We can live in fear or we can live in solidarity, seeking to watch over one another and holding them to account. If no one stands up they win. There are worse causes to spend the balance of one's days on if that's the cost.

Things don't automatically get better in life. You have to work to improve them. You can be grateful for the things in your life and still pursue the things that fulfill you. But if you're just going through the motions without having something you're working toward, you're never going to stop going through the motions.

Living takes money, as you say, but the things worth doing don't always have a cost. When I was young I could have a great day counting trees and swimming in lakes. I could wander the neighborhood. I could ride a bike — not to anywhere, just ride it. You can draw, paint, play guitar, sing, write, read. Christ, I have money and I look around and just see I've pissed it away on stupid consumer bullshit that doesn't make me happy at all, and takes more effort ultimately that the old cheap ways. I have a stupid $1500 robot vacuum that constantly gets jammed up or needs new rollers or censors or to be emptied, to be filled.... fuck it'd be easier to just use a broom and mop.

Even if I do make friends what do u do with friends? You just joke around with them or get a cup of tea.

Is that so bad? I miss having friends. I love my wife and kids and my extending family but I miss just fucking around with friends most weekends.

How can I get anything anyway that is outside my own comprehension.

It's a bunch of bullshit, but some folks thrive on having something like religion to focus their life around. Just don't go thinking it makes you or anyone special to be religious. But when it is focused on moving forward and being selfless, it can offer people a path to bettering themselves. Like, don't get me wrong, I think it's terrible and do not recommend religion, but some folks find it fulfilling is all.

When I try to think of my reason for living

If someone told you your reason for being alive, what would you do with that? Resent it because it's not what you would choose? Embrace the path you never had a say in? Would you consider yourself a failure if you didn't achieve it? Would you consider yourself worthy and righteous if you did?

You get to choose what your calling is. You get to define success. You get to change your mind. No one is going to tell you why you are here (well they might in religion, but they are wrong). You steer your life in the direction of things you think are important.

wish I was good at music and could make a song out of my feelings

Wishing will never make you good at anything. On the other hand, no one can stop you from worrying a song, a poem, a verse that holds meaning for you.

rich charismatic kids get all

Always has been so. So what? You aren't them and you'll find gifts you've been given that they never were.

If none of it makes sense now, someday it will. But that doesn't mean wait. It means get out there and keep doing with a goal in mind. Big or small. It's best to start small. And see what you can do.

Anyhow, good luck.

I voted against these fuckers and I can't wait to do it again. And if they want, I will tell them to their face how absolutely fucked they can get.

I've seen it. My understanding is that due to catastrophic loss of blood pressure, he was instantly unconscious. But maybe that's just a nice lie.

I'm glad he's dead, and the world is a brighter place for his lack. I only wish he'd been conscious a while to feel the doom weighing upon him.

That's the level of vitriol I would love to have read. Right-wingers got off easy.

Oh no — today is Monday already? Shit.

Trump promoted the benefits of injecting bleach, and there was no mass casualty event. It seems like even MAGA choose to think for themselves in some cases.

You don't compromise with a fascist. You can only become compromised by a fascist.

128 GB of unified memory

I thought I was asking a lot when work asked me to pick a computer (with no guidelines) and I asked for a 36GB MacBook and justified it by saying I needed to run local models to save money. I didn't ask for nearly enough. To its credit it does run local models fast, but it's very limited in context window. It starts slowing down long before hitting context sizes I hit in frontier models.

I feel very fortunate to be in software development. I genuinely enjoy my job. Not the jobby parts of it, but the actually problem solving and puzzle solving and trying to make something the best I can within the box I'm given to play in.

I don't know if I could handle another job, though one summer I loaded boxes on a truck and while it was physically demanding, I daydreamed about computers while I was doing it and left mentally refreshed even after ten hour days and had the energy to work on my passions. But that doesn't pay like software does.

Thank you for the reminder to take my meds.

It can be the difference between a water heater lasting 7 years and lasting 30.

Qwen is really good. For coding, it's the best local model I've found.

64k context is nowhere near enough. I try to remember to compact Claude when I hit 200k but sometimes when I'm not paying attention I can hit 600k. Yeah I've written little Python scripts on my machine using qwen, but some of my work projects have 80k tokens of just documentation.

This isn't WW3. This is what the 80's was. Iran v Iraq, the troubles in Ireland, Russia vs Afghanistan, Falklands, India v Pakistan, Lebanon, Cuba, Nicaragua. This is an ordinary amount of regional conflicts, at least measured within my lifetime of 50+ years.

I'm not part of the market for leasing private jets. Is that a lot of trips? Or like... 1?

I mean it doesn't matter to me in any way but is that like... 1 trip or 10 trips or 50 trips?

I use Claude all the time at work. It is good. But it makes massive mistakes, it misses tests, it confidently says something it screwed up will be fixed by something that certainly isn't the right way to fix the problem.

I recently explained to a colleague: if you can use 1 AIU (arbitrary quantity of ai usage) and get 10% productivity bump, that doesn't mean 5 AIU gets you 50% and 10 doubles your speed. The AI will do and say promising things, make you believe it's on the verge of solving the problems, but it never quite arrives. There's always one more problem and if you're very lucky the AI will find it itself, but most likely it will be found when you pass it on to another person and it's completely useless.

Let me put it this way: in addition to development, I use Claude to help with production support issues. It wrote some scripts I didn't have time to and it pulls logs and data from multiple systems — honestly it works great and has saved me so much time. But I'm constantly in meetings and so I set Claude to investigate an incident so I can focus on my meeting and return when I have time, and it gets RCA wrong well over 50% of the time.

If it is so bad at RCA, how do you imagine it is fixing the bugs in the code it finds? Badly. It misunderstands the cause of problems, and so it fixes the wrong things until it has cobbled together the creakiest of code that passes the test. In fact I think AI is far worse at fixing code than it is at writing it in the first place.

I'm not anti AI. I'm trying to find ways to make it effective. And my teams are seeing 20-30% productivity gains - I think because they are skeptical about AI rather than trusting. But it has to be used appropriately, and everywhere I look, even within my own company, people are trying to do too much with it and creating huge problems I have to sort through.

Oh for sure. Agents often use under 30k tokens, but the orchestrator needs to have enough information to instruct the agents so it typically is a fair bit bigger in context. Agents tend to save you money on frontier models, but I'm skeptical about local LLMs. I suppose if you aren't pressed for time it's probably just fine. I haven't played that much with it because anything big enough to bother with agents I typically feel is too big for local anyway. But I'm sure others have experimented more on that front than I have.

Yeah so I've been working with Claude on that. Typically it greps to find what it's looking for and that can be a lot of tokens. So I created something halfway between rag and that (semantic search), and overall it lowers token usage a bit, but even if it optimistically reduces tokens 20%, Claude is hungry for docs.

There is automatic compaction, but I typically want to control that myself when I change focus (if I don't just /clear it). Still I'd say almost all of the stuff I do runs north of 100k tokens.

Rock Me Amadeus is a song about how classical music was the modern rock of its day. It's now a classic.