sz4kerto

> The ones who have seen obvious degradation in work quality and stability, but who have tried to ignore or hide it. They now have to face down CFO’s and executive management who see zero returns on the current spend and are being asked to approve extreme budget increases.

Hm, there must be businesses like this, but I presume there are many who experience huge returns on current spend - and even 5x costs would be fine, but currently AI prices (given fixed 'intelligence') are dropping like a stone. I can't imagine that the same level of intelligence is going to be more expensive in 12 months.

It's just normal that there's a huge variation of how businesses and individuals adapt to new circumstances, this has been the case forever.

It's not self-evident what we need. We currently ended up with this whole free-market capitalism, which is super distorted of course, but still it kinda says that 'we should let people do whatever they want with their money unless they harm others'. "I want clean water. I want a stable climate. I want bees to survive." Yes, so we all. But we set up a system where people can vote with their wallets.

> If you even review PRs still: when was the last time you didn't just skip over tests?

The opposite. Reviewing PRs is now about just reviewing the tests, as the code is very likely to be fine if tests are relevant and they're passing.

The main enabler of agentic coding is heavy end-to-end/characterisation testing.

We can ask AI to do very large-scale refactors, for example, because if tests pass, it's 99% that everything is fine.

GLM 5.3 Flash has been a relevation for me. It's practically impossible to spend more than $5-$10 per day if you're only working on a single project -- but $10 is a full-day of continuous churn. First I was super sceptical about it, and always used Fable to instruct it, but now I realised that even with complex coding, it's reasonably good.

> I do sort of suspect a fan thermal control curve is a PID response curve written out in long hand but don't really have the math to prove it.

No, a fan response curve is kinda-sorta a P controller. It does not take into account 1) how quickly the temperature is rising or dropping (D) 2) the time passed since the system has drifted from the target temp (I).

"In my previous blog, I revealed that Oura data is not end-to-end encrypted. That means that an Oura user's health data can be unscrambled at certain points as it travels from a person's ring, through their phone app, over the internet, and as it lands on Oura's servers."

Very strange -- it seems to be conflating end-to-end encryption with encryption-in-transit.

We need sandboxing for any agent, so we run it within Docker - so we use CLI.

> And then there's explorative testing, where I always found a good QA invaluable.

Yes, I agree. We do this too. Findings are followed by a post-mortem-like process: - fix the problem - produce an automated test - evaluate why the feature wasn't autotested properly

"Before I weigh in further, I’d like to make sure you’re familiar with the testing pyramid."

The testing pyramid is a par excellance SWE kool-aid. Someone wrote a logically-sounding blogpost about it many years ago and then people started regurgitating it without any empirical evidence behind it.

Many of us have realised that you need a "testing hourglass", not a "testing pyramid". Unit tests are universally considered useful, there's not much debate about it (also they're cheap). Integration tests are expensive and, in most cases, have very limited use. UI and API tests are extremely useful because they are testing whether the system behaves as we expect it to behave.

E.g. for a specific system of ours we have ~30k unit tests and ~10k UI/API tests. UI and API tests are effectively the living, valid documentation of how the system behaves. Those tests are what prevent the system becoming 'legacy'. UI and API tests are what enable large-scale refactors without breaking stuff.

Isolated QA should not exist because anything a QA engineer can do manually can be automated.

So prices will need to increase -- if it makes a senior engineer 10x more productive then coding assistants could easily cost 20x-100x more then what they cost today. Same for video generation.

Recently I've been using AI for some stuff that service providers don't want it to be used for (specifically: medical diagnosis). I found that Grok (4.1) is superior to most of the others when it comes to this, because it doesn't go out of its way to support my own hypotheses.

I believe that syncophancy and guardrails will be major differentiators between LLM services, and the ones with less of those will always have a fan base.

I'm using Gemini in general, but Grok too. That's because sometimes Gemini Thinking is too slow, but Fast can get confused a lot. Grok strikes a nice balance between being quite smart (not Gemini 3 Pro level, but close) and very fast.

It's a modem, not a router.

For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.

So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.

I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.

This is exactly how sound studios do mixing. They don't just use top-end monitors -- they generally also listen on low-end speakers that color sound in a way that's representative to what people have at home (hello, Yamaha NS-10).

I think compliance is one of the key advantages of cloud. When you go through SOC2 or ISO27001, you can just tick off entire categories of questions by saying 'we host on AWS/GCP/Azure'.

It's really shitty that we all need to pay this tax, but I've been just asked about whether our company has armed guards and redundant HVAC systems in our DC, and I wouldn't know how to do that apart from saying that 'our cloud provider has all of those'.

The 7 series has many problems. They'll eventually work it out, but it seems to be a bit more problematic than usual.

> I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure

Immich can store your photos in a file structure you want. It can also reorganise your files on disk based on EXIF data, and so on.

> I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage

It can absolutely do exactly this.

https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/

Example: if user IDs are not random but eg Bigserial (autoincremented) and they're exposed through some API, then API clients can infer the creation time of said users in the system. Now if my system is storing eg health data for a large population, then it'll be easy to guess the age of the user. Etc. This is not a security problem, this is an information governance problem. But it's a problem. Now if you say that I should not expose these IDs - fine, but then whatever I expose is essentially an ID anyway.

I definitely don't think so. You're seeing companies who have a lot of publicity on the internet. There are tons of very successful SMBs who have no real idea of what to do with AI, and they're not jumping on it at all. They're at risk.

This. It's a fascinating project, it is hard to believe how can an FLOSS project be so high quality. In my book it's on the level of Postgres (although it's a smaller project, probably).

Or they consider themselves to have low(er) chance of winning. They could think either, but they obviously can't say the latter.

UFH has mixing valves, so it runs on 38 C and radiators run on 55C. Single boiler.

If we ever sell this (which we don't plan to), I know what to install (it'll be quite good, just not this perfect). I have it in a cupboard (a Siemens Connected Home thermostat system), the downside of that is that the combined UFH+radiator rooms will be less comfortable.

(But still more comfortable than 99% of the houses I've been in.)

I haven't mentioned in the parent comment but as a test I've dismantled the HA system and installed the Siemens system and it works well, just not 'perfectly'.

> If your goal is saving energy/money, you don’t want a system capable of going from cool to toasty in 20 minutes.

Depends. As explained in a sibling comments, I have some rooms that have combined UFH and radiators, and if the desired temp is more than 1 celsius away from the current temp, then both are driven, otherwise it's just the UFH.

It does match physics if you consider other factors. Apart from the heat pump scenario, this statement can also be true when you have condensing boilers (and okay-ish insulation)

The reasoning: when you heat up the house, then your boiler needs to produce constant high-temperature water. When you keep the house at the same temperature, then the boiler produces much lower temp water and it is more efficient.

Insulation also matters because if your house has outer insulation then it means that heat transfer from the house to the environment is mostly blocked, but cross-room heat transfer is likely not (through the walls). Therefore it is better to heat the whole house than heating just a couple of rooms because if you do the latter then you'll end up heating the whole house anyway but you're using less surface area (meaning you need higher flow temperatures, meaning less efficiency).

We've moved to an new apartment (house) and we had to do a full renovation. It doesn't have modern insulation and I calculated that for the time being the ROI on insulation isn't worth it. It's a multi-floor semi-detached house and I wanted the best comfort and the most economical heating possible.

In particular: stable and individually adjustable temperatures for bedrooms and living rooms; underfloor heating in some rooms (bedrooms), radiator-based heating in some others (living room), and combined UFH+radiators in some others (where UFH might not be enough during extreme colds).

I thought I can just pay someone some money and they'll set up the controls for me. It must be a simple exercise, right?

I could not have been more wrong. After spending a few hours of understanding the setups that "experts" have recommended, I figured out edge cases where they would be either wasteful or uncomfortable (meaning: unnecessary and inavoidable temperature overshoots or undershoots, etc.). I had many-many rounds with Honeywell, Tado, Siemens, etc. and every single one of them had _major_ issues.

The renovation got a bit stuck because of this, but the plumbing was ready so I wanted to see whether the pluming and pumps are working, at least. So I connected the pumps and valves to "smart plugs", i.e. Zigbee-controlled plugs, so that I can see that they turn on. They did, which got me thinking...

Right now I have $20 Zigbee temp sensors sprinkled across the house, $30 smart plugs and relays driving valves, pumps and the boiler, and Home Assistant is controlling the whole thing. Everything works perfectly and I could implement some features that simply no system would have done out of the box, for example in rooms where there's combined UFH and radiators I can drive both heating systems when the target temperature is far from the desired (so that the room heats up quickly) but as the room temp is getting closer to the target, the radiators are turned off so that UFH dominates heating (more comfortable and more energy efficient than radiators). In rooms with radiators, temp is +- 0.4 C within target, in rooms with UFH, it's +-0.1C within target.

As someone who lived in multiple rich countries in Europe, let me tell you that the German healthcare system is awesome. It has a lot of problems, but it's head and shoulders above many-many other countries. You can actually get care by a qualified doctor, while this is absolutely not self-evident even in rich countries like the United Kingdom, and let's not talk about CEE countries.

There's not much to see here I believe - Tesla's valuation is approximately where it was before the election, and that's generally true for tech stocks (Tesla generally moves with the NASDAQ). It made a big swing in the last month, but the news around this is classic post-hoc narrative.

Edit: I meant the crashing valuation, not this particular news, apologies for the confusion. I do think that government officials promoting stocks is a terrible precedent to set.

I've looked around (Europe), and there's nothing comparable at the price, except maybe Ioniq (but I didn't like the ergonomics, not saying it's objectively bad, just didn't fit me). Kia is way more expensive, Volkswagen is way more expensive at the same trim level, etc.