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  • 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • SNW’s scientific accuracy and technobabble are so bad, it often pulls me right out of the story. I feel like Next Gen era at least tried a little bit. Yeah, it was awful, but it was watchable. I’ve gone back and watched some to verify it’s not just in my head. It’s not. Does SNW have science and technology consultants? If so, if the problem is them they should be fired, but I suspect the problem is the writers / directors not giving two fucks what the consultants have to say. Be better guys.



  • If those words are connected to some automated system that can accept them as commands…

    For instance, some idiot entrepreneur was talking to me recently about whether it was feasible to put an LLM on an unmanned spacecraft in cis-lunar space (I consult with the space industry) in order to give it operational control of on-board systems based on real time telemetry. I told him about hallucination and asked him what he thinks he’s going to do when the model registers some false positive in response to a system fault… Or even what happens to a model when you bombard it’s long-term storage with the kind of cosmic particles that cause random bit flips (This is a real problem for software in space) and how that might change its output?

    Now, I don’t think anyone’s actually going to build something like that anytime soon (then again the space industry is full of stupid money), but what about putting models in charge of semi-autonomous systems here on earth? Or giving them access to APIs that let them spend money or trade stocks or hire people on mechanical Turk? Probably a bunch of stupid expensive bad decisions…

    Speaking of stupid expensive bad decisions, has anyone embedded an LLM in the ethereum blockchain and givien it access to smart contracts yet? I bet investors would throw stupid money at that…



  • We’re also using Forgejo for a small consulting team working on lots of different projects for a lot of different clients.

    A couple of our team members who came from a more complex and scaled environment (particularly our DevOps / SRE guy who’s worked at such places as LinkedIn and Snowflake) want to move us to Gitlab because it’s “more powerful” but I like Forgejo because it’s just super simple. Just does exactly what I need, doesn’t give me to many more options.

    We have

    • Projects segregated into teams, organized by client (so only those working on a specific client’s projects have access to their repos).
    • Able to invite clients and put them into the team for their project (we’ve had a couple clients that want that).
    • Able to automate deployments with webhooks (this was pretty easy to get working).

    One of our devs wanted to use Actions. It’s hard to get that working and (at least a month ago) there were warnings that Actons aren’t mature yet and are probably insecure (looks like that may have changed with the recent jump to Forgejo 8.0). I think it’s now a non issue for us though because we were like “Dude, stop trying to role your own CI/CD, that’s why we have two infrastructure people!”




  • This exact thing happened to one of my clients. And it sucked because they didn’t even register the domains with Ionos, they registered them with some other company that then got bought by Ionos. They were not technically savvy and didn’t understand what was happening until it was way too late. They lost about 8 domains closely associated with their business and with their CEO’s research.





  • Sure, that was overly broad. But I’ve got a BUNCH of tools in my garage and they’re fine, but my dad’s got a bunch of the same tools in his workshop he had when I was a kid, and they still work just as well now as they did in the 80s (I think his drill press actually used to belong to HIS dad and it’s never failed me). Also, his table saw and band saw rock. I remember using them to cut things for silly projects when I was a kid and I just used the table saw the other day… same saw, great results.

    My take was all centered around “solid” and “built to last”. I don’t have any faith that the tools in my garage will outlast his tools. Don’t see it happening. I think me inheriting his tools is more likely than my tools outlasting them.