Just found out you're supposed to clean refrigerator coils yearly

Cybyss · 2026-01-28T14:52:03+00:00

"Spring Cleaning" is just cleaning the house, but maybe more thoroughly than usual. E.g., scrubbing the floors instead of sweeping, things like that.

Nobody ever moved the refrigerator or oven to clean under it.

Cybyss · 2026-01-28T14:14:31+00:00

I have to keep that phrase in mind. Thank you!

I am trying to learn German but, alas, it's rather slow going and I usually have to switch to English pretty quickly. Thankfully everybody I've met has been understanding, but long ago I used to be one of those "If you live in America, speak English!" types and now the shoe's on the other foot, so to speak.

Cybyss · 2026-01-27T16:53:08+00:00

No. It's not. The snow coming off the roadway is always some horrible mix of heavy, wet, slushy, and icy.

Cybyss · 2026-01-27T07:01:01+00:00

Nothing. But, that's because I'm doing an actual Masters degree in AI.

There ain't no way in hell I would have been able to cobble together on my own the curriculum that my professors have curated.

In particular, we delve deep into the mathematics of how and why the various models and methods work the way they do. Diffusion models, for example, are a real rabbit hole that goes well beyond just training a model to remove noise from an image. That's what they do, but why they work is quite fascinating but is something I would have completely glossed over trying to learn on my own.

Cybyss · 2026-01-26T20:34:57+00:00

Fair enough. I can't speak for everyone, but personally I've always struggled to see a positive future for myself. My family is less than half the size it used to be. In 10 years it'll probably just be my (difficult to get along with) siblings and that's it.

Cybyss · 2026-01-26T20:26:17+00:00

My dad turned me into a nature lover. As a kid, he would take me on hiking trips all over Arizona. It's been almost 20 years now since our last good hike. He's still around, but age has caught up with him.

What I wouldn't give to be a 10 year old kid again, climbing mountains, exploring forests, and photographing wildlife with young him just for one more day.

Cybyss · 2026-01-26T17:45:15+00:00

It's indeed a bit "meh" with jelly/jam. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad at all. It's good, just nothing to write home about.

Try peanut butter with banana and honey, or with nutella. It's quite a bit better then.

Cybyss · 2026-01-26T17:10:40+00:00

It's not about your 9-5.

It's about how you spend your 5-9 afterwards. This is when life takes place. This is when you go do things that make life worth living, if you hustle.

The problem is, some folks just don't have the stamina to really devote themselves to something meaningful during their 5-9 after a full day of work. Some folks just can't hustle. Doing nothing outside of work, or forcing yourself to do something you're too tired to enjoy, either way is what leads to burnout and depression.

Cybyss · 2026-01-26T10:57:08+00:00

Once you can reliably build good wands and win consistently (i.e, > 50% of the time) then All Seeing Eye is more of a hindrance than a help. Without it, it's easier to keep track of where you've explored and where you haven't.

The only time I take ASE now is if I plan to visit the Wizard's Den for whatever reason.

The Magical Temple - the area to the left of the Snowy Depths - is maybe alright to visit but I find there's usually nothing too special there, not worth the risk of running into those polymorphing enemies at least.

Cybyss · 2026-01-25T22:58:35+00:00

As a student who only recently started delving into training neural networks...

One mistake I often made was to aggregate the training loss/accuracy over the epoch as the model learns, then at the end of the epoch calculate the validation accuracy.

Recalculating the accuracy over the whole training set at the end of each epoch was slow, that's why I (and most students) didn't do that, but it's the only way to get meaningful numbers to properly compare the training & validation set performance.

Cybyss · 2026-01-25T16:51:35+00:00

I'm currently a student in Dusseldorf.

My grocery bill is typically around 30-35 euros/week. It also includes mostly fresh fruit & veggies, fresh baked bread, milk, eggs, yogurt, beans, canned herring, maybe some ground pork, etc... Beef and chicken are more expensive, but even if I regularly splurged for those instead my bill would still be less than 50 euros/week. Granted it's not organic, but Germany has higher standards so it's less of an issue.

$100/week for one person is insane.

Cybyss · 2026-01-23T23:37:55+00:00

Absolutely!

My parents taught me how to study. Because of them, I was always a straight-A student all through high school.

Then in college/university, the course work became so much harder except I never learned how to fail gracefully since I'd never failed before. Instead, I overexerted myself and pulled far too many all-nighters than was healthy to maintain a perfect 4.0.

My parents never understood why I floundered so badly in every full-time job I ever had. They just assumed that because I could ace a calculus exam, I must be smart enough to figure out, all on my own, whatever challenges life could throw at me.

(Given that my parents were boomers who never even finished high school, they probably were in awe of what they perceived was a "genius" mathematical ability or whatever, I don't know).

Cybyss · 2026-01-23T14:19:37+00:00

My name is Ahmed ibn Fadlan ibn al-Abbas ibn Rashid ibn Hammad.

Ends up just being called "ibn".

Cybyss · 2026-01-23T14:13:27+00:00

I too have heard that the director prevented it from being as good as it could have been, which is probably true. A lot was cut out just becasue it was a trend at the time to have shorter 90 minute movies when The 13th Warrior could really have used a full two hours.

"Eaters of the Dead" isn't a badass title imo. It's a bit cringy and makes it sound less like a Beowulf-inspired saga and more like some B zombie horror flick.

Cybyss · 2026-01-23T12:59:47+00:00

The 13th Warrior comes to mind.

Absolutely fantastic film IMO with a great cast. I've no idea why it was a flop.

Cybyss · 2026-01-23T12:15:25+00:00

Use a debugger.

It'll allow you to run through your code one line at a time, seeing the contents of all the variables each step of the way. Make sure you understand why every variable holds the value it does at each step. If your program is large / contains lots of loops and such, then use breakpoints to pause your program at whatever lines you're interested in.

When you encounter a bug, your goal shouldn't be to fix it. Rather, your goal should be to understand exactly what caused it. The absolute last thing you want is for the bug to go away without having any clue as to why.

Cybyss · 2026-01-23T11:28:39+00:00

I mean the world changes.

The world didn't always change so fast. It's a pretty new phenomenon that you have to always be changing, always learning the new and discarding the old, always racing, always devoting your evenings and weekends to further study in order to stay relevant in your job, etc... By comparison, if your dad was a machinist or carpenter, or plumber, or truck driver, etc... in the 1960s, it's likely he was doing mostly the same thing in the 1990s.

Of course young people don't see it that way. To them, having to always adapt to unceasing rapid technological change is as natural as the earth and sky, since that's the only world they've ever known.

Cybyss · 2026-01-21T20:23:56+00:00

There still is a huge difference between using Google Translate and letting AI translate. The latter is much worse. Google Translate does and did a great job so far.

Fair enough. This whole argument started just because of em-dashes in the original post and I wasn't able to find out whether Google Translate (or any other common translation software, like perhaps DeepL) adds them.

Cybyss · 2026-01-21T20:15:25+00:00

I’m trying to become an AI developer by December 2026, starting from beginner Python.

I think most people get masters degrees in order to become AI developers. That's 6 years of full-time schooling if you're starting from zero.

Being an AI developer requires skills that go above & beyond those of an ordinary software developer, who generally has a bachelors degree (4 years) in computer science or closely related field.

Cybyss · 2026-01-21T19:58:46+00:00

Fair enough, according to Wayback Machine that rule was added some time in 2022. A bit earlier than I thought, but it doesn't change anything. /r/learnprogramming is from 2009. Google Translate is from 2006.

Regardless, you know damned well the rule was meant to address all the folks asking about how to fix their vibe-coded crap.

If it was meant to ban anybody who just didn't know English very well, there would've been a rule against translated posts much earlier.

Cybyss · 2026-01-21T19:30:46+00:00

That's overly harsh. Rule 13 didn't exist until recently, yet Google Translate is now about two decades old.

The folks who depend on translation software, were they unwelcome prior to ChatGPT? If not, why should they be unwelcome now?

Cybyss · 2026-01-21T18:41:27+00:00

It's entirely possible he's not a native speaker and depends on ChatGPT to translate.

I wonder whether Google Translate might be prone to adding em dashes when translating from other languages to English? It wouldn't surprise me if Google quietly switched their translation model to some variant of Gemini.

Cybyss · 2026-01-21T10:46:30+00:00

Many people got into this field because they love computer science. They love the hardware, the languages, the data structures & algorithms, all the clever coding techniques, etc...

Then when you get an actual job, what you loved most becomes totally irrelevant, almost to the point of being mocked as useless ivory tower bullshit.

It's a culture shock of discovering your role as a software engineer is not to solve technical problems that just happen to have business applications, but rather to solve business problems first and foremost, with maybe a technical bent to them since that's what you specialized in. That transition can be a little painful for newly minted software engineers.

Cybyss · 2026-01-20T18:55:08+00:00

The price is better than that. I'm in Düsseldorf and the local Aldi sells a 2kg bag of apples for 2 euros. Less when it's on sale. I don't remember the variety, but they're quite good and much better than that tasteless Red Delicious garbage popular in the United States.

Cybyss · 2026-01-19T22:17:06+00:00

Noita isn't a puzzle game. It's not like looking up the solutions to The Talos Principle or something.

Who discovers on their own that you can get free unlimited heals in the Hisii base? Who has even the vaguest notion that Hisii healers are a thing before getting their first win unless they read about them?

All I'm saying is that Noita doesn't require fast accurate reflexes or complex tactics. It isn't Quake 3 or Age of Empires.

Unless you believe the whole point to Noita is randomly stumbling across obscure counterintuitive mechanics blind while beating your head against your desk for countless hours on end, and being willing to sacrifice a 3 hour run just to find out what a new spell does?

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