raffraffraff

Have you tried turning it off and then on again?

> We're no longer pursuing restarts as a path to remediation.

Oh you have

In America?

I have 25 panels highly efficient panels on a small house. "Total overkill", even according to the installer who was happily taking my money. For two months in the summer I was generating 4x to 5x what I needed. To store that surplus I would fill five 9kwh batteries PER DAY. These aren't shitty lead-acid or NiCad, they're brand new LiFePo4, and are surprisingly compact. But using them to store two months of surplus would cost me half a million euros and take up most of my yard with 300 batteries.

The other question (a more important one) is how much stored power I would actually need for the winter. Which points to your comment "you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026". Yes I absolutely do. My worst performing solar day recently was 5.85kwh on the 27th of August (a bad day, but not a short winter day). Two days in a row like that, and I'd be relying on some external "steady state" power source, like my old nuclear power plant at the end of the garden. (The very next day I generated 30kwh, but the whole point is that it's not economical for me store enough surplus for two consecutive shit days in August, never mind the whole winter).

I don't know what my November through to February average will be, or for much of the spring/autumn I'll be "averaging" a surplus. But I guess that maybe €300,000 of batteries in my up yard would hold enough surplus to get me through the winter months? The solar could certainly fill them. Solar isn't the problem.

I just can't imagine how this is supposed to scale.

Especially now that old.reddit.com requires a login. That's me done with Reddit!

Who currently makes a decent haptic trackpad? I have an Asus with gorgeous OLED screen, good battery life etc and fucking GARBAGE trackpad.

It's the hardware. Always the hardware. Best trackpad (ALL other trackpads are trash), best build and screen (since the first aluminium Macbook Pro retina) and right now, best silicon. But I also hate MacOS.

I'll take any file browser over finder. In fact, I hate the whole MacOS UI but I can mostly ignore the problems with Karabiner, Hammerspoon and Rectangle.

Mick thought he could give up his job and live off winnings. No steady state earnings. Just wins and losses. On the bad days he lose, and hope his winnings on other days would see him right.

Lose on Monday. Easy: double your bets on Tuesday. Lose on Tuesday too? No problem, double up again on Wednesday. You can't possibly have a 4 day losing streak.

If you're talking about renewable tech like a volcanic geothermal system in your back yard then you got me. But that's just like a regular job with a predictable income. It's not what 99% of people mean when they say "renewables"

Exactly how big do you think batteries need to be to store a summer's worth of extra sunshine until the bleak winter?

Btw Mick is a real person who really did lose all his money because he didn't count on a 10 day losing streak, and almost lost his family in the process. Lucky for him he had a forgiving wife and a steady state income.

This sounds like my friend Mick who developed a gambling habit, but assured me that his method was flawless. If you lose, double your bet next time to cover the loss. If you lose that one, double it again. You can't keep on losing.

I suppose it could turn very bearish in the next few years?

Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...

Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).

Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)

When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.

We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.

I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.

But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?

Right now it's about €1650 for that machine (used, on ebay obviously)

What about a light but bulky AI job, like batch processing 50GB of files? I'm currently doing it on my used Macbook M1 Max 64gb, and it's chugging through it for the cost of electricity (free with my solar).

I converted my cheap Billy shelves into what look like fitted shelves. They're all bolted together, screwed to the wall, filled in around the edges with wooden panels, and finished off with 2.5m decorative strips of pine at all the edges and joins. Then I painted the whole lot the same colour and filled them with books. Looks amazing, cheap as hell. Nobody guesses they're Billy shelves.

I thought this was going to be an Intel cpu security issue

Looking at the relative sizes of the dotcom crash, '08 financial crisis and covid is interesting...

I hated the idea of self hosting keycloak, learning how to terraform every single inch of it. But I worked at a startup that had a fucking weird investor who paid me, and would pay AWS, but wouldn't pay Okta (or any other 3rd party).

So given the choice between Cognito (easy right? It's a managed service!) and Keycloak (a large, complex security Swiss Army knife) should have been a no-brainer in favour of Cognito. But we absolutely hated it. I think it's one of the worst AWS services I've used.

Keycloak is only hard because security is hard. The terraform provider is amazing, worked remarkably well. We never had a single hitch, and I could spin up new tenants in seconds, or deploy Keycloak to other regions in a few minutes.

Personally, I just hate the idea of running that type of thing in production unless it's my full time job (and it wasn't) and I have other team members who also knowit backwards. But for a sufficiently well staffed org that feels like moving this expertise inhouse and dumping a paid auth service, Keycloak really is amazingly good.

Now that I've moved on to another job, my time spent in the belly of Keycloak wasn't wasted either. I can help our security team figure out auth issues blindfolded (ie: without access to their Okta admin interface, and in fact having never seen one)

I recently implemented CloudFront signed urls for accessing S3, where my app uses KMS keys to sign the url. Sounds simple and obvious but for the entire history of Cloudfront and KMS it was not! It is not documented to work, nor could I find any explicit AWS documentation saying that it wouldn't work either. And there's a just bunch of anecdotal reports (blogs, github issues) that it doesn't work. But very recently (April I think) Cloudfront and KMS, for the first time ever, both started to support the same key algo/size. So it's now possible, but I stumbled on it, and have never seen a recipe for using them together. So AI doesn't know about it either!

I was finally able to stop managing and rotating TLS key pairs, replicating private keys globally to my apps.

So: who really reads those little boring announcements, and connects the dots? Seemingly, not even AWS themselves!

Is "top down" a company size thing? Very simple organisms don't need brains or nervous systems. But once they get big and complex, suddenly there's a need for sensors, messages, plumbing networks for transporting signals and matter. That doesn't evolve as a decentralized system. You quickly need a control centre to oversee operations.

Companies are no different. During company growth, it's all about hiring, and giving tasks and some responsibilities to subordinates, setting up the right channels for communication etc. But at what point do company leadership actually say "You know what,that department would work better without direct instructions from us. Let's facilitate communication, act as conflict adjudicators and make company-wide 'North Star' decisions"

I think that's what OKRs are supposed to do, but I've never seen that work well (for very long anyway). It always gets up-ended somehow. Start of quarter optimism, over-promising, not spotting that someone else's stretch goal is actually your blocker. Then mid-quarter you're dealing with production emergencies, database code red and running out of time. At the end of the quarter, two of your team go off on PTO while you desperately try not to "fail your quarter", working late, and delivering shoddy work.

Does true bottom up exist at large companies? Hmmm. Some. We've all heard the legends of IBM's "build the first PC!" skunkworks. And we know about research-only departments at Xerox that led to so many modern computing inventions. But these were brief projects.

I find these days that people have the desire to get out of the way and let us work, but the tiling is in the way. I waste so much fixing time in Jira, slack, doing performance reviews, interviewing...

How about adding a return packaging cost and have the empty package sent back to the country of origin so that you can drop it into your own recycling bin?

Wow. I tried to get Qwen3.8 4B to parse song lyrics and analyse them. Getting ollama running was a minute or two.

However coming up with a prompt that didn't turn out total garbage was impossible. After wasting over an hour and I ended up getting Qwen side by side with Llama 3.2 3B, just to see if I was being stupid. Nope, it just looks like Llama is orders of magnitude better at this specific task for some reason).

If you think I'm doing it wrong, you're probably right, I don't know a ton about local LLMs. But I hand selected 50 songs, set up ollama with both LLMs, and for each iteration on the prompt text, ran both LLMs 10x times per song. Side-by-side comparisons showed that Qwen 3 4B was so bad that I actually downloaded Qwen again, thinking there must have been some mistake and I accidentally grabbed an old 1B model.

I'm not saying this is the case in the particular example, but these days a lot of people aren't bothering to read a 1 page README, and are instead letting claude "just fucking do it already". I see it at work.

Claude has got better at "just fucking doing it" by asking if it's ok to go read the latest github issues and pull the README, which means that people will likely get lazier and lazier.

Private Email (a Namecheap product) makes me wish I didn't move that account off Gmail. I'll take a look at Fastmail.

I'm doing a small local version of this test to pull moods and themes out of song lyrics. I've found that one prompt, 1 model, 11 runs even gives different results.

There's no consistency over multiple runs of the same prompt on the same model.

Also, for the purpose of music lyric analysis Qwen 4B is laughably bad. Like it's going out of its way to be extremely wrong, misunderstand the prompt. When it does correctly understand what I asked for it ALWAYS tells me that the mood is Angry. Sometimesiit just gives back all the lyrics. Sometimes it claims that it doesn't have the list of moods or the lyrics and tells me I should look them up on the Internet first.

All with the same prompt every time.

Are models being overtuned for coding tasks?

What about container specific permissions? If they implemented that it would be enough for me since I tend to split up my services by type (eg: shopping, banking, work, hack) so enabling an extensive on a specific set of containers would rock. Right now I think the only control we have is over private tabs/windows?

If your country suddenly has hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of weather migrants from countries with vastly different cultures and values to yours, you'll be wishing that populism was your biggest concern.

Not every culture encourages the same principles or values as yours. I'd say they possibly would.

I haven't fired up UT99, UT2K4 or any of the Quakes for decades. Are there active servers where you could get a good DM session?

Xonotic has that old school feeling. It's an unfortunately tiny player base, and only a handful of servers with regular players. But if you are within ping of a busy server (like Jeff & Julius resurrection) you do run into the same people all the time, including the ones that run the servers.

As a tea drinker, I wish that cafés, bars and restaurants followed the most basic rule which is: take cold water from the tap, bring it quickly to the boil ONCE and pour it into the tea IMMEDIATELY and then give me the cup before you fuck anything up. I'll take things from there. I don't care if it's loose leaf in a teapot (but heat the teapot first) or teabag directly in a cup (and "scald" the cup too). I care much more that it's a strong "breakfast tea" like Barry's Gold label or something similar.

Also...

    Place one rounded teaspoon of tea per cup into the pot.

My rule is usually one per person and "one for the pot".

Same. Our engineers have failed to convince absolutely clueless executives that service / code ownership is critical, you can't just allocate 100% of your engineering team to "roaming around the dungheap adding features" because they want everybody to focus on features. In an organisation where nobody owns anything, nobody cares about anything, nobody has the autonomy to fix anything. Imagine a huge wobbling Jenga tower with dozens of engineers all trying to pull out a block, put it on top and back the fuck away quickly, hopping it falls over after someone else touches it.

Yes this is real. And it's hell. And now all of those Jenga players are AI powered.