navigating poly pharmacology concerns will go to jail for a narcotics crimes or will be labeled to heretic until Medicare pays them all for it.

If your name is John Smith, and you prompt Gemini to act as a robust OSINT tool, you will experience the vicissitudes of Chaps firsthand as the tool normalizations of vector space yields an answer that will not only never get close to identifying you because it has lumped several John Smiths together like asking a dog to fetch your shoes and it comes back with a Footlocker in its mouth.

It’s a good question. That said unless there are compliance or fallback concerns i would prefer a service that burns my data on departure.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but from my experience in this space in order for a model to exercise judgment it must force itself to operate in a strict chain of thought mode. Since all LLMs are predictive creatures, I started to care a lot more about my judgment settings, the transparency of them, and the presence of a judgment loop in either the development or functionality of an application built these days.

Not exactly sure where I’m going with this, but my work with creating penetesting tools for LLMs, the way that I use judgment is critical to the core functionality of the application. I agree with your concern and I will just say that the more time I spent concerned with chain of though where now I will make multiple versions of the same app using a different judge set a different “temperaments” and I found it to be incredibly enlightening as to the diversity of applications and approaches that it creates.

  Even using BMAD or superpowers, I can make five versions of an app without judges involved and I feel like I’m just making the same app five times because the API begins to coalesce around the business problem you want to solve. The vicissitudes of prediction tools always want to take the safest bet for the greater good, but with the judge involved we can make the agent force itself to actually be hostile about what exactly we’re trying to do, which has produced interesting and fun results.

As an amateur sauna evangelist, I can say my experience sauna usage 1-2 times a week has greatly improved my life and quality of sleep!

If you give 100 monkeys 100 guns and room full of building materials, how long will it take before they build a house?

How long will it take before they rob a bank?

If they do either of those things will the results have been intentional from the simian’s POV?

Not notepad++! (Opens WhatsApp) OpenClawd express my discontent across all my channels and draft an email to send to IT tomorrow morning. Also turn off the lights off and go to bed. (Somewhere in china, all the lights go out)

There is capital “A” Active Listening, which is in a family of behavior modification techniques in which the interviewer can follow the aforementioned scripts to increase engagement…

And lowercase active listening, IMHO is genuinely being interested in the experiences of the person talking that your line of questioning disarms the subject into sharing stories that add personal, “cultural” context to their choices which could be considered taboo.

The tactic become normalized amongst the extremes of both sides. “ 5% of the wizards casting 85% of the spells.”

Beautifully said. I believe wholeheartedly that in real life, disagreements between two people hinge on an ability to disarm each other through charm and disposition. The less you know someone, and the more they appear to earnestly try to understand you - becoming heated and firing phasers just feels unbecoming; why would I perpetuate personal loneliness or ennui in a moment that is genuinely devoid of it?

In short, death by acquisition by dice.com

This is a perfect recipe!

I’ve found the best strategies are the ones you can abandon. clearly defined tactics and an appropriate application of people and resources require a quarterback with an ability to audible.

It’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose, it’s when people get offended about something they are wrong about that creates a tolerance for Pyrrhic victories.

My first job out of college I was hired to follow around an MSP/IT consultant and learn what he did, specifically to cut the expense of having a MCSA/network engineer coming in weekly for basic desktop support.

I met him in the server closet and asked “hey, I’m new here - do you mind if I look over your shoulder?” He turned around and smiled, “if you are here to help, then you should sit down and I’ll walk you through setting up Exchange mailboxes for these doctors.” Before he left, he walked me through a RAM upgrade and gave me his lucky red screwdriver “ you got this, just call me if you have any issues.”

Later in my career, I continue to learn lessons from this interaction; lately the lesson has been one of “don’t be awesome in a vacuum” - a little bit of encouragement to the new guy can go a long way to adding another person to your on-call rotation that you trust.

20 years later, I still have his screwdriver - and I bring it every time we have lunch every once in a while.

Life is too short to not let the people who make life enjoyable for us know so.

Work is work, that’s why they call it work.

That’s funny because I thought they captured it perfectly. Cults can be blissful places; the experience and friends I’ve made amidst the madness I’ve experienced in startups made me stronger in the end.

I rely on rsync because I want to keep critical system-backup tools small and portable without installing anything.

Recovery from addiction became so much more meaningful when you realize that failing at recovery is part of the process.

I was trying to keep a death grip on sobriety. The clenching and clawing while putting up appearances... life brings us sadness. sometimes at times of desperation, the only thing I have left is my reaction.

When I look back on my mistakes, it all feels insane; the pathology of feedback loop neurosis had me chasing tornados with a butterfly net. What would catching it do for me?

Recognize the stillness where you are _right now_ my friend, and we can sit here for awhile and watch those clouds join the others as they roll over the horizon.

Steampipes is amazing. It is a light in the darkness to anyone taking on enterprise compliance reporting. The growth of the platform laterally WRT plugins and features while somehow making cross-org/multi-account even easier for end-users on top of building a cloud-hosted solution for teams is a testament to everything in this article.

mixing paints, crafting your own brushes, and studying the genetic geometries of the human body Will turn some painters into artists.

As somebody else pointed out in this thread, The trick is to refine your training in real situations as quickly as possible. The SRE Padawan isn't there to watch, they are there to grill me as to why certain things aren't in my documentation.

they are there to help me eventually raise up the operational excellence of our team.

With the jr-sre by my side, Refuse to perform a task in a vacuum, or jump into meeting alone....their success is our victory (and probably my vacation.)

I think that this is a great starting point, but there is some fun nuances to teaching how to survive a shitstorm that are so rarely brought up. Communication protocols, database warming, orders of operations.

you can teach these things but until you get them wrong you risk not learning them.

TLDR: good but missing a Kobayashi Maru.

it comforts the disturbed, and disturbs the comforted

If your company is of type "enterprise" i.e. large enough to have a compliance department or security-conscious enough to go through a pre-sale vendor assessment, and you intend to "sync" users from LDAP/AD with the intent to use your AD user to log in, I strongly urge against hosting on their cloud platform. The LDAP Sync job pulls the password plaintext using the OpenLDAP protocol encrypts it with an APP_KEY they control, and stores that password in the Snipe-IT database. If you ever had an AD user who couldn't log into SnipeIT, then you "sync'd" users And it magically worked - chances are that user changed their password and the correct password needs to be re-acquired before the LDAP user-bind will be successful.

In our assessment we found that these APPKEYs are also included in the backup file - which makes the SnipeIT backup ZIP files a vector for exposing all users and passwords (as well as all encrypted fields data) because of a default setting by the framework's backup provider.

That said - if you are concerned about security, you will be on-prem or within your own cloud provider to begin with. The SnipeApp company offers an "enterprise" level support at a somewhat reasonable rate for big companies, and they were a great help assisting with our installation and integrating the SnipeIT API to import new devices and licenses automatically in a way that we can control from say a PO.

This password issue may not be a problem for you as I understand they now have connectors for SSO or another OAUTH provider. That and the fact that they asked us to share our backup via email during onboarding and they did not specify to keep the secrets out of the backup made our decision to go in-house. Still a good, scrappy product, and when we asked them if they had access to our company's passwords that was not disclosed, we didn't get a response. That's OK - and it was a good lesson for my team in evaluating an open source framework behind the product vis-a-vis "trust but verify."

Its always going to be a vector of our own partial design (and/or someone we are paying), a rogue backup source of truth that is ejected into the ether like atoms forming salts in an acid-base reaction.

"Magicians are wearing not just better, but fundamentally differently shaped lenses to the rest of us. And regardless of your skills and experience, it is likely that you are a magician to someone else."

----

something so beautiful

Deserves more than a poem

but this cage in My house

I won't never be home

I love you, being right

why do i make it so wrong

cut into my songbird

in search of the song

This is fantastic! Your bash-fu is strong, you bring great honor to our dojo.

This is so cool I dare say I am feeling inspired!

I had a friend who had their bank account cleaned out by a wire transfer of 200K in the same week he is trying to close on a house.

The bank executed on their promises of no disruption to his transfers; they told him he did not have to worry and the customer service was so terrific, he said he was going to stay with the bank.

"Did you ask if there were other accounts at the bank that had been accessed in this way?"

"A wire transfer to an international location went through with no red flags and 0 notifications?"

"Can you ask your security department to produce a report of their investigation into the matter?"

Nobody asks those questions.