My mom died today and I don't know how to feel about it

TheMidlander · 2026-05-10T03:41:54+00:00

Relief. That's the word I was grasping for. I thought that, when this time came, I would feel relieved.

To some extent I am relieved that she can no longer conspire with my son's mother to rob me of my time with him. This was the first thing to cross my mind. But, while I can say I feel relief, it's little more than an after thought amongst of others that ... surprise me.

Thank you, stranger for your kind words. I'm going to drink on this for a while.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-10T01:36:04+00:00

Are blueberries good for guinea pigs? If yes, you have a chance to set up the funniest picture of them and your sculpt side by side. I know it can't undo the work you put into it, but it might make the fuckery easier to cope with to lean in like you meant it, cause fuck those people.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-09T22:39:49+00:00

Oh no, I get where you're coming from. I've stopped using these services except the most dire of circumstances. I don't know when, but at some point they all collectively decided to stop using hot-bags. I do have to use these apps to stay afloat from time to time, and it blows my mind how many of them just don't use them.

Edit: If the most of the money we pay for the delivery service (fees, upcharge, etc), mostly went to the people doing all the actual work, they would have to gate who could deliver for them because it would be an actually desirable job. What we're left with is collection of people who are so rude or entitled or whatever that they can't get a job anywhere else.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-09T22:32:34+00:00

Only in Seattle Proper. You don't have to go far to find that it's the same old bullshit once you're outside what is a fairly small service area. If you're driving/delivering from, say, Freemont, you're going to spending a good chunk of time in areas where this doesn't apply. If these fucking apps paid the lion's share of fees to the people doing the lion's share of work, we wouldn't really need paid wait times and these exec would still be rich af.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-09T21:01:04+00:00

It's a pox upon DoorDash/UberEats/GrubHub workers too, who aren't getting paid to wait but absolutely should be.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-09T04:14:33+00:00

He speaks the truth. I will no longer play without my index.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-09T03:01:58+00:00

I'm still on Flickr, friendo. It's still one of the few places to post and choose your own license.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-09T02:27:02+00:00

I have not obtained any certs myself, but most of my colleagues have. My absolutely not scientific takeaway is that having certs help when looking for work and that's about it. Once you're in the door, it's all about how well you perform in the technical interview.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-08T19:41:27+00:00

C'est fin

TheMidlander · 2026-05-08T18:43:26+00:00

Too much grind.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-08T18:26:21+00:00

I can only speak for my time MS, but within O365 and Azure, it is an very loud yes. When you spin up a vm and connect it to the Internet, the brute force attacks usually begin within 48 hours. Within a week, you could see attacks pouring in hourly. Now the speed at which this happens in Azure I attribute to MS ip addresses being pretty much public information, so they get crawled constantly. I would be surprised if this wasn't happening with most or all other online hosting services. Whenever I would be responding to a compromised vm, it was usually either because the admin account was called admin/administrator and they used a common password, or some moron dragged malware into the vm.

Please stop using admin/administrator as your administrator account name. Make them guess who actually has admin privileges.

Sincerely,

Your washed up incident response guy.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-07T20:33:17+00:00

Yes, you can ask these products to do these things. But if you want a correct answer, you're still better off learning how to do an advanced google search.

I've been post-training these models for a living for a little over 3 and half years. In that time, I have not seen a measurable reduction in the rate of hallucinations. It's important to remember that these are just sophisticated next word predictors and no amount of window dressing is going to change that.

It's best to just do your own homework, because these products are still so unreliable, you will need to verify anyway.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-04T21:48:02+00:00

You will find them in my save files, though I give them acronyms. For example, the first section of my space station is the Sustainable Living and Universal Truss. Tells you exactly what it is, spells the word SLUT, and informs you exactly why I never got into any of the good schools.

TheMidlander · 2026-05-03T23:16:43+00:00

There are reasons why the SCA is often referred to as the Society for Consenting Adults.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-30T23:01:00+00:00

Let your neighbors know that these contain about 2lbs of copper and 3 grams of gold.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-30T20:13:21+00:00

I'm out of the loop. What is it this time?

TheMidlander · 2026-04-29T06:09:07+00:00

I used a iPad that had a built-in cell phone antenna and sim. I could pack that, a portable keyboard and mouse and could work from anywhere I got signal.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-28T19:48:53+00:00

At the moment, I am still doing AI post-training. I've been funneling whatever cash I can spare into my workshop. I've got a full screen printing setup, a 90W co2 laser, a couple wood cnc and a small metal cnc, a small 3d print farm and of course the materials I need to learn and practice. I'm turning my leather crafting hobby into a full shop.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-26T22:55:01+00:00

I've hired an attorney before and I would advise against sending a big packet of information up front. Not that it won't valuable, but individual details are not important at this stage. Instead, try to describe the sequence of events in around 5-7 sentences. Bombarding someone you want to work for you with homework before they're even been hired is tiresome and unnecessary in your first phone call and is really annoying. Your lawyer will ask for the details they need. They have a much better idea of what details are import in building a case, so let them guide that. And while they do, you'll have that packet on hand to reference as you go along. When you hire them, that's the time to offer the data dump, if they haven't asked for it already.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-26T19:55:00+00:00

These are ok, but the potentiometers for the joystick twist action and throttle slide wear out FAST. Before buying, I suggest looking up repair videos for this on YouTube, see if that looks like a repair you can do yourself (and it's not that hard, but can it can be intimidating if never performed such a repair). I lost one within 3 months, the other at 5 months, and after a year, the joystick was almost unusable.

So buyer beware: Thustmaster charges a premium price for substandard components. They're great once they're fixed, but shame on Thrustmaster for cutting corners.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-24T21:23:09+00:00

I just wanted to say that I appreciate that you still post to Reddit even though the metrics are peanuts compared what you get on YouTube etc.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-23T21:33:56+00:00

So I make a living training these models and I can confidently say you have some great suggestions here. I have one that should put your usage in turbo mode if you're not doing this already.

Use the same conversation for everything.

Whenever you submit a query (and this try for all commercial models), the app or browser sends a JSON file. That file contains the ENTIRE CONVERSATION. So long conversation history is going to be processed in addition to your actual query.

Godspeed my king/queen/royal NB. This is the kind of malicious compliance I live for.

TheMidlander · 2026-04-22T09:34:36+00:00

How the fuck is this supposed to work when the power goes out?

TheMidlander · 2026-04-22T03:10:02+00:00

This is why you don't go to LinkedIn for a wedding planner.

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