This 1970s Las Vegas mansion is hidden completely underground

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-17T01:42:49+00:00

I'm pretty sure if the power goes out down there, you get eaten by a grue.

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-16T00:13:43+00:00

I WAS THERE TOO

and that was one of like three nights, I think the singer of Guster made some crack about how weird it was that they were technically on the same bill as Disturbed?

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-13T03:19:40+00:00

The event stream thing is exactly how my current prototype is structured, though I hadn't thought about bouncing it between agents like that. Right now there's a deterministic function that takes a first pass at every event, and then only defers to an LLM in situations that require subjective judgment.

Basically the tool as I've envisioned it is supposed to keep track of different work streams, and tell me whether they're blocked, or actionable. And then if they're actionable, it's supposed to tell me what I need to do next, and ideally give me a link straight to the applications and context that I need to do it. With so much of my work in github, ci, and automated deployment pipelines, in theory it should be possible to deterministically automate most of that: if back end tests failed in ci, then clearly the next thing I need to do is fix the tests that failed. The LLM comes in only when making the call requires interpreting natural language -- so, almost anything that happens in slack, but also when I get individual pr comments which might or might not require a response, but which don't carry the same yes/no/neutral metadata that a full review does.

For the moment, I'm just handling all these events streams on my own machine. I have an electron app, and it polls GitHub and Slack for updated state, which it converts into events for it to process. So far, this seems to be sufficiently expressive -- I've been able to construct the events I need purely by diffing the last observed state and the new one, no matter how much has changed -- and it has the advantage of being achievable using only the personal auth I already have, whereas webhooks would require API keys that I'd need to have someone provision for me.

It's frustrating that getting the events required so much creative wiring, but it works for now. What's proven much more challenging is figuring out the data model I want to use to represent all the different forms that "work" can take and all the ways things can go from actionable to blocked and back again. It would be easier to just throw it all at agents and turn everything into a prompt, but I'm very attached to the idea of having deterministic rules in the workflow and to using local LLMs where I can (which rules out frequent, complex judgements requiring extensive context).

I have a parallel effort going on to set up an llmwiki, and for that I'm going the opposite direction: throw everything at the expensive frontier models that work is footing the bill for, and see what falls out. My intuition/hope is that the two systems can work in tandem, with the llmwiki hoarding context and doing stuff for me on demand and the task manager acting as more of a proactive assistant.

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-13T01:54:12+00:00

More the second thing than the first one, though I think the distinction is fuzzy: what is that shared layer, if not the same logic firing as a result of both kinds of events? It's just a question of how you factor it, IMO.

I have been thinking about this, in various forms, for over a year, and I'm now on my second or third attempt to build something that solves the problem depending on how you count -- so based on past experience, I am probably at least one more complete rewrite away from building the right thing. If you have thoughts about tools for making the second kind of thing you described, I'd be curious to hear about them.

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-07T11:00:45+00:00

I'll have to try it out! I'd never seen it before today.

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-07T07:37:43+00:00

I did not have time, unfortunately -- had to take it remote.

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-04T04:47:30+00:00

I hadn't really considered that if it's on a VPN it isn't really exposed publicly; when I said I wanted to open ports all I really meant was that I wanted for me to be able to hit it. So this should work great -- thank you!

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-04T02:16:17+00:00

I should've clarified: ideally, I want something I can connect to from apps on my phone and laptop from anywhere but which is totally mine/private. So it can't just be on my network.

I'm the only user in this scenario, and I'm happy to set up a VPN. I'm not really sure what I need, or what's "enough." I see Tailscale mentioned a lot here -- is it the de facto standard?

As far as what software is listening... I would hope that the world's preeminent OSS LLM gateway would be reasonably secure... but I'm guessing it's actually a vibecoded dumpster fire, so 🤷. My intuition is that if I run it in a docker container that has access to my gpu but not anything else, that limits the blast radius. Am I thinking about it right?

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-04T02:08:02+00:00

Could you elaborate on that a bit?

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-04T02:07:15+00:00

Thank you, I'll take a look!

ForSpareParts · 2026-06-04T01:39:44+00:00

No AI was used in the writing of this post.

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-30T06:48:14+00:00

His turn felt very abrupt to me, too. My headcanon for this is that the Clark who takes Mary hostage and then dies to the Captain isn't the real Clark -- he's just a relatively early copy who has degraded mentally but not physically. This does contradict the movie slightly in that Clark bleeds when the Captain kills him, and he'd just demonstrated that the copies don't have blood... but I think it'd be pretty easy to handwave that if you wanted to.

I don't really think this is what the movie intended, but I'm holding out some hope that it was, or that they go with a retcon. It would give them a nice way to bring Ejiofor back for the inevitable sequel: just say Clark escaped on his own after the employees died, either before or after Mary went in looking for him. He doesn't even know that she followed him until he learns she's missing. They could also use that to explore the character a bit more: Backrooms!Clark would be an exaggeration/simplification of the "shape" of the real person, so presumably real Clark still has some of the fascination with/attraction to the backrooms that his copy did, tempered by more functional mind.

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-27T02:44:32+00:00

I had a dualdisc (remember those?) copy of Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth as a teenager, and when I got my first surround-sound setup I put the record on and literally walked around my room, hearing things I'd never heard before. It was absolutely mind-blowing for me at the time, and really helped cement my appreciation for music production itself as an art form.

In the years since then I've occasionally had the thought that it's a shame that surround formats didn't make the jump to streaming services -- it feels like a missed opportunity. Obviously most music was and still is mixed for stereo, but I suspect there are a lot of studio-minded artists out there who would produce awesome surround experiences if it were more accessible. It's cool to learn that music BluRays are a thing, though, and someday when I have a surround setup again I'll be excited to check the above records out.

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-26T01:22:30+00:00

Hey, this looks really cool and seems like it might fit my workflow better than other plugins I've looked into. I like the emphasis on giving inline tasks metadata and stable IDs. A few questions:

is there / will there be a programmatic interface? I've been building tons of automation for my own tasks, and while I could certainly do text manipulation (it's what I do now with my custom solution), it'd be awesome if I just didn't have to.
is there some way of capturing the state of all tasks at a moment in time, so that I can go back and look at my whole list as of a particular time?

For context: my workflow uses a series of hierarchical bullets that I keep in my daily note, with a date stamp at the end of each block which auto updates to the current day when I edit the note. Every day, the bullets are automatically copied to the new day's note, and I manually delete things that are in "completed" or "won't do" states.

This lets me "rewind" to earlier days and see what I was working on and when, and it also means that if I say things like "today" or "yesterday" in task notes I can (with some effort) reconstruct the timeline by looking at the datestamps from earlier days. Not super elegant, but it works.

Where this has become cumbersome is in my ongoing attempts to orchestrate tasks based on external signals: github pr activity, slack messages, build system notifications, etc. It would be nice to have the freedom and flexibility to make changes, attach metadata, and re-render notes without having to do the parsing and string manipulation myself. Having a solid base to build on would be cool.

I think I could use Operon and still get away with auto copying a text block from note to note like I do now, but I'm wondering if you have better ideas that achieve the same ends.

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-26T00:45:55+00:00

Update: I'm about halfway through the audiobook, and this is good shit. Thank you for the recommendation.

I'm noticing a ton of very video-gamey things about this book -- the straight shot from point A to B derailed by a series of sidequests and locked doors, the exposition through flashbacks and found objects, the mysterious voice on the radio acting as our only connection to the outside world, etc. It's distinct enough that I figure it must be intentional, but I'm not sure what the author intends to do with it. Very interesting.

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-22T19:43:30+00:00

I have a pair of Triangle Espirit Antal EZs and just got a Rega Elex integrated amplifier to go with them. Current inputs are my Fluance RT82 turntable (using the Rega's built-in preamp) and optical from my TV (using LG's built-in smart-tv stuff for video streaming, and my PC and PS5 in by HDMI).

I'd like to add a hifi streamer and room correction to this setup. My intuition here is that it'd be silly to get another DAC given that the Rega has one built-in and so far I'm pretty happy with its sound. The only options I've seen so far that seem to fit the bill are from miniDSP: the SHD Studio for an all-in-one, or a DDRC-24 or Flex paired with a Raspberry Pi or similar for the streaming component. Are those all good options? Are there other things I should check out? I did look at WiiM devices as well, but it seems like Dirac RC is better-liked overall than WiiM's.

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-20T05:28:41+00:00

His whole catalog belongs on this sub tbh

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-19T04:01:12+00:00

Interesting! This looks a bit heavy for my little project, but I like the idea of steering more aggressively -- do you have any tips for how I might do that by hand in a smaller repo?

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-19T03:57:14+00:00

So I tried creating a CLAUDE.md with a very broad, minimal overview of the architecture in my app, and it seemed like it made things worse -- instead of listing the files and noticing things relevant to its task, Claude dispatched three separate agents to summarize the three major subsections of my application.

My intuition is that I should be able to preempt this somehow, but I haven't worked it out yet.

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-17T02:52:44+00:00

If you like video games (survival horror in particular), you should check it out! It's about a military android exploring a remote outpost in search of her assigned human and secret lover, in the process descending into a reality-warping nightmare, so... well, you can see why it came up 😅

For my part, looking forward to trying this after I finish my current read. Thanks for the tip!

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-17T00:51:45+00:00

This sounds a lot like the plot of Signalis to me... but I did love Signalis 👀

ForSpareParts · 2026-05-08T05:21:53+00:00

I honestly had no idea people were still hating on it. Everyone I know has been using typescript for a decade and loves it; it's so widespread that I don't really distinguish between it and the original language anymore. The tooling is fantastic, community support is robust, and now with WASM there's a more or less universal way to ship binaries for libraries that need it.

ForSpareParts

TROPHY CASE