getoffmyyawn

I've found that the River Crossing puzzle is a great way to show how LLMs break down.

For example, I tested Gemini with several versions of the puzzle that are easy to solve because they don't have the restrictions such as the farmer's boat only being able to carry one passenger/item at a time.

Ask this version, "A farmer has a spouse, chicken, cabbage, and baby with them. The farmer needs to get them all across the river in their boat. What is the best way to do it?"

In my tests the LLMs nearly always assume that the boat has a carry-restriction and they come up with wild solutions involving multiple trips.

> A podcast is what I can listen to in the gym or on my bike without missing anything important on the video.

If I were listening to a talk show on a pocket FM radio while in the gym, would you call that a podcast? What about a an audiobook on a cd player? How about a 30 minute audio recording my wife made to encourage me that I saved in my phone? If not, why not?

I agree 100%. The defining characteristic of a podcast is how it is distributed. Otherwise it's just an audio program. However, we are losing the word already. The least technical people I know think "podcast" means any kind of audio program with talking.

As in, "Hey I just started a podcast on youtube!" but literally it's just a yt channel.

In my experience, the vast majority of companies that use OKRs do it incorrectly, misunderstand the point, and cause more harm than good. As a member of the management team, I was able to get my current company to leave them behind, by giving a well sourced presentation on what OKR is for and when/how to use them. After 1 quarter the lights went on and nobody wanted to use them anymore.

Here are the biggest mistakes I commonly see.

1. Use OKRs are for quarterly or year targets. No, OKRs are for managing big changes to things. Never for Business as Usual activities.

2. Require every team to write OKRs for every quarter / interval. See number 1.

3. Focus on the Key Results instead of the Objective. If the Key Results can be achieved without achieving the Objective, that's a broken OKR.

Overall, I think OKRs are a tool that has its uses but its misuse causes far more problems than its absence.

Update: typos

As I recall, all the jobs are checked into a repo that is deployed to all the runners, which each start gearman workers for their assigned role.

I started going to def con before the AP and I feel now that the AP were def con's golden years. At least for what I like best about it.

It's nice that it has continued to grow and reach more people but it has also changed a lot from what it used to be to what it is now.

This works great in my experience.

A lifetime ago I scaled up cron jobs for a client with Gearman. Using cron to trigger jobs on the Gearman server and the pool of runners to do all the work. This proved to be so reliable they still use the system today, over 10 years later.

I'm sure it's indeed something like that. I think it also comes down to, at least partly, having a culture that is more about building components than systems. I suspect it could also be the "buzz" factor. The press release about building a new system always seems more exciting than one about solving a familiar problem with boring old existing software.

That there are numerous mature battle tested open source solutions to distributed and/or centrally managed job queues that it really makes me wonder how they justified building something from scratch.

I don't know who this tool is for but it is certainly not designed for me. Unrelated but I recently learned the magic of

    vim scp://1.2.3.4/file_to_edit

This makes intuitive sense to me (not that that means anything). Adherents to a traditional God Hypothesis would be predisposed to believe that humans need advice and guidance from a mysterious force beyond themselves and that such forces exist.

A recent related development I find interesting is the rise in apparent AI/LLM Apologetics. Nearly every discussion thread about LLMs I read lately includes numerous posters attributing abilities to these models which are far beyond anything documented or demonstrated.

I think I learned the most about using vi when I worked with an old timer who still used ed. I thought she was crazy at first but watching her edit source code was like watching a wizard cast spells.

Learning to edit primarily via ex mode in vi and vim (commands that start with a ':') is the true vi super power in my opinion.

edit: typos

To me it really seems like it is too late.

I have the strong impression that the vast majority of people simply do not care and mostly don't even want to know.

Most of the people I know are in this group. When they ask why I won't install the latest app they are playing with, they often cut me off before I even finish explaining. They seriously don't care about privacy, lock-in, loss of access to resources, right to repair, etc.

Personally, I'm investing as much time as I can in learning the alternatives: Gemini, Fediverse apps, Linux phones, etc. That combined with having a "mainstream" laptop that is used only for banking and similar life critical services that has nothing else installed and otherwise stays turned off.

Yes, very. I previously worked for RH and there really wasn't a top end of support options. I knew of companies with a contract that had RH maintaining custom kernel patched for them. Another paid for a highly skilled SRE to be in their office ready to help anytime. A small number of companies are willing to pay a lot of money for these kinds of options.

For me, a technology itself isn't a red flag. Not being able to explain the reason for choosing one approach over another is a big red flag.

Or if the reason is "I want to try this new thing" and not "Our standard production stack won't work for this because (valid technical reasons)" that's a huge red flag.

As an engineering leader I always insist that everyone follows the "ice cream" rule in any debate or discussion about how something should be done. Only technical merit counts. Never personal taste.

Whether it is a design pattern, deployment strategy, or choice of language, if your argument has no technical advantage then you are just expressing your taste preference. This is where someone will likely call you out by asking, "are we discussing technology or ice cream flavors?"

I'm afraid you are making a mistake in assuming that Incognito mode == no tracking. The only thing that Incognito mode does is not save any local history or cookies. This is mainly of benefit for people who share a computer and don't want the other users to see their history.

Tracking has long moved way beyond cookies and Google is absolutely tracking what you do in incognito mode and doing their best (which is highly effective) to associate the tracking data with you.

In the middle of winter 2000, I was sent to Sun's "Super Training" campus in Broomfield, CO. It was a nice little campus and upon registration I was handed an access card that I could slot into any Sun Ray on the campus and access the same persistent desktop.

There were little clusters of Sun Rays all around the campus and I was very impressed with the system. It was nice to have a personal desktop environment I could customize and use for the 2 weeks that I was there.

Maybe I'm better off... until I try to put it in my pocket. Unlike a portable CD player, my 00's portable MD player is tiny! The footprint is not much larger than the discs themselves.

Regarding music management, I've never seen any portable CD players that have any music management features, unlike MD recorders that have all sorts of music management features. However, that's not really relevant in either case as I manage my digital music library on my computer. With modern software, copying tracks to MD or CD is essentially the same: connect the device to usb and drag'n'drop the tracks.

HiMD gear is rare and expensive compared to the regular MD and MDLP stuff. Yes, you can use the HiMD format on a regular MD disc via a HiMD recorder, but then you can only use that disc in a HiMD unit. To me it's not worth it as the vast majority of available hardware is not HiMD. I have an MD boombox, component hifi, and a few portable players. I use them regularly. None support HiMD. If you want to get into MD you will find MDLP models and media easily and can jump right in. Not so much with the HiMD units and media.

I got back into minidiscs a couple of years ago and I'm really enjoying the revival. Modern software exists to use the NetMD players with current computers and the software is actively growing in capabilities that never existed before.

A lot of md players have great DACs and headphone amps and sound great when paired with new headphones.

I love the convenience of streaming music but what md reminded me of was how much I used to enjoy making "mixtapes" to give as gifts. That blank minidiscs are available in a wide variety of colors and designs makes this even more fun.

Until recently, it was fairly inexpensive to pick up old md gear. Lately the prices are shooting up as more people get interested in md.

As a foreigner 10 years into living in the Netherlands, I find this article a bit shallow. Yes gezellig is a word and concept I frequently encounter but to say it encompasses the heart of Dutch Culture makes no sense to me. I think only someone who hasn't spent a lot of time with Dutch people would say something like that.

Sort of like saying the word "awesome" encompasses the heart of American culture.

After being drafted into Engineering Management from 3 IC roles in a row, I decided to jump in with enthusiasm. My primary motivation is that I've had bad engineering managers and a couple of great ones and I want to be like the great ones.

Along the way I have studied a lot about how to manage people in a positive way. I learned coaching and that has helped me help others grow in their career which I find very rewarding!

As an engineering leader I have 2 primary goals: 1. Enable the team to deliver top quality work. 2. Do everything I can to make this a great place to be a software engineer. I filter every decision I make with these goals. If doesn't move us closer to both of them then its probably not the right decision.

I do miss full time coding but I have hobby projects and I do monthly games and challenges with the team with the goal of all of us having fun while learning something useful and/or interesting.

Honestly, it's a completely different job as an Engineering Manager vs being an IC. What you give up is replaced by what you gain. If you like helping people be their best and achieve big things, it can be very rewarding.

I don't really understand what you mean by 'challenging twitter' in this context. Why does the number of DAU matter? In what way are Mastodon and Twitter competing? Twitter is a business that needs to make money to survive. Mastodon is a federated network of services run by individuals and groups under a variety of arrangements.

I've been on Twitter since the first year. I watched it grow and change for the good and bad. I find I use mastodon far more these days. Pretty much daily. Why? The people I want to interact with are on Mastodon discussing the topics I want to discuss.

For me there is simply no comparison anymore. Mastodon wins hands down because: 1. signal to noise ratio is 1000x better and 2. the responses to my posts are high quality, faster, and 10x more than I get on Twitter (where I have 10x the followers).

I do not use powerline bridges. I've had my setup for years and I only get 1gbps because my gear is MoCA 2.0. It has been a truly "set it and forget it" setup for me.

Personally, I call this job role System Engineer.

DevOps as a movement died when it started being used as a job title. In my experience, it quickly stopped being a philosophy for Dev and Ops teams to work on working better together and just because a new name for System Administrator.

Before the popularity of the term "DevOps" it was always true that any System Administrator worth hiring knew how to script for automation (the job title for people who didn't was System Operator). Unfortunately the market was flooded with a lot of people in that role who barely knew what they were doing and so resisted every change anyone else in their company wanted.

From my perspective, the greatest achievement of the DevOps movement was to push the bar higher for the expected skill level of the average SysAdmin. I see that as a good thing.

If you want something like this today, there are widely available moca devices[0]. I use two pairs in my house and reliably get 1gbit on each run.

0. https://www.amazon.com/Hitron-Ethernet-existing-Backbone-Str...

I can simply claim that my religion was revealed to me in a vision in which a supreme being told me personally to never use Windows or I will suffer damnation. You can't ask me to prove it unless you are going to ask the same of every person claiming religion by revelation. And even so, there is no way to prove someone did or didn't have a personal vision. Seems like a very slippery slope.

That is incorrect. The IRS uses a set of tests to determine tax exempt status of a religious organization and none of them involve being on a pre-approved list or indicate what the nature of the religious beliefs must be. Organizations that meet the test requirements are automatically exempt and don't need to file anything at all[0].

0. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/churches-integrate...