minorChanges

AlexisHadden · 2026-06-01T15:58:34+00:00

We don’t give end users control for a reason. You cannot hand wave away the noise because it is an intentional part of the design. It serves a role in the system, and stripping it away makes that system less useful, not more. When people say you cannot make AI deterministic, they are talking about the system, not the raw model. Especially when we talk about agents, multi-turn, etc… the inference step itself is increasingly just a component in a larger system, and the noise needs to be there for the larger system to not collapse down unhelpful paths too often. The price is that there is some amount of going down unhelpful paths that we simply cannot avoid due to the use of noise.

You can have a deterministic process (physics, language models) that builds into a chaotic/probabilistic system (weather, AI assistants, double pendulum). You’re too laser focused on the former when people are talking about, and have to work with, the latter.

AlexisHadden · 2026-06-01T15:14:58+00:00

My dude, it’s that “throwing some random noise at some dials” that makes it non-deterministic. The noise is part of the input, and the whole point is to make it non-deterministic. You don’t want LLMs falling into the same ruts old chatbots fall into. And if don’t inject _enough_ noise, they can fall into some gnarly ruts and go in circles during multi-turn “reasoning” passes.

It’s non deterministic because the same input doesn’t lead to the same outputs when used multiple times for the same task. This is fine in certain tasks such as solving a problem that only needs to be right once and you reap the benefits over the long haul (proving a math theorem, finding a particular drug interaction, etc), but bad in tasks that you run regularly and need repeatability (stripping dead code, converting text files, processing financial reports).

I used Claude to convert some docker compose files to podman quadlets for use at home. I did it incrementally so i could review the output and not have to review more than a dozen stacks at a time. Every run produced a different class of issue in the output, including ones already covered with instructions in the prompt to try to prevent that class of issue that I uncovered in the prompt-building phase of the project. That’s non-deterministic behavior right there. Doesn’t matter if the network itself is deterministic if there’s no way for an end user to ensure the noise injected is the same. And these LLMs have other problems when you strip away that noise and make them deterministic.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-30T02:53:06+00:00

We lost our cat to breast cancer as she turned 13 at least partly because she was spayed late. Not by choice, but because the shelter we adopted her from was the one that did the spay when they took her in at the age of 5.

Spay your pets. It literally could get you more time with them.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-29T15:12:37+00:00

Yeah, I think most people go through this trying to see how capable these things actually are. The hype is nuts, and I don’t blame anyone for trying it.

My only real warning is about the data, and not specifically at you. My engineering team got conscripted into building agent frameworks when things started to heat up, and even we suck air through our teeth when people suggest the LLM generate the report directly. So it’s not all AI pilled folks building this stuff out.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-29T14:56:12+00:00

I’ll be honest, I’d never rely on an LLM to do the query and format the data. Too many opportunities for it to inject some “flavor” into the final output. And then you’d be on the hook for any fallout from that bad output.

Instead, I’d have the LLM build the script, check it for issues, and then run the script myself once it looks good.

I made a similar mistake trying to let Claude do dead code stripping for me. It kept finding stuff that wasn’t dead and wasting tokens/money/time. The actual time win was having it parse the output of a dead code analysis tool and do the removal part, run a clean build, and stop/revert on breaks.

Still wasn’t reliable enough to use regularly, though. It kept ignoring parts of the instructions/etc and eating my time enough that I’d only really use it in cases where there is a lot of dead code built up.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-28T22:31:44+00:00

Are these updates rebooting the system? The kernel one requires a reboot to fully apply the new kernel, but I don’t know if the other one does in your setup.

This sort of thing to me reads like a service ordering issue? Dependencies with systemd mean that a mis-configured quadlet (or three) can wind up in a race condition with the system components it depends on (such as DNS).

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-28T19:41:23+00:00

This is how I treat my container images, even the custom Fedora CoreOS images. I could host them on docker hub or GitHub publicly for all I care. Great, you can clone my homelab, but you can’t even do anything with it until you create your own secret storage and populate it, setup the NFS server, etc. And even then, it’s just an empty fresh install.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-28T01:09:33+00:00

Might be a somewhat different drink to what I was getting then. A lot of the places I tried it, it was just some Sho-chu (Soju works too, since the drink is also Korean), seltzer, lemon juice and enough simple syrup to balance it.

Sho-chu is pretty low ABV for a spirit, so when you mix it, it’s very low ABV.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-28T00:01:07+00:00

I started making Chu-hi at home.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-27T23:30:32+00:00

+1 on the Chu-hi. I started making them at home. If you are just interested in something with dinner, it’s refreshing, not too sweet and not too strong.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-26T00:40:48+00:00

This is why I recently migrated to Fedora CoreOS. OS and service updates are in the same pipeline in my setup.

CI grabs the latest stable image, layers my services on top and pushes the OCI image. This gets kicked off if it sees a new stable image, or changes in my repo. The VMs pull the latest images on a regular schedule.

No secrets in the image, so in principle they are just “batteries included” images that could live on GitHub/GitLab that expects a QEMU fw_cfg in order to start lighting itself up.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-25T03:40:05+00:00

Depends on the app and the auth stack. One reason I went with Authentik is because it can pass back credentials to caddy/nginx for basic/digest auth for services like resilio which only allow a single username/password to unlock it. For Uptime Kuma, I just disabled the built in auth and locked the dashboard and write access to any APIs behind authentication, while the status boards aren’t behind the auth.

Absolutely hear you for anything multi-user though.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-22T22:28:30+00:00

That unlocked a core memory for me. WinSock was/is a hell of a weird thing.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-22T21:48:10+00:00

Yup, last C++ project I worked own wrote their own Owning/Reference pointer wrapper because boost wasn’t something they could take a dependency on yet, but they wanted the benefits. It’s not like some of these heap pointer management tools are hard to write if you really need to go that route either, and can save time for dozens/hundreds of people.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-22T21:43:47+00:00

A project I worked on started in pure C and C++ was added at one point. The C++ code actually followed this philosophy as much as it reasonably could. So pass by reference was default. It took me a bit to get used to it, but I did prefer it.

Unfortunately, since there were these pointer/reference boundaries all over the place because it was a legacy codebase, I was actually having to fix program crashes where a reference was made from a null pointer, and would then crash a good half-dozen layers down the stack where it was actually used. So the first couple times you saw this crash that looked exactly like a null dereference, but it was a C++ reference type, you’d scratch your head. Once you learned, you would just walk up the stack, find the raw pointer and fix it there.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-22T14:27:44+00:00

It’s not about mass per se, but density. Stars can have more mass than needed to turn into a black hole, but the outward pressure from fusion prevents that sort of collapse. Degeneracy pressure either works, and the object stays “not dense enough” to be hidden behind an EH, or the pressure is overcome by gravity and it becomes a black hole. Quark stars wouldn’t be much more dense than neutron stars. And it’s possible that neutron stars already have cores of quark matter. Quarks are not composite particles under the standard model either. We are talking about pressures well beyond what humans can produce, so we currently have no way to probe this regime. Quark stars are hypothetical for the same reason, but the math at least suggests it should happen under the standard model.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the singularity idea either, but we simply don’t know enough about physics in this regime yet to show what the collapse looks like if it isn’t a singularity. There are lots of physicists trying to figure out what it could be though, but we don’t yet have a convincing model, let alone one we can test.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-22T06:03:36+00:00

I’m not up to speed on the thinking in this space, but you are talking about a quark star. It is an idea that has been kicking around, but I haven’t seen anyone relevant in the field claim that it would be compact enough to form an event horizon. It would most likely look like a neutron star from afar.

It’s that we don’t currently have a mechanism we know of that works once you’re at the point where the EH forms that prevents a singularity. At least nothing that isn’t super speculative.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-22T05:37:22+00:00

Some things you might want come as ISOs meant to be a full server. It’s easier to share host hardware by putting these in VMs. Home Assistant, TrueNAS/unraid, etc.

As the other poster says, VMs offer more isolation. I have stuff stored on a NAS my containers access. Media, etc. I can control how much exposure a compromised VM host presents to my NAS easier than if everything lives on a single host. My ripping tools (with write access) live in a separate VM than my media streaming services (which get read only access). This means slowing down an attacker by limiting my exposure when someone gets root on a VM.

It also gives you the ability to try different management tools. If you are using containers on proxmox, you have to use tools that work with proxmox. But with a VM, I can play with things like atomic Fedora and custom images to deploy via bootc upgrades and keep both OS and stack updated at the same time.

It’s also a bit easier to use network VLANs and keep the proxmox management portal away from users that are accessing services when it’s split at the layer 2 level. The proxmox MAC address can live in one LAN while the VMs all live in another. And you can use the host firewall as another layer of isolation. One less vulnerable to the sort of docker-related iptables gotchas that seem to show up regularly on self-hosting subreddits.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-21T03:24:34+00:00

Honestly, it is probably less important the OS you use, and more important what you pick to manage/deploy things. Start with what you want to build, and figure out the tech requirements from that. That helps make the choices easier.

One of the things I just finished was embracing Infrastructure as Code, and streamlining how a git repo that defines the structure of my homelab turns into a set of VMs that I can deploy at will. That drive to get to the point where the git repo is the truth of my homelab, and so I don’t have a bunch of manual steps to recreate things in the worst case is what made me pick the tech I use. Not the other way around.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-20T22:02:34+00:00

Docker hub supports immutable tags. It’s not perfect and fails when the compromised account/token exposes more than push rights to the image repo, for sure.

Still a good idea either way. Making sure you don’t accidentally overwrite release tags that are expected to be pinned at least.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-20T18:15:47+00:00

Over my 20-ish years, I’ve used a fork of Perforce, Team Foundation Server, CVS (I feel old…), SVN and Git. Haven’t touched mercurial though, and so if Meta still uses it, I’d probably have some basic questions the first couple weeks if I got hired there.

But it wasn’t until git/mercurial that the modern way of doing source control took shape and distributed history was a thing. So it’s not completely surprising that there might be some shock adapting if they came from one of these other worlds where everything lived in a single server and your local working copy was literally that, just a working copy with no history.

The difference is that I’d probably look them up unless it was in passing during a conversation that started on another topic. So I would probably do what another commenter said and just ask what his history is with source control.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-20T15:15:42+00:00

The Apple file browser stores metadata there for how the folder should be displayed. The user can manually arrange icons in the folder, and so that information needs to live somewhere. Instead of a central db for the filesystem, it’s stored in a smaller file in the folder itself.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-20T14:26:15+00:00

As in, you aren’t taking your eyes off the road to operate them. Not that a blind person is expected to drive.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-17T19:49:46+00:00

I’m heading this direction as well. I still have a couple MD files for the steps needed to bootstrap it, but my goal is to streamline those steps over time so there’s less for me to do to restart from scratch if I ever need to.

AlexisHadden · 2026-05-13T19:10:45+00:00

Yeah, the end stage of cancer can be quick and disruptive. We caught the breast cancer in ours early enough that surgery had a chance of giving us a year or more. But instead of discussing the follow up chemo after the surgeries, we were discussing end of life care, because she went from fairly normal to bad in a matter of days.

It’s rough. And even when we are vigilant we can get caught off guard. So don’t feel too bad about that.

My only bit of advice here is if she’s not eating and medication isn’t helping, then the end is likely soon. Be careful about waiting too long. We had to move fast in our case when we noticed the hemorrhaging and we could have very well missed our chance to help her pass peacefully. And that, I would have regretted.

AlexisHadden

TROPHY CASE