gnarcoregrizz

Tried voice, I can never get it to translate technical names well, e.g. "systemctl", weird paths, etc.

Gemini 3.7 was benched at 6x the speed of Claude opus high at a slightly lower “intelligence score”. Yes opus is great at one shotting tasks (while being overly verbose as everyone here is saying), but I can’t stand the 20-minute-prompt-code-prompt interrupt loop. Still have yet to try Gemini for coding tasks but going to give it a try today..

Which is too bad... They are great practical and reliable vehicles. You can't even ride them off-road either (CA), since the majority of _accessible_ off-road trails require a highway-legal vehicle, or are otherwise limited to hiking and biking.

So, the only real alternative is a dual sport, which is louder, heavier, faster, and has more emissions. The latest (only?) loophole is to find a plated, clapped out Honda or Yamaha dirt bike and do an electric conversion.

most motorcycles are low tech outside of adv and $$ cruisers. they still make kick started carb'd 2 strokes. the 4 strokes are almost all EFI with electric start now (the Suzuki drz just added FI last year, lol. I think the bike has otherwise been unchanged since the 90s?). plenty of older carbeurated machines still exist. even the electric motos (especially those coming out of china) are low tech. just a battery, bms, controller and motor pretty much, with a minimal display.

yeah. there absolutely are lots of very smart and capable people outside of tech. as someone who has seen the blue collar world "up close" (family businesses), its a different breed... the culture and attitude gap is enormous. shockingly so. most tech workers I know couldn't hang (don't hustle as hard, risk averse, liberal), but some skills may transfer, like problem solving and diagnosis, i.e. debugging.

Technical: release a simple, focused product. AI makes it easy to spam things out that look good. I would be psyched if something catches just a little bit of attention. I feel like my main limit is creativity now. Mine has been stifled by 15 years of rote web dev.

Non technical: I made a conscious decision to push career and technical things aside to spend more time living life (hobbies, family). I’ve since fallen behind in my career, but I’ve had more interesting life experiences I suppose. I do get jealous of people’s titles and promotions sometimes, but I don’t want their jobs. The competition to make others rich right now is enormous. Fucked labor market. Seems like a loser’s game (I just tell myself that since I can’t compete)

I agree. I did most of my work in vim/cli (still often do), but the tight agent integrations in the IDEs are hard to beat. I'm able to see more in cursor (entire diffs), and it shows me all of the terminal output, whereas Claude Code hides things from you by default, by only showing you a few pieces and summaries of what it did. I do prefer to use CC for cli usage though (e.g. using aws cli, Kubernetes, etc). The tab-autocomplete is also excellent.

I also like how cursor is model-agnostic. I prefer codex for first drafts (it's more precise and produces less code), for Claude when less precision or planning is required, and other, faster models when possible.

Also, one of cursor's best features is rollback. I know people have some funky ways to do it in CC with git work trees etc, but it's built into cursor.

Good tips. Not a stroke survivor but I developed epilepsy as a young adult… Not sure if work/stress had anything to do with it, but stress certainly triggers it!

I’m still able to work as a software engineer, and my career has progressed, but the condition has held me back in a lot of ways.

you can get a high quality 4khw 20kw electric dirt bike for $4500... oh right, maybe not the best for commuting. they were fun before the cops caught on.

agreed. regen does nothing on my e-moto. i'll drop 5000 feet in elevation and the battery percentage doesn't go up.

Yeah same thing happens around here. A dude here bought some land which surrounded an old popular access road to Cleveland national forest (socal), and promptly put a gate up... For a while it was the only convenient way to drive into the mountains from riverside county. Alternative routes were either closed from fires, closed to vehicles, or located on the other side of the mountain range. Lots of Facebook drama between this guy and people in the area trying to access the national forest. He has a camera pointed at the gate and regularly posts altercations and threatens to shoot people.

I've found it to be insanely productive when doing framework-based web development (currently working with Django), I would say it's an easy 5-10x improvement in productivity there, but I still need to keep a somewhat close eye on it. It's not nearly as productive in my home grown stuff, it can be kind of annoying actually.

Been there. It’s a hazard of biking in general. I love riding though.

There are fatal car crashes all the time.

I should restate - mine definitely did not feel better post-surgery, the ORIF pain was worse than the break, but it felt good to have my bones secure with my shoulder in its anatomically correct place, and not have any more crepitus.

My plate was extremely uncomfortable, it was a "hook plate" which held my collar bone to my scapula. I couldn't raise my arm above shoulder height with it installed, it had to be removed after 6mo.

Plate removal was a bit tougher than anticipated (short term). I read accounts of it being a 'relief' but I was in quite bit of pain.

Shattered mine mountain biking as well (6 pieces). Ortho took one look at it and scheduled surgery for the next day. It wasn't a 'standard' break since it included my AC joint and coracoclavicular ligaments which needed a special type of plate. Ultimately it took 2 surgeries (ORIF, then plate removal). Total recovery was 9 months. My arm/shoulder is as strong as it was before, and it looks anatomically correct.

My shoulder immediately felt "better" after ORIF. I would suggest it if it's way out of whack... mine was drooping probably 2". I can't imagine how much it would suck if the bones healed that way.

Shit's tough though. Most tradespeople have lots of injuries... smashed hands, bad joints, have to breathe in toxic shit all day, bad hearing. My 35yo friend can hardly stand from back pain. And, it can be _very_ skilled. Business/shop owners can and do make quite a bit more than the standard software engineer.

I thought the problem with all of these metal air batteries is the sluggish oxygen reduction reaction at the air cathode. It just seems too slow for a high power density - need high surface area. The air cathode in this experiment is a gas diffusion layer embedded with trimolybdenum phosphide nanoparticle (seems common with these, others use platinum and iridium), with a current density of 0.1 mA/cm2. Need 1m2 of air cathode for 10 amps. I wonder how that ORR can be sped up or use smaller surface area. Could some kind of forced induction supercharger type thing work for these? I'm not a chemist.

Yes, AI team was created in our company to bring it in house, and I was invited mainly to integrate it into the web app, and to do some ops work. A year later and I'm fine tuning models, building datasets, working with PyTorch. Much different than webdev, not as rewarding sometimes, more unknowns, longer feedback cycles. The main issue is getting enough data quality and quantity, which can be a grind. Happy to have taken this opportunity though. Endless things to learn.

I made few of these when I was a kid. My pièce de résistance was a 10' 'coaxial piston launcher'. It scared the bejeezus out of most people... I usually shot ice slugs, which would throw a hole in a piece of plywood at 50 psi.

A golf ball with a chipped off shell fits perfectly in a 2" PVC barrel. The problem with chipping off the shell (along with an unrifled barrel) is that it makes it like a knuckleball - you have no idea where it's going to go. They would curve violently in any direction. One of the few times I shot one of these, it curved directly upwards, and I'm guessing landed a half a mile or so away. Hopefully it didn't hit anyone or anything. That was the last time I shot it.

I'm in that basket. I can't reliably commute due to a neurological disability that prevents me from driving. I've been WFH since 2015. It's harder to find WFH jobs that pay as well. I also rely on expensive drugs to manage the condition. I absolutely cannot take the risk of being without health insurance. It definitely makes it a lot harder. I can't really tell prospective employers about the disability, it will just scare them off.

It's still more of an idea/crude experiment than a project right now. There are some neat videos of DIYers with similar projects though - small homemade metal air batteries and materials experimentation. Aluminum air seems to attract the most attention. There is also a lot of available research.

Metal-air batteries/fuel cells. Made a mini aluminum air battery (you can easily DIY one with household items). It seems that most people consider metal-air batteries to be a dead-end, since they aren't green and are generally non-rechargeable, and air cathodes are tricky (sluggish, exotic materials, expensive catalysts). I dove into "alternative" battery and fuel cell research after looking into how to extend the range of my electric motorcycle. I love the electric drivetrain, especially on motorcycles, but lithium ion isn't up to the task as far as capacity for anything beyond an hour or two of high performance fun. If I could get a compact metal air battery or hydrogen fuel cell to output just 1kw for a hybrid drivetrain, range issues could be solved.

Yet again, bad time to be on the labor side of the equation, great time to be a capitalist. For us laborers, if I had to choose from a list of fields to go into, anything creative would be low on the list. 'Prompt Engineer' will be the only one left.

UBI is a pipe dream... it's not happening. The wealth and means of production won't be shared in any meaningful capacity. Wealth inequality can get a whole lot worse.

I have one too. It’s not my favorite to wear because it has zero heft. It’s unsubstantial and has a strange plasticky somewhat sticky feel. I plan on replacing it with gold. I can’t complain about the price though - they came in a box of 3.

> the “inefficiency” involved in carrying out many digital tasks “manually” is a core driver of the joy that comes with using computers (for me and, I assume, for at least some subset of others)

A lot of people feel this way. The romanticism of computing is diminished by LLMs. Call me a luddite. I even work in AI.

Yep. An employee won't see any upside of the project they're working on. There are no incentives besides some nebulous promo dangling ("we'll see where you are at the next review cycle...") , and usually no way for employees to capture the upside of their project. I created something valuable for the company I work at, and I was left without upside - just my salary. Meanwhile, the people with stakes in the business say, "well you're making a salary," while they are buying new homes.

Engineers - you are capable of creating an extreme amount of value that far exceeds your income. Take care of #1.

I've felt a bit of heat from the radio waves, especially during the fMRI sequence. Personally, I get a bit claustrophobic during brain MRIs because of the restricting face coils, and you have to go pretty deep into the tube. No idea why people get weirded out by seeing pictures of their brain. I've never felt that. I think its cool.

The DEA is evil. They drag their feet in allowing FDA approved medicines to be approved for sale. There was a law passed recently that they had N months to schedule it because they kept taking so long. If a single person in a study says a medicine gives them feelings of euphoria it can be subject to scheduling, which makes it an epic pain in the ass to acquire. They don’t allow electronic prescriptions to be sent for some drugs, and at least for mine, they can’t be for longer than 90 days.

For example, I am basically forced to take Vimpat, a DEA scheduled anti-epilepsy medicine. Due to the scheduling, I can only pick it up 2 days before it’s due for refill, and otherwise have to have a doctor provide me an early refill request. It’s like they don’t expect me to ever go on vacation or have a life. I feel chained down by this. The DEA treats me like a pleasure seeking drug addict. The sad thing is I am a drug addict, I just take it to stay alive, and don’t get any pleasure from this drug. If I don’t get it I’ll probably withdrawal and die. Also, who the hell is going to use a drug that costs $1400/month for pleasure?

I. Hate. The. DEA. For some of these epilepsy drugs the scheduling seems cruel and senseless. All it does is make life difficult for doctors, pharmacies, and patients. For what??? No one wants to take these drugs. It’s a joke that this stupid agency would even consider these to have some recreational value. Sure the benzos, but for the majority of them, no.

I'm really hopeful about focused ultrasound for non-invasive treatment of various brain diseases.

The feeling of being able to see a dark sky on a moonless night is amazing. For me, it's very spiritual, especially at a truly dark site, after my eyes adjust and I'm immersed in it. It's no wonder they call it "the heavens." It makes me sad that some people will never be able to experience it, and that I don't get to experience it more often. The feeling of cosmic insignificance and unknown is oddly comforting. Sometimes I wonder if lack of dark skies correlates with people being less religious.