tibbon

I just installed Steam on Ubuntu yesterday, and I'm impressed at the progress so far. A HUGE number of titles run flawlessly.

Soooo close, but I have a 4 floor house. Talk to me when it does stairs.

Now… why is Jira so painfully slow? Even changing the type of a ticket or moving it takes like 20 clicks and a minute

But when you hit that wall, it is hard to stop and convince people to use different patterns and systems. I've seen so many tables go from "it will only be a few thousand rows" to suddenly several TB and then people are looking confused when performance and db admin tasks get really difficult.

I'm working at a scale where almost every day I have to ask people "are you use you need to treat that as relational data? It doesn't seem relational"

For those able to contribute a bit monetarily, he's also got a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/textfiles

I love his podcast, and was able to back it for about a year.

I, too, love soldering. I've done it since I was around 6 years old (wood burning before that). It's what I do when I want to zone out and relax. I've found random people at Burning Man and camping events who needed help with electronics, and I was happy to spend my time with an iron helping out - I even carry a butane-powered one on my motorcycle for quick repairs in the field.

Right? Visicalc wasn't using anything that a terminal didn't offer.

Maybe I've just got deep scars from the 90's, where I'd wait 15-25 minutes sometimes to download a single mp3.

I have a FIOS connection here at home, and it seems entirely sufficient. Even AAA steam games, I hit 'download' and go grab a snack in the kitchen and it's done. My server does incremental backups to s3 every night, but its not like i'm sitting there watching it.

I download a new large model maybe once every other week. It takes a few seconds, maybe minutes. I don't really notice either way? 25x faster doesn't seem like it would make any difference.

I could imagine a leadership or viewpoint change in how they reported when/what was down.

I've seen so many times where Company A will complain that their vendors aren't accurate enough about uptime and how Company A notices first that their vendors are down, but then they themselves have a very laggy or inaccurate status page.

We want our vendors to be accurate to the minute on these, but many CTOs don't care to admit when they too have problems.

This feels a bit like when my friend Colin put out a challenge for people to get Windows XP running on the then-new Intel Macs.

I love this idea. I'd love a tiny full computer that I could dock onto other hardware and just carry around.

https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183700272/intel-ma...

My first real soldering project (aside from just making cables) was a x0xb0x TB-303 clone. I somehow built it with a $10 radioshack iron and nail-clippers as flush cutters in an un-air conditioned Boston studio apartment over a summer. Probably not the first deep electronics project, but somehow it worked!

I've used it with Claude Code for refactoring and helping write a really in depth D&D campaign. Using frontmatter, I can keep metadata about NPCs and characters synced across all files.

Fixes all the problems I've had about "In what order do I put this data" and flipping back and forth in a huge stack of papers.

Same. I lost data this way. It wasn't worth it. Happy to support Obsidian

That's a lot of PeDoFiles!

(But seriously, great work here!)

I was inspired by the work here, so I sat down with Claude to make something similar, for the purpose of being able to play Z-Machine (Infocom games, Inform 6/7 Z-code) and modern Inform 7 games with Glulx. So far I've tested it with Andrew Plotkin’s Hadean Lands.

Switchable backends, various output formats, etc.

In theory, I could also likely wire this up to get it playing MUDs, but I have some reservations about running that on anything except a private server.

My use case for this is to help test and evaluate Interactive Fiction in development, and you could even run it as a CI/CD process.

It's not perfect (so much Claude Coding of this), but it's an ok start for an hour on the couch: https://github.com/tibbon/gruebot

I'd have to check, but I wonder what pitch the song is in? Could have it just been sped up ever so slightly in mastering, or even just between tape playback from mixing to mastering?

I have to wonder if this is like Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz - viewers can imply all sorts of intent that is very unlikely to have been there originally. A small mistake or tweak in any layer of processing could have easily done this.

This has been driving me up a wall. I was seriously considering if I had just gotten 'old' or something. I've had every iPhone since the first one, and suddenly I feel like I'm typing with mittens on.

I’ve considered that too- particularly for riding Asia. I do wonder the logistics too of a foreigner buying a vehicle and getting all the paperwork in line, and selling it then; but it might still be easier and cheaper on the balance

I care a lot about the environment. It seems obvious that there is an impact, but it seems relatively small- something that if it wasn’t AI would be counted as a rounding error by many.

People keep raising AI’s environmental impact to me as a concern, and I’m open to learning more, but at this point it seems potentially even long term neutral if it really does insert the efficiencies to productivity that many claim it will.

For example: look up the co2 impacts of gas powered lawn equipment. By one number I found that in 2020 it released 30 million tons of co2 in the US alone. Yet, when this equipment was coming into popularity no one expressed the moral panic they are over AI.

I know people who will stomp around about how AI is bad, and then go use their gas powered leaf blower for a few hours.

I’ve been looking for a reasonable way to get me and my motorcycle to Europe and back (rentals of my bike are $300/day, and I want to ride off-road occasionally, which isn’t great for rentals). I’ve also always wanted to sail the ocean. This could be a win.

Agreed. They feel massively overpriced. Covid and government rebates had everyone using them as cash cows.

I installed a 24k btu one for my recording studio myself. Took me 3 hours. It’s a cheap Mr Cool one, but seems good enough for me and has been problem free. $1300 from Costco.

The quotes I got were $10-30k for one to five head units around my house. Nope!

If I’m going to spend that much I’m going to be looking into geothermal for heating

I don't backup my phone. The NSA does it for me!

Yup. I've got an M1 Pro from work, and while I'm looking forward to hopefully getting an M5 in December, I really don't know if it will be a significant increase in my daily tasks or enjoyment. I do have an M4 Pro Mini that's a bit snappier, but it isn't night and day difference.

Trial periods. Asking employees to do less in their first months.

Maybe not great mitigations, but that’s what I could come up with

Oh you’re also into M&A?

I got a Bambu P1S two years ago for Christmas as a gift. It's been fantastic. 98% of my prints have been successful.

They aren't the free open source dream machine, but it also works quite well and needs little messing with.

I've played with 3d printers back to the RepRap and Makerbots - but those always required so much work to get a successful print.

I haven't seen something clearly better in the price range.

I mean, I get it.

I'm highly capable of building some great things, but at my dayjob I'm filled to brim with things to do and a non-ending list of tasks in front of me.

I've built cool stuff before, and if given a little push and some support could probably come up with something useful - and I can implement much of it myself.

Put me in the room with cool people, throw out some conversation starters, shake it up and I'll come up with something.

Agreed. Give me a phone thick and durable enough that I don't feel the need to add a screen protector and case to it, or strap a battery to the back to make it last.

It seems they are often peeling away useful features, which then you have to replace - yielding a worse experience often.

Small screen, thick, durable, good battery. Would pay $

So... Sub-Etha?

I disagree. It's akin to security theatre. People who engage in it can think they've done the right things, when in reality, they might have created more vulnerabilities or now have a false sense of security.

Finding effective, actionable and safe methods is difficult - but that's the work we have to do.