421–430 of 446 posts
My home office gets up to about 1500ppm of CO2 by the end of the workday, which explains a lot about why I often feel exhausted after the end of a long, uninterrupted session in there (especially when I’m on back to back zoom calls). I now have several plants in there that are supposed to be especially good at sucking up CO2, and my sensor reports that the current level is slightly below atmospheric ambient CO2 level…
I have started exploring Seneca/stoicism again. Prompted partly by a recent submission here, partly by personal reasons. Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me. I have read Letters from a stoic a number of times before and my copy is filled with highlights, but this time I think I will try to limit myself to one or two letters a day and…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a few contemporary takes and tries to connect statistics into stoicism.
I've learned that being truthful in your resume as a SWE doesn't work anymore. I've had nearly 0 response rate to my applications, even if I was nearly a perfect match. Dude that we fired a while ago for being abysmally bad and non-productive gets interviews, raises and just got into ycombinator backed company by making up 75% of his resume(which I saw). We need a reset, this is getting ridiculous.
Same general experience. I have seen friends and former coworkers who I know are mediocre devs but good at talking themselves up get placed multiple times this year. I've secured a single interview, company seemed like a great fit. System level Go apps, my bread and butter. No longer have to split my time with frontend? The dream. On round 2 their CTO basically shut me down 2 minutes in saying they're unwilling to do…
It wasn't literally today, but about 2 days ago I discovered the -H (and --host) arguments to systemctl. These allow you to pass a hostname of a remote server, so you can use systemctl to manage systemd services on remote machines. It layers over ssh, so the cleanest way to do it is to have passwordless ssh with certificates set up to the remote host. If you do, running systemctl commands remotely is totally seamless…
For fun look at telefork(2)
https://thume.ca/2020/04/18/telefork-forking-a-process-onto-...
We've recently been without water in the UK for 5 days (water company failings). I've come to appreciate mains water and how its utility is hard felt by omission for toilets, washing & cleaning. Immensely grateful to have it back now.
I'm doing PHP for the first time in years. I needed a function that returns the date of last week's Monday. Turns out PHP has a funky date querying language. I can just do: $today->modify('monday last week'). Makes me happy.
Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250215223917/https://solar.low...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was the killer app for personal computers as well. From Lotus123 to my family's small business in a tiny country that could only afford a computer in 92 for the business.
Indeed. That's why I am doubtful about LLMs, they just aren't doing something particularly well or solving a basic problem. No one in their right mind would let an LLM do their accounting. Just today I was looking something up and that AI summary was just so wrong. How can I trust it with anything important?
Geometry is more or less floating point arithmetic and trigonometry.
LLMs are very lossy text compression. Just like JPEG and MP3 it helps with distilling down the text of the entire Internet in some way.
We can even get reddit recommendations for putting glue onto pizza.
I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector,…
I’ve been slowing crunching through Math for Deep Learning, so spent a fair amount of time looking at Hessian matrices + second order optimisation. I’ve been slowly reading this book for a year, so stopping to do most of the math by hand each time. One chapter to go! Then I was sick all last week, so ended up down a rabbit hole about the current card collecting bubble (right word?). Super interesting.
The theoretical results sometime look at the second order derivative.