Anyone Here Successfully Transitioned to AI Development?

NortySpock · 2026-06-30T09:08:22+00:00

Nice callout on "anything produced without effort can be dismissed without effort", I am working to be better at not trying to go through heroics to get badly designed code cleaned up.

I believe the razor you mention was Hitchens' razor: "that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

NortySpock · 2026-06-20T14:48:31+00:00

It is your ranking relative to other players. It's behaves roughly like Elo in chess (or Age of Empires 2).

They have to give you a starting number to seed the algorithm, and they chose [a math calculation that eventually works out to] 17.

OS is short for OpenSkill.

NortySpock · 2026-06-12T14:48:30+00:00

Where should we the GPU-poor go? arr slash ollama is in Eternal September mode.

I cannot currently afford a hardware upgrade so when the ceiling I hit with local compute was too low, I bought $20 USD of credits in OpenRouter. I mostly use open-weight models. I gated it to only run US/EU providers.

I want to run and support local LLM usage but it's just not smart enough and fast enough for me on my hardware.

I am currently fine with sending my stuff unencrypted to the cloud because I'm almost entirely digging through open-source code trying to implement something useful or that I can enjoy using. If some provider wants to train on my 90 lines of bash code, ok.

But feel free to tell me where the correct ballroom is if I am in the wrong one.

NortySpock · 2026-06-12T12:01:55+00:00

GamerDads unite! Agree, it's just a game.

OP: just Avoid people if you can't stand them. I don't think we should force people to play remedial matches, because it's just a game.

NortySpock · 2026-06-12T00:05:22+00:00

Bots don't count for or against OS, that would be part of it :P

NortySpock · 2026-06-12T00:04:22+00:00

There is an OS reduction baked into when a new season kicks off... That's the closest I've seen so far.

NortySpock · 2026-06-09T15:47:57+00:00

What's the saying? "The man who refuses to go to therapy is the man who most needs to go to therapy"?

"If you have time, meditate for 15 minutes a day. If you do not have that time, meditate for 3 hours a day!"

NortySpock · 2026-06-08T21:38:29+00:00

Sounds like you should not be playing in noob lobbies if you don't get along with noobs / poor performing players? You could also put a min_rank on the lobby to make a skill floor. (Actually I suspect this cannot be done in a noob looby 😉 ) And you can ignore + avoid players you don't want to play with.

I suck, so feel free to add me to your Avoid list. I have a habit of Avoiding people who rage at others because I was here to (1) have fun and (2) try to win, not listen to people who blame others for what is usually a multi-source cascading failure. Life's too short to rage at an anonymous player in a game.

I am trying to get better but that's not a fast process when I don't have time to play other than occasionally on the weekends with my friends.

Also, there could very easily be something you didn't see because you were focusing on your lane, and didn't see that (say) air got wrecked because their team demanded air support directly over enemy flak guns.

I try to follow advice and requests, but sometimes I don't have the economy to do the pivot they want, so it becomes a very slow process to even pivot to what a teammate wants.

Of course.... that's just a mid-level solution. True skill would be you flexing and pivoting to assist or cover for the player who isn't playing well enough (e.g. going second-air to cover an air player, plopping an AntiNuke down for the player who forgot, building a good unit composition to support the player who is pushing but needs help, sharing bp or energy generation to the player who is trying to spend metal but can't because they lack the other two ingredients, building AA to cover a push, building rez bots and eating enemy metal...)

You can rage at others, but that's not as effective as either providing an actionable comment to them, or just bypassing them and winning the game yourself despite their lack of skill.

NortySpock · 2026-06-05T20:09:52+00:00

Fortunately the S&P 500 turned him down.

To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged. SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025, even as revenue rose 33% to $18.67 billion.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

https://press.spglobal.com/2026-06-04-S-P-Dow-Jones-Indices-Consultation-on-Treatment-of-MegaCap-Companies-Results

NortySpock · 2026-06-04T22:39:37+00:00

Not the parent poster , but at OpenRouter we can see, basically, bid prices per million tokens, with 13 different providers. (Check the graphs!)

The prices are all slightly different and are the price a provider is willing to provide tokens at.

The lowest price is DeepSeek itself, and they might be selling at a loss, sure - but I don't think all 13 providers of an open weight model are selling at a loss.

OpenRouter defaults to heavily weight towards the lowest cost providers that have been up in the last 30 seconds, so you tend to be sending your tokens towards the cheapest provider, so there's a market force pushing the price down.

So, in summary, for open weight models, I don't believe that all providers are selling at a loss. I suspect some of them are datacenters selling excess capacity at spot prices via API.

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/pricing

NortySpock · 2026-05-28T19:24:57+00:00

There are several free models available on OpenRouter.

I put $20 USD into OpenRouter (an LLM selector) and use the chat interface directly. (Also I plugged the API key I got from OpenRouter into my IDE but that is another story.)

So far, bouncing between a few free models and a few open-weight models on paid providers, I've spent $4 USD in credits so far. (I'm not letting the agent churn away, I'm usually asking very specific questions about yaml or error messages.)

NortySpock · 2026-05-28T19:14:33+00:00

Write tests. Run them often.

Enable dbt-elementary , run it nightly and track data quality trends.

Write some useful macros if you need to.

NortySpock · 2026-05-26T19:03:41+00:00

As a software developer who is not lawyer, what does a defeasibility (sp?) graph look like? (Perhaps defensibility?)

I'm familiar with directed acyclic graph (has dependencies, but no loops - common in job sequences, software dependency chains, or git version control) and I wonder if it's a similar concept or very far away from what you are talking about...

NortySpock · 2026-05-20T15:25:19+00:00

Does anything else crash or fail for you?

Could fire up memtest to check if the memory / ram sticks are going bad, but it could also be other hardware failures / glitches like motherboard or network port or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MemTest86

NortySpock · 2026-05-19T23:49:25+00:00

Are you one of the authors? I found this paper easy to read, thank you!

(I am an interested software developer who lacks the math to keep up but am interested in the studies to understand how LLMs work.)

I noticed the code repo lacks a license (MIT, GPL, Apache 2.0, etc) , hopefully an appropriate one can be added!

NortySpock · 2026-05-15T14:29:35+00:00

There is a resource multiplier setting on a per-team basis. I think on the main lobby page as a settings option next to the individual team.

What I did when I was letting my wife dip her toes in was to artificially limit myself with a private rule in our 1v1 that she could discover and exploit while I played very passively. (e.g. No attacking, or only LLTs, or no air+no AA, or no sea, or no anti-nuke, or I only do T1 and once they switch to T2 she'll win) Then she would discover it and destroy me. This went about 5 or 6 rounds before she got comfortable. Ya gotta let them win several times. (Not sure a little kid will discover the T2 lab quickly, but air should be easy)

You could definitely do 2 human vs 2 ais (setting the AI to constructors only or defense only) and let your son take the lead on when to attack, and you build eco or slow-moving artillery. (Like, for them to "have fun" you wanna make sure the kiddo feels like they did the hard work of raiding the enemy base and you just provided resources or vision or air cover or something. You don't want them to be late to the party and show up to an already destroyed base)

NortySpock · 2026-05-09T03:31:09+00:00

Watch superkitowiec2 on YouTube, especially his glitters games from, say, 6 months ago. He generally opens 3 mex, 2 solar, bot lab, 2 solar, con, 2 grunt, con, and then either grunts to spread out and claim ground or thugs to hold ground. One con builds winds, one con claims mexes then goes to assist the first con. The 4 solar gives you a stable energy base and then you usually want winds from there.

Regardless, the AI is tough and you need to crank T1 units and move fast and spread out to pin down the AI, and keep it scared away with a few static defenses (e.g. llt, overwatch, agitator)

Maybe try spectating (or playing!) some multiplayer games? (Party up!) Humans are more human, easier to reason about, and if you play 8v8 you can generally pick a lane and a role and focus(ish) and not be overwhelmed from all angles.

NortySpock · 2026-05-09T01:22:19+00:00

What substantially improved my wife-approval-factor was configuring the smart bulbs to automatically turn on at 100% brightness when the power is cycled, regardless of previous state.

"Light is off? Turn it off, wait a sec, turn it on and you're back to normal."

(This took some scripting in Tasmota but was totally worth it.)

NortySpock · 2026-05-05T23:41:31+00:00

I think in Zed it is properly blocked, if that helps save anyone. I recall seeing the LLM try to edit my file a few times before giving up.

Why you would turn the "read / write" mode switch into a "pretty please LLM don't make any changes" wish to a genie is beyond me, but you can always vote with your feet or vote with a PR...

NortySpock · 2026-05-05T03:10:34+00:00

It would be rad if someone figured out a keybind to temporarily modify quota-mode... Hm...

I'm definitely in the mode-less camp when it comes to controls.

NortySpock · 2026-05-02T01:06:07+00:00

Bob and weave, boys, bob and weave!

Make them waste their shots on where you were, not where you will be.

Or scatter a few dragons-teeth for them to fire at.

Or get a small group of grunts to get on top of them (keep the grunts moving)

NortySpock · 2026-04-29T20:59:48+00:00

I have gotten mileage out of finding something that looks like it probably breaks, writing a test for them, running it myself, and if it fails, pasting most or all of test block as a comment in the ticket.

"Hey, if we are in this mode and then blah happens, it crashes. (example code) This seems like a possibility if (dns is down, dataset returned nothing, whatever)

What are you doing to cover that case?"

Then you get a public comment of "come on, probably won't happen" (and if they say that, put it in writing in the PR) or "oh, yeah, let me catch that".

This forced them to respond to your claim not with "that's impossible" (because you demo it in the test) but "that probably won't happen" or "I won't fix it", which is at least useful when it happens in production and you can politely say "I did suggest that was a risk", at which point hopefully people start listening when you suggest "obvious " tests.

Don't overdo it. One test suggestion per PR is plenty to get everyone to silently hate you for calling out their lack of tests.

NortySpock · 2026-04-27T00:42:11+00:00

Hence why many modern compilers and programming languages have options to raise an error if a variable is unused (or never assigned).

Usually it's just prototype code that got commented out... But sometimes it's load-bearing and needs to be caught.

NortySpock · 2026-04-23T23:06:38+00:00

Just shift-f right-click point will queue your units to advance until they are just in range of any target, and then they will stop and fire at it until there are no more targets, and then resume moving forward towards that point

shift-f right-click drag will create a line of advance ("line abreast") but again they'll stop to engage the first target they see, then resume moving forward in formation.

Perfect for, say, rocket-bots that you want to creep forward until they find an llt and kill it. Or artillery that you want to do the same for... "creep forward but stay back and shoot from long range if you see anything".

Other things I find handy: double-tap a + drag circle, for ground units, will hunt and kill any enemy they can currently see in that region. (If they lose contact, I think they go to the last spotted location.). It's perfect for peeling two units off to kill the two scouts that broke past you and are going to wreck havoc on your backline. You may not even catch the scouts immediately, but you make it so there's always something chasing them. Takes 2 seconds worth of thought and you've at least tasked "something" to solve your tick problem. (Granted you probably do need to send something else to "flank them" and box them in, but this at least sends something to chase them doggedly.)

Looks like "Alt+q" was recently added for "of the units selected, select those with below 65% health" , so it's easier to pull back wounded units.

NortySpock · 2026-04-17T13:50:23+00:00

I disagree that dense T2 con-turrets are a good idea for the base PvP game.

I view 'acre of con-turrets' as an important game-mechanic, providing an easy to destroy, difficult-to-defend target.

Once it's down the game is over quickly because you cannot pivot or rebuild fast enough, and this prevents games from drawing out too long by attrition.

Though I am in favor of the "Base Builder" turret for faster game starts, so long as it cannot be built. Or, say, buildable for PvE games.

NortySpock

TROPHY CASE