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lee_ars

405 karma · joined April 20, 2013

Senior Technology Editor @ Ars Technica
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lee_ars··on 'I've applied for 300 jobs. My 25 years' experience is worthless'
> I'm based in Russia...

This would be an immediate disqualification for any tech job I can think of.

lee_ars··on PHP 8.2.35
PHP 8.5.4-0ubuntu1.5 (the fixed version for Ubuntu 26.04) has been downloadable for me via apt from security.ubuntu.com for about 30 minutes. Perhaps check to see that you're not using a different mirror?
lee_ars··on GridSnap – an open-source Divvy-style window snapper for macOS
I've been using Divvy for many years and am gutted that it seems to have been orphaned and won't be updated for apple silicon. I ended up switching a few months ago to Lasso, which does most of what I want. But I miss Divvy.

https://www.thelasso.app/

lee_ars··on What is going on with ceiling fans
> Where are you getting ceiling fans that don't squeak and/or hum? (Or perhaps, what are you doing to maintain them)

When I moved into my current home 22 years ago, I bought five Hunter ceiling fans from Home Depot and installed them in the bedrooms and living room. Each one cost maybe $100 or so. They've been used more or less daily since then (the one in the master bedroom runs at medium speed all night, every night), and they're still silent and wobble-free. Other than wiping dust off of the blades from time to time, I've done precisely nothing to them.

They don't have mobile apps (there was no such thing as a "mobile app" when I bought them) and they don't have remote controls, but they're pretty great.

lee_ars··on What is going on with ceiling fans
> LLMs write better than vast majority of people at this point.

The vast majority of people are not good prose writers. Nor are LLMs.

lee_ars··on I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for 5 years
My dude, you only need to put the registered trademark symbol after the first occurrence of the mark. You® don't® need® to® put® it® after® every® mention® of® Click®House®™™®™®™®™®™.
lee_ars··on Tyranny of Optionality
What in the blue fuck is going on with that awful, awful fade-in blur effect on the text? That's one of the worst things I think I've ever seen.
lee_ars··on California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law
Lawmakers—contemporary and otherwise—have in fact decided many many times that the state can deprive you of your life as punishment for certain crimes.
lee_ars··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
> Your right to push back on that...

Human test passed. AIs make giant flashy mistakes. They don't fuck up basic grammar.

lee_ars··on Stop Making TUIs
> Then why isn't it done more often?

Because it tends to require a lot of thought and effort along totally separate engineering pathways than most of the actual functional coding. Good UI design is not easy, and the skills to do it don't directly overlap with good coding skills. It's hard.

> I suspect part of the reason is that most gui frameworks are not really designed for making dense economical interfaces.

Don't blame the tooling for a broad failing of many developers. It's because constructing a genuinely dense and economical interface for most apps requires considerable time and effort, and frankly, most developers are crap at understanding how users other than themselves use applications. Those that aren't crap at it tend to have worked in large teams with dedicated UX people to help drag them away from their preconceptions.

lee_ars··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
I don't like assisting reddit's monetization/AI training machine by tying my browsing activity directly to an account identity. I would prefer to browse anonymously and make them work at least a little bit harder to compile my anonymous activity into a coherent single-user profile.

If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.

lee_ars··on New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
> I think you might want to download new anti-Texas talking points.

No need—the current ones are uploaded directly into my mailbox regularly by Randy Weber, my district rep.

lee_ars··on New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
Texas specifically has heavily politicized and demonized wind power, in spite of having massive successes with it prior to 2016 and being a leading producer of it. Solar isn't as bad, but is still seen as "leftist." The political landscape in TX is vastly more friendly to natural gas.

In other words, they are using gas turbines because the politicians are stupid.

lee_ars··on The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale
Sounds like a poster child for LXC containerization with Proxmox — all the host-level management of a non-ephemeral VM (including snapshots!), without the every-machine-has-its-own-kernel overhead.
lee_ars··on The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale
> You document what needs to be reverse proxied and give examples for caddy and nginx, repeatedly cursing at nginx for not having an if that’s useful.

Somebody hasn't read the docs and doesn't understand how nginx's "if" works, because it's fantastically useful.

lee_ars··on Web Security is Too Hard
You'd think, but nope, it def doesn't — the site's TLS cert is issued by Google Trust Services, which issues domain-validated certs via ACME, so no, the only thing the site owner had to do to get that certificate is demonstrate ownership of the `cloudflare.pay` domain. GTS is also one of the default CAs that Cloudflare's universal SSL uses, so that's also exactly what would show up for any Cloudflare-proxied site with TLS enabled.

The cert itself only has CN=cloudflare.pay. It lacks an org, an address, or any other identifying info. It's not OV/EV, so no details there, either.

The domain's whois is also devoid of identifying details:

https://rdap.nominet.uk/pay/domain/cloudflare.pay

Registered through 101domain, with nothing except a registrar abuse contact.

I mean, great that this is legit, but CF could have done a better job with making it actually _look_ legit. This looks sketchy as fuck.

edit - gawd, nevermind. they don't even have anything useful for cloudflare.com. Same GTS cert, redacted whois info. lol. how did we even get here.

lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
Definitely heard re: the python code, yeah—it seems fine to my limited ability to review, and the functionality is there, and at least organizationally the structure makes sense to me, but I can't speak to its sophistication or whether or not it's how a skilled human might approach the same set of tasks.

I imagine it's somewhat the same boiling rage I feel when I watch youtube videos with obviously AI-written scripts, or read obviously AI-created written content in any area. I can't code, but do write and edit professionally, and the lackadaisical approach many people take with the form and presentation of their written words can be pretty damn offensive. (The responses I hear when I raise these objections are more or less the same ones I raise re: coding, though — "Well, I can't write, and the LLM says what I want to say way better than I could ever say it!" and so on.)

So it goes, I guess, heh.

lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
> I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth...

FWIW, Conde has no input on my work. Conde is the machine that provides HR and legal and payroll. Ars is a more or less self-contained world and since I got kicked into management a few years back, my output is my own. I wrote this up because this is how the project unfolded; no one assigned it to me or said I needed to write a July story to make a quota. It was fun. I did the write-up because it felt like an Ars-y thing to write up.

Definitely heard re: wanting to stumble through things and see the warts, but I have to disagree on the "learning enough python to make this work would still have been a weekend project." That's simply not true—if it were, I would have done it.

But it's not like the project didn't require effort. I put in considerable time on the parts that weren't python coding and CAD. Planning out and setting up the systemd service and timers, packaging up the service to ensure the thing was running under a properly isolated service account context, writing the installer, setting up the deployment pipeline—I didn't want to do the usual lazy thing I see so often and just take a barely functional mess of conflicting dependencies and shove them into a docker container and say "Here, this works on my computer, your problem now."

But like I said elsewhere in the thread, at 48 I'm old enough and ossified enough that I've come to accept that coding is simply not a skill I've got in me, and cranking out even something relatively simple like this project is going to be impossible for me without help. I've tried, too—I've bootstrapped myself through code academies, tried DIY courses, thrown myself into code-adjacent weekend projects, and otherwise tried to get to some level of mastery past "hello world," and I just kinda....suck. I bounced off of coding 30 years ago in college, I've bounced off it professionally for anything more than simple bash scripting, and I've bounced off of it in hobbies. I don't know if it's that my english major brain just doesn't do well in chopping problems down into small enough chunks or what—but I know after a lifetime that it's something I'm never going to be able to do.

That and bowling. Never scored over 100 in a game in my life, and likely at this point never will. Some things are just beyond my reach.

lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
Nice!! Excellent job. I like the idea of using one of the side dots to show NTP sync status, too.
lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
Asked and answered in the article comments, but briefly, I don't keep my phone in the bedroom at night, so no.
lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
> Then I think this is a trap to get some kind of proprietary app onto your phone.

This was my thinking as well, and why I rejected the idea. I'm not installing some rando company's information-harvesting data-selling garbage app on my phone to do something that the clock should do itself.

lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
Did you peek at the project's repo? The Ars piece is more of a narrative write-up; the repo has the step-by-step runbooks that I tried to ensure were beginner-friendly.
lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
Look at it this way: LLMs are trained, among other things, on quality professional prose. I've been writing for Ars for almost 14 years at this point.

I don't sound like LLMs. LLMs sound like _me,_ lol.

lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
nope. i was using em-dashes and semicolons before they were cool.
lee_ars··on I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated
To be fair, I did the research, the BOM, the systemd service and timers, the packaging, most of the installer, and the deployment pipeline myself. It's just the python and the Fusion modeling I needed LLM help with. Coding beyond bash scripting is just not something I'm good at, and at 48, I've kind of accepted that it's not ever going to be no matter how hard I try.
lee_ars··on Making ASCII Art in Vim
True terminal art connoisseurs are still using their registered copies of TheDraw from 1991:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw

lee_ars··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
OP, why mess with acme.sh's cron schedule with your own cron job that calls its cron job? You might instead consider running acme.sh again with the "--install-cert" flag, coupled with its "--reloadcmd" flag, in order to automatically have it do the cert+key copying and nginx reloading for you when it renews:

acme.sh --install-cert -d grafana.tuxnet.dev --key-file /etc/ssl/private/grafana.tuxnet.dev.key --fullchain-file /etc/ssl/certs/grafana.tuxnet.dev.crt --reloadcmd "systemctl reload nginx"

Then you can ditch your custom cron and let acme handle everything on its own, as intended.

lee_ars··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
The tweet you link shows "Qwen 3.6 35b NVFP4 - 256k ctx, 110 tok/s", but I'm getting only half that, around 50 tok/sec, on a DGX Spark with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 (via vLLM) plus speculative decode w/EAGLE3. I'd be ecstatic to see 110 tok/sec and I wish they had some more sourcing for the exact config, because it's double what I'm getting.

edit - after actually reading the tweets (had to use xcancel) and visiting the source git repo, switching to MTP for speculative decode makes things a hell of a lot faster, and the abliterated model plus dflash makes it even faster! I'm now seeing 70-90 tok/sec for most stuff. I like!

lee_ars··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I'm currently fiddling with a DGX Spark and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (specifically Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 under vLLM, with EAGLE3 speculative decoding via eagle3-dogacel-vllm), and it's pretty okay in terms of smarts. The speed is relatively usable at about 50 tok/sec with a 256k context window, and it's definitely smart enough to one-shot some basic coding tasks. I had it doing reverse engineering/disassembly of some ancient MS-DOS assembly language games from the 80s and it handled the task well and produced good outputs.

But it's also really easy to trip up. I fed it some of my Ars pieces and asked it to analyze themes and composition, and it got into a looping argument with me over how it was unable to analyze "my" writing because "the user cannot be the article author, the user is the user, the user did not write the article, the article author wrote the article." I was utterly unable to convince it that I was in fact me.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B hums along at about 50GB of RAM used with --gpu-memory-utilization=0.42. I haven't tried Qwen3.6-27B (I'd likely grab Qwen3.6-27B-FP8, I think), but I'm curious to see if it makes much of a difference.

lee_ars··on Minecraft: Java Edition 26.2, the first version with Vulkan 1.2
> ...the game is utterly fucked with insane bugs atm

As someone who's been playing since alpha 1.2.0 starting back in october 2010, there has never been a moment in minecraft's entire history where the game hasn't been utterly fucked with insane bugs. This is status quo.

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