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I also make nerdy jokes/puns, and I had similar experiences with beneficial model steering that such puns create.

It's interesting how more loose/informal prompting achieves good results, there is some cultural understanding in the models from training. Once I asked the clanker to remove the gambiarras and puxadinhos that it wrote as part of an experiment, and it promptly fixed those.

They claimed the model was PhD-level, but they never mentioned the university the model graduated from... :)

I currently have a free trial AI Pro subscription that will run out next month.

If it weren't for the $10 GCP credit, I'd straight away cancel it. I don't see enough value in Gemini to justify the $20 subscription.

Where are you sourcing the API from?

I have zero quality issues on Z.ai Coding Plan and maki.sh as the coding agent, but I've seen many reports on 3rd party providers that they host heavily quantized versions of GLM models.

I imagine they're not spying for fun...

I feel the same. I feel Anthropics' raw models are excellent, but Claude Code's bloat make them lose some potential.

This and I very much miss reading the chain of thought. At least I have it on GLM-5.2.

Happy to disagree with you. There are many examples of the US using the state espionage machinery for private purposes. The extent of "private" is debatable given the US as a nation behaves more like a big corp.

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/nsa-spying-on-petro...

You can trade-off cable shielding for electronics power and corresponding heat to encode/decode stuff.

Ethernet is notoriously power hungry, but I bet you can use a phone cable and still get tens of Gb over a very short range.

And then there are the crappy devices that aren't compliant with USB PD and only charge with a USB-C to USB-A cable.

For me it depends, if I simply take the answer from the LLM it goes straight into the shortest memory neurons my brain has.

Now, if I go back and forth with the LLM to say, taking the language learning example, to explore the etymology of the word (which for me is far more interesting than the translation itself), then I learn a ton more.

I had a professor who polled the class if we preferred our exams to be open book or not. First year of undergrad.

The midterm was open book, he even shared the previous year's exams. The final, as expected, closed book, thank you very much.

Exactly! It got so easy nowadays to use AI to setup scenarios since the busy work of writing code/test harnesses and setting things up for the benchmark is done by the machine. Then throw away what does not work.

Some benchmark that would take weeks to plan, code and set up is now hours and days - the time is now spent on the benchmark itself, not on temporary code.

For me, them allowing API usage on coding plans so we can use any harness, and returning the full unabridged reasoning back are how they earned my trust.

Weird. I have seen it asking the harness to do `find ~ -type f | grep` to try and find my agent configuration .json file when I asked it to add a MCP server. Stupid, but they weren't sending the files back home. This was with older models though. Newer ones are a bit smarter than that.

Now, where are the people afraid of the Chinese AI companies, who claim they are going to copy their very precious code...?

How so?

I assume they can spy on anything, that's why I refuse to do any kind of BYOD that requires MDM enrollment. It's also one IT mistake away from wiping out my personal data from my own property.

Company's Outlook, Teams, MS Authenticator and Slack on my personal phone? Ehhhh fine.

The second IT requires a profile it's the second I'm uninstalling anything company related from my phone. They can give me a company phone, or I will only access work related things from their laptop.

Happened twice to me, one time I got a company phone, the other, computer only.

And then some colleagues even paid out-of-pocket to upgrade their Android phones once IT dictated their OS were out of support. No way.

My first phone that had a (rear) camera 20 years ago also had a chrome-plated mirror thing to help us take selfies. I guess nobody called them selfies then.

I guess point and shoot cameras also had those mirrors back then.

Glad to know that kids rediscovered camera selfies.

Nah, I live in a major city between two airports, under an airplane departure and a heli route. I can't really launch rockets or balloons from my home.

When I was at uni I didn't have the funds for this hobby unfortunately.

You can use a FPGA, like this 2013 project: http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPS/Main.htm

Or go old school (1991-1992): https://lea.hamradio.si/~s53mv/navsats/theory.html

So yeah, this regulation is absolutely an inconvenient measure.

That's why I said "inching towards", not that it already is.

See how people are being treated in ICE detention camps. See how protests are getting violent with law enforcement officers donning military gear. Your mass media is built for consumption and conformity, not reality. The fact that news channels can say whatever lies they want on commentary programs, washing their hands without any reprisal is telling. You don't need to censor the media if the media is already self-censoring and self-serving due to the fact that it is owned by oligarchs.

What outsiders see is history repeating itself.

And I'm definitely concerned that the US could revoke/not renew my visitor visa based on online posts like this one.

I've been to Beijing International Airport on a layover, and at least the Chinese are on your face about being surveilled. Giant cameras everywhere, to access wifi you had to scan your passport, the Great Firewall is a reality etc.

Meanwhile lots of my personal data is hosted in the US via Google and Apple and I have absolutely no doubt that if some American authority decided to trawl around my files they absolutely could if they follow the (American) due process.

Why do you think it's better that a country that turns its citizens into a pulp for criticizing the government, and censors most media to control its citizens' thoughts, reach SI before one that is democratically elected and in which you can generally criticize the government?

Which country are you referring to? As an outsider who is neither American or Chinese, day by day it seems like the US is inching towards the same path as the criticized one.

You can keep the radiators in place when using mini-split heat pumps..

Of course not, those are clearly scams. On marketplaces, no matter the country, caveat emptor, as always.

My problem with buying SSDs on AliE is with reasonably priced products that use NAND chips with no consideration for their quality grade. Vendors are not transparent.

NVMe SSDs are usually better in this regard, but SATA SSDs became a nightmare to purchase.

Solar panels + cooling + heating heat pump is the most logical combination as we are past the point of no return on global warming.

And there's no need to be like the Americans that cool down to 18°C when the outside is > 35°C: simply decreasing the indoor temperature to saner numbers like 26°C is enough, it's summer after all. Less energy usage and it is enough for the body to be happy.

Having cabled my apartment with Cat 6 definitely made me prefer fiber, it would have been a breeze instead of pulling thick cables from my office to other rooms. Cat 6 also shouldn’t be bent or you risk it going out of spec, and modern fiber nowadays have bend radius comparable to (or even smaller than) Cat 6.

I see how sloppy some FTTH installs are and they all work fine, and this is for light that travels for long distances.

The only advantage copper has is PoE.

With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative

American companies, you mean.

Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.

The problem with these drives is that you can't ensure the grade of the NAND chips. They could be A+ grade with great endurance but they could also be bottom of the barrel.

I had two KingSpec SSDs sourced from AliExpress that failed too soon: one used YMTC and the other used Intel chips. Both failed within 1 to 2 years.

I have another one which is 5 years old by now.

For me it works fine outside of afternoons Beijing time on weekdays.

Z.ai legacy Pro coding plan which will last me until the end of the year + maki.sh as the agent.

OpenCode works fine, i just find it very resource intensive for no good reason.