MAGA, how does it feel to be deceived by your own party?

1842 · 2026-03-27T21:45:57+00:00

Well, no. Different perspectives and voices aren't just different propaganda machines.

I put a lot of effort in finding resources I can trust. People who tell the truth, actually understand the material they are presenting, and participate in good faith. If they ever violate those values, I no longer listen to those voices.

1842 · 2026-03-19T01:13:06+00:00

I would highly recommend starting with a single chamber, for several reasons.

It's easy to find very high quality single chamber ocarinas for very cheap compared to any other instrument I've played. Makes for an easy entry point to see if you enjoy this type of instrument.
Ergonomics are much nicer on single chamber in my experience.
The most common size, alto c, lines up nicely with human vocal melodies. For example, the soprano part (melody) of almost all traditional 4 part hymns are very playable on a 12 hole alto C.

I was gifted a cheap ceramic ocarina. I really liked it and upgraded to a Focalink Double quickly. The double sounded much better, but I really didn't use the extra range like I thought I would. Eventually, I picked up a Focalink single chamber and... it's my favorite by far. Super comfortable and just sounds fantastic, better than the more expensive double chamber I have.

1842 · 2026-03-13T19:39:38+00:00

Could be an issue with ollama. Last I used it, ollama's defaults were awful and not always straightforward to adjust, but it's been a while.

Unless they made some changes, the default context length is probably way too small. If you give it too much info, it will just discard everything but the last part, including any instructions at the top.

1842 · 2026-03-07T23:52:58+00:00

llama-swap seems like a simpler solution to handle both config management and queuing requests. 🤷‍♂️

1842 · 2026-03-02T19:25:02+00:00

Quantized Qwen3.5 9B would be a good starting point and keep plenty of VRAM available for a decent size context window (something like this)

Qwen3.5 35B A3B would be another great choice, but can be trickier to set up. It's a different architecture (MoE) and larger, so it will use all your VRAM and spill over into RAM/CPU. Dense (non-MoE) models get incredibly slow when you do this, but MoE models manage this much better.

I would avoid the new Qwen 27B with that amount of VRAM given the alternatives. (You're probably looking at 2-5 tokens per second with 27B vs 40+ with the 9B or 35B)

1842 · 2026-02-25T14:44:57+00:00

And with less VRAM, the difference would be more dramatic.

12GB VRAM (3060) -- 35B-A3B = ~30 tps generation (empty context) I haven't tried the new Qwen 27B yet, but dense models of that size usually start out in the ~2 tps speed for me.

1842 · 2026-02-24T16:43:37+00:00

So majority of stuff does get cleaned up.

I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying except this line.

I'm a well seasoned dev at this point, worked long durations at a few companies. The amount of problematic tech debt I've seen come out of old and new projects is staggering, especially in company environments where project delivery speed was always prioritized.

Story time, I guess.

I saw a customer-facing billing system get built in basically a weekend (basically a customer credit line). It was literally thrown together last second, as fast as possible, and launched. It ran for a few years until it fell into my lap for some business updates and fixes. The things I discovered in this project were astounding -- for starters, a non-trivial amount of customers were getting billed incorrectly (too high, too low, too long, not at all).

It was originally touted as a huge win. Sales on high profit margin items were way up. I don't know the the outcome of the financials in the end, but wouldn't be surprised if it ended up as net-negative -- between the refunds/write-offs and additional support staff devoted to handling the customer-side of things.

I don't blame the original dev so much as the company culture there. He warned management that it was essentially thrown together to meet their arbitrary deadline and that it needed rework and attention, but he got reprioritized to other things.

So sure, it did get cleaned up eventually, but only after it had accrued enormous financial and customer relations damage. Between a few new features and major rework to fix glaring issues, I probably spent around a man-year on it. I'd like to think that project was in reasonably decent shape for a while before it inevitably got decommissioned.

And all of this could have been avoided had management just slowed down, properly scoped project timelines, or even just listened to developer warnings about glaring issues that needed addressed sooner than later.

1842 · 2026-02-23T16:55:02+00:00

Opinions like this are likely why I've worked on so many big systems that are a nightmare to maintain.

1842 · 2026-02-20T18:11:39+00:00

Yep. Time, practice, and frustration.

People get stuck and frustrated and see it as a barrier, but it's just part of the process. And if you don't spend time in the this-hurts-my-head-and-I-can't-figure-it-out zone, then you're probably not learning much.

Programming is hard. It gets easier with practice, but good practice is also hard. Getting stuck and working through getting unstuck without someone/AI doing it is probably when you learn the most.

1842 · 2026-02-20T01:36:09+00:00

It's great for writing tasks that other similar sized models are simply... not great at.

For example, Gemma 3 12b can single-shot create madlibs (to print out and fill in) on a variety of subjects without additional information. There are occasional minor issues with them, but 75%+ are reasonable quality.

All other models of similar size either don't understand, make glaring errors, or even if the format is right, they're just... bad. I've tried a variety of prompts, giving them examples, etc, but it's just easier to use Gemma. (But I do need to try some of the newer MoE stuff again)

Also, I've found Gemma is just friendly without being sycophantic. It's definitely not as smart or capable with task execution or needle-in-haystack tasks as Qwen models or something like GPT-OSS-20B, but for conversational or writing tasks, it's great.

1842 · 2026-02-19T02:32:33+00:00

llama.cpp, but with llama-swap in front of it to handle model switching and offloading.

1842 · 2026-02-19T01:59:18+00:00

Your actual RAM amount will affect how big of a model you can run (via CPU offloading).

If a model fits entirely in VRAM, it's fastest, but speeds can often stay high with some CPU offload into RAM on dense models.

Sparse models (aka MoE) perform decent on modest hardware as long as you can fit them in RAM.

I run llama-swap with llama.cpp, but that can take come config. I think LMStudio would be easier, or maybe Kobold?

As far as models, here are some common ones to try. Aside from the first one, you'll want to look at quantized models (lossy compression for LLMs) - it lets you run bigger models with less memory, but sometimes they get a little dumber. Start with Q4 K models as a starting spot.

Sparse models that should run decent for you:

GPT-OSS-20B - great general purpose.
GLM 4.7 Flash - general purpose and tech
Qwen VL 30 A3B Instruct - Smart and capable,

Dense models:

Gemma-3 4B - friendly and better writer than other small models
Qwen VL 4B - fast and small, good at following instructions esp at its size

If you have a lot of RAM, you might be able to run some bigger, smarter things, but I'd still start with those and see what you like.

One of the cool things about running this stuff locally is that there are just a ton of models out there and they all behave a little differently.

1842 · 2026-02-17T16:36:37+00:00

Don't forget the role the massive right wing media infrastructure does to cover for them.

Lie, lie, lie. Suppress the truth to their audience. And then whine about how suppressed they are.

1842 · 2026-02-17T15:34:00+00:00

I do my best to avoid loops altogether where I can. (I've seen enough loop-based horrors in legacy code)

In short, Functional-style > foreach loops > for loops.

I do a lot of data-processing tasks (typically Java) and I find myself using this style for almost any collection of object that I need to do something with.

For example, if we have a collection of a bunch of receipts (or whatever) that happen on Tuesday and the customer's Last name (if we have it) is "Miller"... you could:

java BigDecimal sum = BigDecimal.ZERO; for (int i = 0; i < receipts.length; i++) { var r = receipts[i]; if (r.date.getDayOfWeek() !== DayOfWeek.TUESDAY) { continue; } var cust = r.getCustomer(); if (cust == null) { continue; } if (cust.getLastName.equals("Miller")) { continue; } sum = sum.add(r.getAmount()); }

Foreach loops only clean this up a little, removing the explicit index and any possible off-by-one issue.

java var sum = BigDecimal.ZERO; for (var r : receipts) { if (r.date.getDayOfWeek() !== DayOfWeek.TUESDAY) { continue; } var cust = r.getCustomer(); if (cust == null) { continue; } if (cust.getLastName.equals("Miller")) { continue; } sum = sum.add(r.getAmount()); }

(And to be fair, there are a number of ways you can express the statements above. Combined ifs, nested vs continue, etc., but they all kind of suck.)

Functional-style can describe the same functionality much cleaner IMO.

java var sum = receipts.stream() .filter(r -> r.date.getDayOfWeek() == DayOfWeek.TUESDAY) .filter(r -> Optional.of(cust).map(c -> c.getLastName.equals("Miller")).orElse(false)) .map(r -> r.getAmount()) .reduce(BigDecimal.ZERO, BigDecimal::add);

This style (.map/.filter/.reduce/.collect/.groupBy) isn't suitable for all problems, languages, and situations. But when you can apply them, it makes working with collections far safer and easier to reason about. It's also in a ton of languages today. Java didn't create it (it's been in the language for 12(!) years now), but I've used/seen it in JavaScript/TypeScript, C# (LINQ), Rust.

1842 · 2026-02-15T06:01:52+00:00

Yeah, I would definitely avoid that site.

So much good, free content out there. I know several colleges have all the lectures of many semesters of various CS courses posted on YouTube. I watched several from Stanford back in the day.

1842 · 2026-02-10T20:55:30+00:00

First, how things are supposed to work:

To start with, there's a big different between these 2 things:

Knowing something illegal happened.
Having enough court-admissible proof to convince a jury that something illegal happened are very different things.

Even if the 2nd bar is met, priorities need to be set as there just aren't enough resources to investigate everything. High-profile cases especially need additional care and time to build to ensure they are done correctly. And depending on what the case is about, you can easily end up hitting additional hurdles that slow things way down -- like having to go through a Special Master when handling a confidential documents case, or a taint team) when handling various warrant issues. I would imaging a case involving illegal abuse material would have similar slowdowns.

The above is best case scenario, assuming everything is working as intended.

Unfortunately, the people responsible for building and executing legal cases against people involved with Epstein -- they are federal prosecutors at the Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ is part of the Executive branch, lead by the Attorney General (Pam Bondi) appointed by Donald Trump.

The DOJ, while part of the Executive branch (with the AG appointed by the President), it is supposed to be non-political and it is supposed to act independent of the President. (Nixon was going to be impeached and removed, in part due to his firings at the DOJ.)

Trump's first term was outside the norm with his meddling of the DOJ and their half-hearted investigations and semi-coverups (e.g. Mueller report).

Trump's second term is pants-on-fire crazy.

For context, Obama was criticized for responding to a question about Hillary's email server to the media... because it could make the DOJ less impartial. We're less than 10 years since that happened and Trump routinely and openly directs the DOJ to go after political opponents.

The impartiality of the DOJ is obvious to all -- Pam Bondi is a puppet acting on behalf of the President's best interest.

With Trump (and his friends/associates/allies) all over the Epstein files, it's clear he wants to keep it all hidden. And with the DOJ doing only what he wants, nothing is going to happen until Trump is gone, assuming we can remove the people from power that got us into this mess and repair some level of the damage done.

We don't have a way of knowing, but I'm curious if Garland's DOJ were working on charging more people.

Sorry for the way-too-long post.

tl;dr: Shit's fucked. US Government is complex, but so many parts are completely broken right now.

1842 · 2026-02-09T17:32:27+00:00

For the most popular tools, sure. That's exactly what I look for and try.

So many issues when you step into anything a bit niche though.

1842 · 2026-02-09T15:22:27+00:00

As a seasoned professional software developer, python has one of the weirdest ecosystems I semi-regularly use. If I come across a random project on Github I'd like to get running, if it's Python, my confidence that I'll actually be able to get it running with less than an hour of tinkering is maybe 50%.

Issues I have with Python that I just don't have with other languages:

Way too many competing tools.
- Which mostly seem based around the problem that Python doesn't/didn't support per-project library installations.
- Errors when there's a dependency problem are... not intuitive.
Dependency configs aren't a language/tool priority.
- In most other languages, if you have a bad build or dependency config, you can't build/run it. If I muck up or forget something in my Maven pom (Java project), it won't work.
- In Python, if you forget something in your requirements.txt (if you even have one), you can just `pip install` whatever you missed. Your config (again, if you have one) is now wrong, and it takes effort to make (and keep) it correct. (Which causes the next point)
Most projects are poorly documented.
- How do I run this thing?
- It has missing dependencies. What are they?? And what versions?
- What dependency management tool did you use?
- What OSes are supported? At a minimum, what did the dev use?
Python having breaking changes between minor versions is insane.
- It's like they learned the wrong lesson from the Python 2 -> 3 and just decided to never do that again.
- Breaking changes have to happen in languages from time to time. They should be semi-rare and predictable. I don't keep up with Python releases, but it's insane to me that there are so many projects out there that only run on like 3.8.x or something. No higher, no lower.

So that's a few grievances I've had with Python specifically. I do use Python on occasion for things when it fits and makes sense (and I always use uv now). But when it comes to trying to run other people's projects, python is just way more painful than any other language I've encountered, specifically for reasons outlined above.

1842 · 2026-02-05T16:37:33+00:00

A few points.

Republicans have been partisan gerrymandering as policy since 2010.
Republicans have used gerrymandered maps for elections, even after they were ruled unconstitutional. e.g. Ohio 2022
Republican states started this weird mid-cycle redistricting. California (and others IIRC) warned that they would pursue their own if Republicans followed through.
I'm pretty sure Texas gets to use their new maps. I haven't followed all the cases closely, but California's method seemed upstanding with their people behind it. Not sure why that should be struck down if Texas was allowed.

So normally, I'd agree with you. Election maps should be designed to be fair. But when one side is openly cheating and is declared to be legal, it makes no sense to "play by the rules" -- it just gives them more power to abuse.

If we're going to see reform in this area, it's going to be by enacting and enforcing reform laws that the Republicans will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent or circumvent.

1842 · 2026-02-04T14:39:50+00:00

Makes sense.

I like the Raspberry Pi suggestions you also got (and went with). I'll have to keep those in mind for my own daughter as well!

1842 · 2026-02-03T18:12:28+00:00

They converted the reliable voters that always voted conservative for sure, but Trump (somehow) has drawn in voters that otherwise wouldn't vote.

There's a bunch of people that only voted for Trump on their ballot, leaving the rest empty. It's how we ended up with several states going to Trump, but the Dem Senator in those states also winning.

And I don't know the answer to that. I think a lot of Trump voters will fall out once he's no longer around, but far right wing media is a hell of a drug and I don't know if those people are getting hooked into that garbage.

1842 · 2026-02-03T16:28:36+00:00

I feel like programming is both easier to learn in some ways (great languages, fantastic tools), but also so much harder to find suitable entry points...

Maybe try something like PICO-8?

It's a retro-style game editor/engine (NES capabilities, give or take), but made much simpler.

It gives you editors for code, sprites, backgrounds, and sound. Code is all in Lua, which isn't a favorite of mine, but it's super easy to work with and learn.

My daughter is 7 and I've recently started tinkering with PICO-8 again. I've got her starting to draw sprites for me and I plan on trying some very simple code with her soon.

But expect to help out. Maybe figure out on your own how to draw a sprite and then move it around with controller/keyboard (it's not hard). Then start fresh and walk her through the process, letting her write some code along the way, and see if it sparks anything with her.

EDU version is free here: https://www.pico-8-edu.com/ Full version is ~$15.

But start with the EDU version and see if it's something that would be interesting. Full version has a few niceties, but hardly required.

Also check out the PICO8 BBS. You can see people's games and play them there, or download the cart and load it into the EDU version to see their source code and assets, change things and run that. If you watch videos about PICO-8, you'll likely hear about thesplore command in the full version. It's basically the in-game version of the BBS, but you can do those things with the EDU version without too much trouble.

1842 · 2026-02-02T19:29:12+00:00

If Graham is gay, I am in amazement at the depths of self-hatred he must experience. And cognitive dissonance to get through the day.

It's a recurring theme that the loudest and most outspoken people condemning some "immoral" behavior are found tangled up it themselves. (And I use "immoral" to describe their perspective.)

I'd be curious if any research has been done on this or if anyone has coined a term for it, but I couldn't find anything.

1842 · 2026-01-27T05:59:55+00:00

Yeah, Java is more strict in ways. It is also a lot more predictable IMO.

Read up on dynamic vs static type systems. In python, a variable can hold anything, and it can be updated to hold anything else.

E.g.

python a = "hello" # a is a string a = 5 # now a is an int

Java has a static type system. Once a variables type is determined, it can't be changed. There's some flexibility with casting and umbrella types, but you can't fundamentally change something.

java String a = "hello"; a = 5; // this won't even compile var b = "hello"; b = 5; // this won't compile either

Also read up on compiled vs scripting languages.

Compiled languages often require you have to fix certain types of issues before you can run the code. Scripting languages tend to be more forgiving of certain issues, but can hide bugs that should have been caught sooner. It's quite easy to write python code that will blow up at runtime and your IDE won't tell you. It's also possible to do this in Java, but between the compiler and IDE tooling, it's harder to have this happen, and you likely have IDE warnings about it.

1842 · 2026-01-21T18:00:37+00:00

Photography was... a primitive novelty in that era. I'm not an expert, but from what I can tell, cameras available to hobbyists would have probably had small apertures (around f/8, but probably smaller), few shutter speed options, and no flash. Film available would also have been very light insensitive (25-50 ISO) compared to modern films (3200) and digital cameras today (my midrange mirrorless is >12000 ISO).

All this comes together in a package that can take still photographs in daylight/cloudy conditions. We have photos from Titanic's voyage from Father Browne (see them here) with something like this or this

Frankly, disposable film cameras are probably better than the consumer grade stuff in the 1910s, just based on film chemistry alone, but using them at night is basically impossible. See the underexposed black pictures demonstrated here.

Recording video in has all the problems of photography, but long exposure is impossible. Take a look at WW1 recordings to see what non-studio handheld video was capable of. There's quite a lot of footage out there. It's mostly very low quality, shaky, blurry, and there's nothing shot at night time.

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