errantmind

What does this mean? I'm not plugging anything.

Long context windows reduce performance and exceeding your context window is impossible. It should be a given that deleting context.. is just that. You do it when you must to preserve your session without compaction.

The regular /prune command leaves tool call 'receipts', which includes the command executed and whether it succeeded or failed, but not results. The extended prune removes both.

The how is important, but I've found all of the decisions, question, answers, and results are the most important and the tool calls themselves secondary. When necessary, the tool calls can be deleted without much being lost.

In my experience, the best approach to compaction is to never get to the point where you need compaction and to generally stay below about 30% context window utilization. Even for long agentic workflows this can be accomplished for quite a while, much longer than most people might think.

Here's what I do for each of my sessions:

1. For asides, off-topic work, or repetitive work that has already been done in the session, branch backwards (with /tree) and summarize.

2. If I've exceeded 30% or the 'price-doubling' multi-tier pricing, prune (my custom extension).

3. If I've already pruned and I'm still close to 30%, 'prune all' (more extensive prune).

Definition:

'/prune': Removes ~50% context on a fresh session (not previously pruned)

  - Keeps: User messages, normal assistant prose, commands/status markers, extension receipts, model settings, and a plain-text receipt for each tool call.
  - Removes: Thinking, signatures, actual tool calls/results, tool output, images, compaction summaries, and other extensions’ state.

'/prune-extended': Removes ~80% context on a fresh session

  - Keeps: User messages, normal assistant prose and conclusions, commands/status markers, extension receipts, and model settings.
  - Removes: Thinking, signatures, all tool calls/results and output, images, compaction summaries, other extensions’ state, and any tool-activity receipts created by /prune.

Both create a new session and delete the old one after a successful switch.

Using these I can keep a session going for weeks (or longer), even with extensive use and almost all the important context is preserved while dumping the less important context. Neither command requires an LLM summarization so they execute quickly.

You can be frugal without spending a lot of mental energy on your expenses. It seems contradictory but it is possible to 'live' frugally without thinking about money all that much (assuming you aren't broke and have positive cash flow). The real challenge is escaping consumerism as a means of (superficial) fulfillment.

> When you default to the lowest cost option without considering the drawbacks, procrastinating or hesitating on spending[...]

This is terrible advice, one of the easiest ways to be frugal is not to be overly attached and to defer spending.

You can also get excellent results with User Scripts that connect to a local language model.

1. Run LM Studio (download the Gemma 4 model), which has a 'local server' w/ API.

2. Use a more powerful LLM to write User Scripts (Greasemonkey, etc) to do whatever you want on any website you go to. Instruct it to connect to LM Studio.

3. Classify and highlight posts / comments based on any criteria that suits you. Summarize, delete from the DOM, etc., Just have fun.

The best part about choosing a simple WM is you never have to think about it again. I installed and configured DWM many years ago and it just works. Never had a single issue after the first week.

It is like when you buy an appliance and it just fades into the background and then, one day, you realize you've had it for 10 years without any problems and you feel a tinge of gratitude before moving on with your day.

This article fails to mention that a lot of current commercial scale battery co-locations' purpose is to capitalize on rare but highly profitable periods where demand spikes and spot prices go up by, sometimes, multiple orders of magnitude.

The idea is to store the power until these events. A lot of money is made from these.

As someone who has used Firefox since 1.0 (~20 years ago), I fully support returning Mozilla's sole focus to its users. Huge amounts of 'free' money has a tendency to de-focus organizations.

This will lead to a game of 'homeless hot potato' among neighborhoods in larger cities as each pass ordinances that ban various 'homeless activities' in their borders.

Some interesting facts:

* ERCOT (Texas) has more renewables generation than every other ISO, including CAISO (California)

* ERCOT is setting new renewables records almost every month, as new renewables sites come online.

Source: https://www.gridstatus.io/home

I had the opportunity to hear a guest lecture of his in Colorado a little over 15 years ago which inspired my further study of philosophy at the time. He had a keen mind and will be missed.

For info, I checked and it looks like none of my AGPL licensed repos are included in The Stack. Neither are my private repos.

There is no evidence patents increase innovation. I suggest reading 'The Case Against Patents':

https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/wp/2012/2012-035.p...

I've never gotten ads on Youtube with Firefox nor my Chromium-based browser. Maybe they didn't roll the adblocker-blocker out to everyone.

Seems weird to be writing about croissants here but the Costco croissants are no where near the quality of a croissant made by a skilled baker, to the degree it is hard to call them a croissant in anything but form. The ingredients, flavor, flakiness, number of layers, etc. are all inferior when compared to what is possible from an artisan. I've bought the Costco croissants a few times in the past to make sandwiches out of as that's about all they are good for.

Lifetime Pricing going to sink you. Best of luck though otherwise.

IMO, Suckless is about providing the minimal feature set possible. If you patch in an extra feature, that is what you get and nothing else. You always end up with exactly what you need and nothing more.

Compare this to software where you only ever use a subset of the features yet still have to pay the cost of features you don't use.

People seem to forget the web existed before widespread advertising. Ads are not necessary for all content on the web and, personally, I'd be fine if every last ad supported site on the internet disappeared.

The statement is that it is shameful to grab for powers that invade the privacy of law abiding citizens.

> If you require the absolutely lowest latency possible though and don’t care about screen tearing then X without compositing, with VSync disabled is a better fit for you. You can re-evaluate once the possibility to have VSync disabled is implemented in your compositor of choice and the measured increased volatility in latency (99th percentile) with immediate mode is fixed.

I enjoyed the post, thanks. I suppose I'll wait then and re-evaluate when Wayland's 'immediate mode' is fixed and it is roughly comparable to X11 without a compositor. I go to great lengths to minimize my latency so this is really the only factor that matters to me.

It is unfortunate but forced vsync means I will never adopt Wayland. I do not want a frame+ delay when I'm gaming. I do not want v-sync lag when my framerate occasionally drops below my 240hz refresh rate.

I don't even especially like X11, I just don't want vsync forced on me.

I live in the middle of a large city, in an old building, and don't really have noise issues. However, if I did I'd sound-proof my office. The noise insulation works both ways.

This post: A long article about weight loss that is built on a calorie-centric approach to food instead of questioning that fundamental premise and differentiating between types of fats and carbs and their effects on body weight.

I've commented on this in the past but to reiterate, calories as a measure are pseudo-scientific at best and totally bunk at worst. If all you are doing is looking at that number on packaging, generally speaking, your weight control will be very limited due to the lack of precision in that measurement.

> I even briefly used a tiling window manager before very quickly returning to the floating ones; the appeal of such utterly inflexible window management I will simply never understand.

The author mentions this design in passing but I think it is contextually important to understand why people might like this at all so I'll share what I appreciate about tiling window managers:

The appeal, for me, is the inflexibility. Tiling window managers and their often bundled 'tags' approach to window management offer a simplicity that is comforting in its constancy to me, the user. To sum it up, they make me feel 'at home' using my computer. Comfy goes beyond familiarity though.

I never have a mess of windows to deal with across my monitors, where I'm constantly needing to look at a taskbar, minimizing and un-minimizing programs (or looking through a stack of 'shaded' windows in the author's case). Each of my frequently used programs has its own tag, or shares a tag (visually as a tile) with other programs. While the programs I have open at any one time change, their locations don't. Everything in its right place, I always know what is where. I switch between all programs directly with ease, with no intermediate interruptions to occupy my attention, my hands never leaving my keyboard. No 'looking' for stuff. Switches happen instantly because there are no transitions or any other forms of detectable latency (and for that matter, no compositor either). Combine all this with extensive use of scratchpads for ad-hoc and exploratory tasks and all the bases have been covered. Comfy.

It means 83% of reviewers gave it a 'passing grade' which is defined as a 6/10+.

The formulation is a way to collapse precise scores into a binary classification of thumbsup or thumbsdown. So, another way to put it would be 83% of reviewers 'liked it'

Side note, I used to really like Rotten Tomatoes 10+ years ago but I noticed a drop in quality, likely Goodhart's law in action as some other commenters here have pointed out.

Living in the US, I often fantasize about living somewhere I can bike freely in the sense the article describes. Somewhere bikes are actually prioritized over cars, not just accommodated. Preferably no cars at all. So far, my search had come up dry.

Good to know and, yes, that was the issue (grub-mkconfig without grub-install). Somehow I've never had this issue in Arch before now and wasn't aware of this idiosyncrasy.. but now I know.

The parameter was unrelated to the issue with grub but I thought I'd mention the grub issue in case anyone else gets surprised like me.

The Linux mitigation can be disabled with gather_data_sampling=off in the kernel boot parameters.

Be warned, apparently Grub had some kind of problem back in August 2022 and this pre-existing bug broke my boot completely when I updated grub for the above mitigation. I had to boot into a live ISO and reinstall grub to fix it.