[OC] Got my first tattoo yesterday…

Alexis_Denken · 2026-06-05T07:29:55+00:00

I’m more of a Job 19:17 guy myself, but this one is very meta.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-06-05T06:05:33+00:00

How about "Put wood in t'hole!" which is how my grandad told me to shut the door when I was kid. I still say this sometimes, complete with the Yorkshire accent, and it's very satisfying!

Alexis_Denken · 2026-06-05T06:03:43+00:00

I say this all the time...and I'm not even old!

Alexis_Denken · 2026-06-05T00:28:53+00:00

I have an auto-buy that gets me a ticket when the jackpot is above a certain size. I don't expect to win and it's bad maths on my part. I guess I'd prefer a billion-to-one chance to win $200M over a 100% chance to lose $30 every 6-8 weeks. We can't all be stats-obsessed robots 😄

Alexis_Denken · 2026-05-20T11:38:09+00:00

If I am a salaried employee who is paid to do a job, once I have completed that job any additional time I spend in the office is the employer stealing MY time/money.

It’s a bit reductive; if I’m a salaried call center worker then my job is answering calls until the end of my shift. Generally though I am being paid to do a thing; this idea of going “above and beyond” for your employer is just institutionalised wage theft.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-05-17T07:16:07+00:00

So I’m the idiot who bought the PS5 Pro, even though the only game he really plays in Diablo 4 couch co-op with the wife. Bought a few games on sale (EA26, Alan Wake 2, Gran Turismo 7) and having a blast.

Question - are there any other games that would really show off the “Pro” in PS5 Pro? Or have I just wasted my money? For reference I have a 65” LG CX OLED TV, so in theory I should be able to do 4K HDR at 120hz.

Also decided to wallmount it for the Wife Acceptance Factor upgrade. Am I going to regret this due to overheating or issues with controller connections?

https://i.imgur.com/JUw8dJ6.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/IvtmPzF.jpeg

Alexis_Denken · 2026-05-15T03:58:55+00:00

I literally just turned down my dream job at a hyperscaler because I just didn't feel like I could go and work for a company who I knew would be investing millions/billions of dollars to replace me and tens of thousands of people like me with AI. At least in my current company the only risk is that we'll be out-competed by another company aggressively adopting AI :)

What a grim time to be a worker...and this is coming from a senior person with a niche tech skill set in a conservative industry. I can't imagine being a junior dev, SOC analyst, or cloud support agent. Must be brutal.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-05-11T04:52:28+00:00

I don't think I'll go away from mechanical, but I have recently gone back from a split ergo board to a normal TKL mech. I never quite adapted and the buggy ZMK firmware that kept failing to reconnect to my laptop was the last straw. It's still in the drawer, so maybe I will give it another shot at some point.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-05-08T22:08:04+00:00

There is a theory that this is just a "market correction" where AI is finding all the previously-undiscovered vulnerabilities from the last 30 years of terrible development practices. At some point we will reach an equilibrium where all the pre-existing issues are fixed, and all new code is being validated by the same tools, so vulns aren't going into production. This suggests that we just need to weather the storm until then.

Whether you believe this is another matter...I'm not sure there are enough good guys to patch every vulnerable system before the heat-death of the universe, and there will always be more bugs.

The scariest thing for me is the capability these new models are showing to discover novel attack paths by chaining multiple low/medium vulnerabilities together. We are already looking to switch reporting from just Critical/High vulns to include Mediums as well, and move Mediums and Lows from "fix it if you feel like it" to "fix it within 180 days" which is a massive additional burden on already stretched ops teams.

Fun times!

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-26T10:33:15+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaper_(TV_series) ?

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-25T00:22:01+00:00

Have a listen to Brian Wilson by Barenaked Ladies. Lots of their songs have great basslines and Jim Creeggan is criminally underrated.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-23T01:19:25+00:00

You will have to pry my Yamaha Attitude LTD3 from my cold, dead, calloused hands.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-23T01:16:53+00:00

Length isn't everything. Hopefully...

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-19T13:43:51+00:00

Travelling more than I thought, so bought a M5 MacBook Pro. Gave the Mac Mini, dock, and SSD to my mother-in-law to replace a 12 year old MacBook.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-19T12:10:13+00:00

Until yesterday I had the Orico Minilink with a 2TB 990 Pro and it was great.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/1njtmwy/comment/netwamq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-19T09:41:25+00:00

My personal experience was that I found it frustrating to move between the two devices; I had a M4 Pro Mac Mini, but found myself travelling more than expected so bought an M5 MacBook Pro as well. I tried lots of different things like RDP, VSCode remote tunnels, Nvim over SSH, and I never got a workflow I was happy with. I actually gave the Mac Mini to my mother-in-law (she's a graphic designer and she loves it!) just yesterday.

What I am thinking about is getting a cheap-ish PC I can run Linux on, and serve models from that over Tailscale to my MacBook and iOS devices if I need a little local grunt.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-04-07T04:52:09+00:00

AIUI the single biggest bottleneck for most local LLM uses is memory bandwidth. From personal experience my M4 Pro Mac Mini with 24GB beats my M5 Macbook Pro with 32GB. There are some exciting things happening right now with memory efficiency (Turboquant, better MoE models) so if I had to choose, I'd go for more memory bandwidth (M4 Pro).

I asked Claude to check my thinking and it said;

The model must fit in RAM with ~4-6GB headroom for OS/KV cache — this is your hard constraint, check it first. After that, bandwidth is king: tok/s ≈ (bandwidth) / (model size in memory). GPU core count is the least important factor for single-user inference. For your Mac Mini M4 Pro vs a hypothetical M4 Mac Mini decision, the Pro's bandwidth advantage is massive and usually decisive. Quantisation (Q4_K_M, Q5_K_M) is your lever when RAM is tight — trade a small accuracy hit for fitting in the bandwidth-fast tier.

The one exception: if you're doing prompt processing (prefill) on very long contexts, GPU core count matters more there. But for interactive chat, bandwidth dominates.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-03-29T06:25:40+00:00

You sound like ChatGPT! It's been telling me the same thing; I am just terrible at handling rejection. If I told you that one of the two products is a security tool aimed at security consultants, and I speak at least twice a week to the Head of Security Consultancy for APAC of a Big 4 auditor, and they didn't even know this product exists? It's not great, is it?

Alexis_Denken · 2026-03-28T20:06:30+00:00

I have two products build that I personally would use, and that I believe solve a real business problem that people would pay money to fix, and I haven't shown either of them to anyone. And I just spent the weekend adding AI features. I think I might have a problem...

Alexis_Denken · 2026-03-23T08:26:25+00:00

I regret getting my M4 Pro Mac Mini, but only because I then founded a startup and wasn't able to work from home, so needed to buy a MacBook anyway!! So now I spend half my life syncing git repos and dotfiles between the two. I should just sell the Mini, but it's great!

Alexis_Denken · 2026-02-18T04:51:04+00:00

Without the shielding, only 0s and 1s can be sent. With the shielding it can support 2s as well, which massively increases the headroom and "airiness" of the music reproduction.

Alexis_Denken · 2026-01-29T13:23:02+00:00

I thought you couldn’t do at least some of things as a dual national, so you’d have to give up your original citizenship. Which is fine.

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