nucleardog

> Why? To increase chances of crashes that produces more views?

Why not allow traction control? To increase crashes?

Why not allow "lane keep assist"? To increase drivers crashing into walls?

Why not allow "automatic braking"? To increase drivers slamming into walls and other drivers?

Why do we still have the human in the car when a brick on the accelerator could do the same job? So when the cars crash people feel there are real stakes?

(Presumably they've decided they want the sport to be about the drivers to some extent.)

Heard similar stories from many people. I have my own--

I was at a range shooting this old revolver with worn seals. Every shot, unburnt (or sometimes burning) powder was flying backward onto my face and arms. I basically took a gunpowder shower.

Got up like 6 hours later and went to the airport to get on a plane. Got swabbed. Came back negative. Got on the plane.

So... yeah, not really sure what the swabs are doing. I have to assume it's more an issue of "they're not intending to detect that" than "failures to detect" because otherwise the repeated misses here are just a little too big to believe.

Every day we stray further from god, etc, etc.

Yes this is and has always been an option. Find any real vape shop at any point in the past... _checks calendar_ 15 years at least, and they will sell you nearly any of their "e-juice" products with no nicotine.

Trick is, the companies making disposables vapes/pods/etc generally don't offer them because those are generally large tobacco and other companies and ... well, why would they manufacturer and sell a non-addictive cigarette when an addictive version exists.

0% nicotine was an option almost 20 years ago when I started vaping and is still available. The tobacco companies getting involved and polluting the streets with single use lithium ion batteries and shit have done nothing but made everything worse.

Got it installed, been playing with it for a bit.

Had a bit of jankiness during setup as I fought with llama.cpp bugs. There are a few issues around models reported by the provider changing, refreshing as they change, had a few instances of "New Chat" showing one model then hitting llama.cpp with another, etc. Sorry, been traveling for a bit and didn't have the energy to properly recreate and put together a real bug report. Just a heads up that the onboarding there is a bit rough, though anyone running their own local models is probably more than able to get it figured out.

I'm really liking it. I wish I had something more substantial to say than "it's easy and clean" but... it's easy and clean. And as far as "AI tooling" goes, the setup was an absolute breeze even with the issues. The fact that I can just install a single app and go rather than spending hours and hours on setup, configuration, etc makes me way more likely to use this going forward... it's a lot easier to rely on a tool when I know it will be quick to fix if it breaks.

One note and one feature request, if you want 'em:

Though now that I understand the concepts better it's obvious, it _wasn't_ immediately obvious why the MCP server I added wasn't working. Tools are called via "tasks", and "tasks" are defined based on the skills. I had to create a skill. I'm sure it's somewhere in the documentation but I (and most people) don't read that kind of stuff, so would be good to surface somewhere obvious in the UI maybe?

And I would absolutely _love_ if you could override the provider and model per task. I run a small model locally as it's good enough for most of what I want to do (and cheap! and private!), but it would be great if I could define a "write-code" skill that was run via Claude instead or something so I could delegate tasks that aren't really suitable for a tiny local model out to something more capable.

Anyway... Cool tool. Hope to see it continue to grow and evolve! Thank you for releasing this!

My daughter's been playing "Hello Kitty Island Adventure"[0]. Besides "dexterity", "hand eye coordination", etc... It's just a lot.

There are a couple dozen characters with their own preferences that need to receive gifts to progress in the game. Each has their own preferences. Many items need to be crafted, out of supplies that need to be collected (or received from other characters when giving _them_ gifts). This creates a pretty complicated supply chain to keep track of.

There are a number of major quest lines on the go at once to keep track of. Though the game does have a quest log to help, you still need to keep up with short term goals (talk to this person) and long term goals (craft this thing that needs 100 items I need to save up). Sometimes these need to span over multiple days, or require choosing to save and delay gratification by accumulating an item rather than using it for some fun thing today.

Many mini games require solving word problems and using your working memory. There's a cafe where characters come and place orders, sometimes communicating three or four different decisions. They may be combined with "and", "or", or some combination there-of. Once it's communicated, you go into a crafting screen where you no longer have access to the order and need to remember and select options (sometimes from lists of several dozen items) to complete the order.

It's easy to see the difference in how she interacts with this over "watching TV". Watching TV is passive. If you ask her what happened ten minutes ago, she has no idea. Nor even that ten minutes have passed. She's very engaged with the Hello Kitty game. She's actively engaging with us to discuss, get help thinking through plans and strategies, etc.

I'm on the same page with everyone asking "what _kind_ of screen time?". I don't mind my kid spending an hour watching some educational TV, or a couple hours playing Hello Kitty. I don't want her spending 15 minutes watching Cocomelon.

[0] https://hellokittyislandadventure.wiki.gg/

Nope, no disagreement. I just see your take as very optimistic.

There is no court at the border. If the agent decides you're going to jail, you're going to jail. The decision may be reversed/corrected after, but it's still going to be a big, expensive problem for you and you _are_ going to be detained for a time.

Not to mention walking up with an empty phone and telling the agent to "fuck off" when they ask about it sure sounds eerily similar to the facts of the case in the linked article. I'd wager that's a good way to land an obstruction charge.

This is not... advice. But if anyone's actually going to do this, the method that's worked for me...

A couple weeks before your trip, factory reset whatever burner phone you're planning on using and swap your SIM card over. Install a few basic apps you wouldn't mind them looking through. Enable hotspot/tethering, and connect your other phone via Wi-Fi.

For a couple of weeks, use the burner as much as you can with what is available on it. When you're driving, us the maps app for GPS. Make and receive some calls, ignore some spam calls. Read the news. Get a few inane text messages conversations going, etc.

When you travel, leave your regular phone at home and take the burner. When it's searched at the border, it has enough activity to pass most initial smell tests. If asked, you dropped your other phone and didn't have time to get it fixed before your trip, this is one a friend lent you.

This has worked for me. Never _actually_ into anything illegal, but just apparently had a suspicious vibe about me or something because every time I crossed the border into or out of the country I was spending 4-5 hours getting searched. Didn't need someone going through my entire life going back decades every time--once was enough.

They have to let you in. Doesn't mean they have to let you roam the country freely. They can just send you to some form of detention.

My personal experience would strongly disagree with "usually" here. While I can't really be sure I've never seen one, none come to mind on my travels across US/Canada/Mexico/East Asia (though I've really only been within Canada the last couple of years).

I also go through the trusted traveler line, and the rules there are _usually_ different (but not always!) and I definitely don't recall seeing any sign specifically addressing the rules for that line at any point. Except maybe one at the start clarifying _who_ can use the line (though on that one I've also had the TSA agents go ahead and explain the rules entirely different than the sign they were standing in front of so...).

I've often thought that having a standardized checklist on a big board in the security line would be a big help.

    Laptops: In/Out
    Liquids: In/Out
    Shoes: On/Off
    Etc

Because yeah, it's really annoying getting treated like I'm the dummy by some agent that's only ever known this airport's rules... because this airport has rules entirely different than every other one I've flown through in this decade.

Recently had to fly with some splints and crutches and stuff and that was a whole extra set of fun difference in airport rules. First one really wanted to rub their explosives swab on my finger that was held together by exposed metal pins and had exposed subcutaneous tissue. They were a bit put off when I asked for alternate options.

Because your entire premise here sort of betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept?

So we stop vaccinating people here, and require everyone that enters be vaccinated. Problem solved!

Except not really, because people here travel to foreign places. So also everyone that _leaves_ here needs to be vaccinated as well. But that's do-able.

Except, and here's the part where "herd immunity" is important: Being vaccinated doesn't prevent contracting the disease 100% of the time. The reason vaccines are effective isn't "you can never get the disease", it's because "if you get it, it can't spread to enough people to sustain itself into an outbreak".

If you require people traveling into or out of the country to be vaccinated and stop vaccinating at home, you're going to have someone bring polio back fairly quickly. The vaccine is not 100% effective, and polio is asymptomatic in about 75% of cases so many carriers wouldn't even know they have it.

In a vaccinated population, that's not a problem. The effective reproduction rate is <1. For every person infected, less than one other will contract it. It does out quickly.

In your unvaccinated population, the R0 is 5-7. For every person infected, five to seven others will be infected. The growth will explode quickly and given the rate of asymptomatic carriers there's no chance you're going to contain it.

(Also have you ever watched any zombie virus/fungus/etc show? Even if the vaccine is 100% effective, do you really want to hang the health of the whole country on nobody ever messing up vaccine administration, nobody lying, nobody faking paperwork, etc?)

So everyone has to be vaccinated anyway, and if they're all vaccinated anyway the risk of letting a potential carrier in is... pretty near nil in the grand scheme of things.

Your options are:

* Never let anyone in or out. (But honestly, it'll still probably get in. See: lying.)

* Eradicated the disease globally. We can do it, but less likely to happen now with USAID shut down.

* Vaccinate at home so when the disease gets in the country it doesn't spread.

As a kid I have memories of driving a bit out the edge of town to a big steel plant for almost exactly this reason, it's not totally insane.

There's plenty of free parking, free admission, giant pool with some small waterslides and stuff, a bunch of picnic tables and public barbecues, generally some nice greenery and trees for shade, ponds and fountains and stuff, a bandstand, etc.

It's not somewhere you'd pop over to for a "quick swim", but especially for lower income people it's a great place to have around as a "grab a pack of hotdogs and your swim trunks and make a day of it" sort of thing. As a kid we couldn't afford to, say, go to the actual waterslide park or anything so I have a lot of fond memories of visiting the steel plant.

I'm sure the construction and upkeep was less than a rounding error in terms of construction and upkeep costs for the plant itself.

In the first case, I've connected to someone else's server and actively done the damage of deleting their data.

In the second case, I've provided instructions on how to destroy the data, said "don't do this", and then someone has done it anyway. _They_ have destroyed their data, and it's now up to them to justify why that's my fault.

If we want to get into legal territory about it, which I'm sure we're both woefully underqualified to comment on... the CFAA is all worded around "intentionally accesses a protected computer...". How exactly do you show intent to access a protected computer here? The developer never took any sort of positive step to access _any_ specific computer. The best I could see would be negligence where a reasonable person would have to have known someone would run this on a protected computer, but that still feels like something a good lawyer would find a way out of.

I think unit tests are documentation in the same way that a Dockerfile is... it's not. The tests don't paint the bigger picture, explain why, etc.

That said, if you pitched me something like a Jupyter notebook style doc where tests validating the claims of the documentation were inline, I'd totally buy into that.

Yeah, that's a reason to do it too! And one I'd hope would land with most people, but "respect and decency" aren't universal unfortunately.

Yeah, after the dozenth time with the same person where the "help" is "playing 20 questions to finally get the stack trace out of them which they should have sent in the first place and then then error explains exactly what is wrong and what they need to look at next" you might feel a little different about it. Or not.

End of the day, though, there's a huge, obvious difference between "asking for help" and "asking for someone to do all my thinking for me".

As a _person_, I'm very sympathetic to why that might be happening. I will do everything I can to help. And sometimes it does feel like I'm bordering on practicing psychology without a license.

As someone responsible for making sure _everyone_ is getting paid this month so they can keep a roof over their head and their kids fed, I do need to be mindful of and address issues that are dragging the entire team down. Regardless of why it's happening, if we're in a situation where you are doing the more company more good by _not showing up to work_ (you're contributing negatively), we have a problem and it needs to be addressed. We can work together on addressing it, but we can't ignore it.

For whatever it's worth, every single person on the team I manage says one of the things they love most about working here is how helpful and cooperative everyone is. Everybody's always happy to hop on a call and work through stuff together and really has a mindset of a rising tide lifting all boats--people are always volunteering to pitch in and help others before being asked. I like to think I've had some part in creating that environment. I am _more_ than happy to _help_. I had to starting making a distinction between "helping" and "doing someone's work for them" because I was getting burned out from overwork. I made it "formal" because I work with the kind of people who really appreciate clear rules and guidelines for things, including communication

I've had this same policy since before AI. I kind of formalized it for myself (and this team) after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.

You need to put as much effort into the question as you expect someone to put into the answer.

It's not "fairness" or "AI" or anything else, it's that doing this any other way fundamentally fucks up the team dynamics.

You have a problem. You want someone's help. If the cost to you is effectively nil (or negative, since you're asking someone to do your job for you), but the cost to the other person is non-zero, then incentives aren't lining up here. Pretty quickly that person is going to start carrying too much load and become a bottleneck.

It can also mask that the context of the work is too concentrated in one person, and does little to nothing to help build that elsewhere in the team.

The other end of this is exactly what you're saying--put as much effort into the answer as they put into the question. You're not doing anyone a service by taking their low effort input and giving them high effort output, least of all yourself. If someone asks "how do I X", that's low effort. If you happen to know the answer off the top of your head, spare a few sentences to explain or point them where in the code they need to be. If you don't know, don't go track it down for them.

> I'm thinking Apple might just be better at figuring out what specs actually matter, and which specs just make nerds happy but don't actually sell. (except liquid glass, they failed on that.)

Or maybe this is just a totally different product?

I'd also call out, anecdotally, of the people in my life the non-technical people are interested in touch screens, don't care about speed as long as it runs a few Chrome tabs without feeling slow, and have literally never mentioned noise except to complain about some absolutely absurd "gaming" laptops. I've only ever heard the "nerds" talking about this stuff you're saying actually matters to the non-nerds. Maybe you're one of the nerds?

Admittedly I'm not buying Enterprise Grade(TM) stuff, but...

For simplicity I just use 10G LR modules everywhere. A pair of fiber transceivers is $25. Pretty sure last batch of 3M pre-terminated fibre cables I was grabbing were like $3 a piece or something. So we'll round up and call it $30.

I can get a 3M DAC for about $20.

So yeah it's cheaper, but the price isn't _that_ different. I was using DACs in quite a few places (and still am), but in general I've found it easier just using fiber. (For one, I've had a few devices that didn't get along with various DACs but worked just fine with the fibre transceivers.)

As a daily GitLab user, I'd say that would be the main criticism I could levy at it as well. It does feel like there are a number of "and the kitchen sink" type features that are just there to check a box in a RFP or something.

That said, are the majority of people actually even _using_ those features? For us we're essentially just using GitLab for git, merge requests, and CI pipelines. A couple places we use the static page hosting. (First thing I do whenever I create a new repository is go into the settings and just uncheck _all_ the boxes.)

All of that core functionality works really well and is more than polished enough from my point of view.

> Yeah it's just a semantic pet peeve. Let me ask you this: What is a "Language Model", if this is a "Large Language Model"? Inversely, if a 1.5B model is "Large" then what is the recent 1T param models? "Superlarge"?

Sure, we could do it like we did radio frequencies! Most of what we use are "High Frequency" and above... Very High Frequency, Ultra High Frequency, Super High Frequency, Extremely High Frequency.

> In my own very humble opinion, it becomes "Large" when it's out of non-specialized hardware. So currently, a model which requires more than 32GB vram is large (as that's roughly where the high-end gaming GPUs cut off).

So the definition shifts over time based on the market availability of RAM? And can also go backwards? I can't really see anyone bothering to look up the state of the GPU market in order to determine correct terminology whenever they want to talk about this stuff (or interpret old comments, or...).

That also decouples the terminology from the actual capabilities which is what people are generally more interested in. GPT-3 was a "large" language model at this present time. However the the seemingly much more capable Gemma 4 was a large language model at the time GPT-3 was in use, but isn't a large language model right now.

I kinda question the arbitrary line drawn here too--32GB VRAM? Where I am that's a ~$5-6k problem. I'm not sure I'd call that a "consumer" product any more than the $20k data center cards regardless of the OEM intent, but we could argue semantics on that one too.

Fundamentally, defining it this way just seems kind of... useless? It's borderline a meaningless modifier already. This just defines it in a way that's so complex to use or interpret that it's just meaningless in a different way.

For what it's worth, I'd vote to use "large" to mean "big enough to be general purpose", more differentiating from the small, specialized models that came before.

> And btw, there is no way you can train a language model on a CPU, even with ddr5, lest you wait a whole week for a single training cycle. Give it a go! I know I did, it's a magnitude away from being feasible.

Yeah, was mostly being silly--tried to allude to that with the "intergenerational project" comment toward the end there.

Though I _did_ try doing some inference on CPU, which is how I found out that these Xeons I have don't implement AVX512. Surprisingly Gemma 4 (2B) was able to spit out a solid 13-14 tok/s! Was expecting more like... 0.13.

Hey now! I've got a half terabyte of RAM at my disposal! I mean, it's DDR4 but... it's RAM!

And it's paired with 48 processor cores! I mean, they don't even support AVX512 but they can do math!

I could totally train a LLM! Or at least my family could... might need my kid to pick up and carry on the project.

But in all seriousness... you either missed the point, are being needlessly pedantic, or are... wrong?

This is about learning concepts, and the rest of this is mostly moot.

On the pedantic or wrong notes--What is the documented cut-off for a "large" language model? Because GPT-2 was and is described as a "large" language model. It had 1.5B parameters. You can just about get a consumer GPU capable of training that for about $400 these days.

> I don't think your definition of spam matches the one that I understand it to mean. Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before firing messages to every address they can find anywhere on the web, the dark web, etc. Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway.

I don't get _only_ this from Mailchimp, but I definitely get quite a bit of this from Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and others. I've marked it spam, reported it to them (no response), and continued to receive the emails.

I can be kind of scatter brained and generally give the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it's pretty clear that, e.g., I most definitely did not sign up with some accountant in a different country, in a place I've never been to, to receive reminders of tax deadlines that don't apply to me and offers of accounting services I can't use. Or if I somehow did, the signup was deceptive enough that they never received meaningful consent and I'd call it spam anyway.

(And the email they're sending this to is not some easily confused gmail address or a fat finger--it's my own name at my own domain.)

Having valid contact details or an opt out on their sign up form isn't relevant given I never signed up. It's _unsolicited_, _bulk_ email. It's spam.

> Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.

Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.

Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).

They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.

> When you've lost someone in a car-accident it's not much condolence to know that e.g. an airbag could have saved him/her but "back in 2026 it was deregulated because the car-companies have proven that there's no economic benefit to include them"

We live in a society, etc, etc. I think it's worthwhile, or even _more_ important, to look at how these impact other people.

In some hypothetical deregulated world, I can choose to buy a car without seatbelts, air bags, ABS/TCS, reverse camera, etc and take that risk on.

My neighbour doesn't get to choose whether or not they want to take on the risk of me backing over their child. The other people on the road don't get to choose whether they take on the risk of me losing control of my vehicle and slamming into them.

The value question isn't purely economic. Regulations that force a general societal care and consideration over selfish individual choices have value in _allowing us to have a society_.

All modern browsers require certificates to be published in the certificate transparency logs in order to be considered valid.

These are monitored, things do get noticed[0], and things like this can and have lead to CAs being distrusted.

It's not foolproof, and it's reactive rather than proactive... but in general, this is unlikely to be happening on major sites or at any significant scale.

I'd wholeheartedly recommend people taking some time and reading through the CA Compliance issues on Bugzilla. The entire CA program there, in my opinion, does a fantastic and largely thankless job of keeping this whole thing on the rails. It's one of the few things I can say I had _more_ trust in the more I looked into it.

[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934361

But what if the wolves become unstoppable?

> Why would you think Canada is fine when the government can freeze your accounts at will?

Can we stop with this nonsense at any point?

The government can declare an emergency. Certain actions can be taken during an emergency which are outside what is typically allowed or bypass normal processes. The actions are subject to a mandatory judicial review within 60 days. The judicial review happened. The government was found to have acted out of line. It's current working its way through appeal courts.

The way you phrase this is, imo, intentionally implying "the government is ALLOWED to freeze your accounts at will". The reality is more in line with "I can murder someone at will.". Yes, yes I can. Because we don't have precogs and a pre-crime division. That doesn't mean it's allowed or accepted.

Direct your energy at this law. This is _actually_ a huge fucking problem.

I tried to find any of the original text so I could try in my editor, but couldn't so I can't say for sure but... At least copying and pasting a bunch of unicode private use characters and stuff, they're not only rendered (box with an X through it) but highlighted in bright red.

Presumably opening this file I'd see some suspicious looking code and a giant bright red block in the middle of it.

I have the benefit that I'm only working in English so "flag anything that's not basic ASCII" is workable. I could see how this could get a bit messy when you _are_ working with other languages and need to differentiate the compound characters and invisible characters and things that _are_ part of your normal use versus these that aren't.

> SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-and-day 80s/90s era change.

For me they were.

I still remember the first PC I put together for someone with a SSD.

I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully load Photoshop.

Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (think like "i3" not "Celeron") components, but it was more than enough for what they wanted it for. It would hit the desktop in around 10 seconds, and photoshop was ready to go in about 2 seconds.

(Or thereabouts--I did time it, but I'm remembering numbers from like a decade and a half ago.)

For a _lot_ of operations, the SSD made an order of magnitude difference. Blew my mind at the time.