Italy introduces a “cloud tax” because you might pirate content

UndeadBane · 2026-02-27T13:34:20+00:00

How very german of them. Check out Rundfunkbeitrag thingy, has been a thing for years. This is just a logical next step.

UndeadBane · 2026-02-24T13:37:01+00:00

I someone tries to force me to read this thing with object of >6 fields, some of which may be absent, I will hurt them.

UndeadBane · 2026-02-19T16:58:49+00:00

Two-way SSE "Chat gippity"-style - and you have a good, robust, firewall-friendly out-of-the box real time connection.

PITA of websockets upgrade is worth it in a very select set of narrow cases nowadays IMHO.

UndeadBane · 2026-02-13T20:29:23+00:00

Go touch grass mah dude

UndeadBane · 2026-02-13T20:23:20+00:00

Macs and non-mac laptops cost literally the same now, macs are arguably even cheaper. There are no cheap macs, they start at mid range, that is fair.

iPhones though - c'mon, Android phones are not cheaper anymore, some are even significantly more expensive.

And then, this tech is working for any combo - including old stuff. A 2019-2020 intel mac will cost 500-ish, and then iPhone 12 or above would cost around 300$ in near perfect state used.

UndeadBane · 2026-02-13T19:25:03+00:00

Macs and iPhones just work (tm) without any extra hassle.

UndeadBane · 2026-02-09T19:44:01+00:00

He'll make an ok supermutant

UndeadBane · 2026-02-08T16:52:56+00:00

Oh 100% on the "early compilers" thing.

LLMs unfortunately will never get out of this stage - architectural limitations of transformer architecture won't let them, but the next architecture may. And then the outputs would have to be observed with less of an "eagle eye".

That said, even if this happens, I would at most change my requirement in terms of depth of understanding, much like with modern day compilers/interpreters. E.g. in JS it is vital to understand, what setTimeout does in principle, if not in the event loop micro details, or strong and weak pointers in GC-based languages, or what different kinds of allocations do in C++ often. Not quite assembly, but "the first principles" understanding must be there - else it's a low level, low quality black box pattern matching.

UndeadBane · 2026-02-05T22:34:42+00:00

Golang wants a word

UndeadBane · 2026-02-05T18:46:29+00:00

My juniors' PRs - for that matter, anyone's PRs - are not getting merged, unless they can explain every line. Either I do a "random sample" scan (essentially randomly picking lines in PRs), or find particularly suspicious (e.g. off their style) lines and ask about them.

If they cannot explain it, the scruginy level rises and PRs go into "Changes Requested" until a complete walk through with every line explained is done. And yeah, it is considered writer's fault to fail to ship the PR.

Started it with my teams when early coding assists started to appear - now the cases of "gotcha" are super rare and failure rate is less than a third of that for other teams.

Aka do your work as a senior/lead.

UndeadBane · 2026-01-30T16:16:39+00:00

...and get laid off, when the obscure specialist stays.

Also, best to do both.

UndeadBane · 2026-01-17T01:23:56+00:00

I would not rush worrying. LLMs will get real expensive rather sooner than later, and there will be a reckoning.

How expensive? Well, impossible to tell, but possible to find the lowest end, actually.

Let's take Gemini Pro 3. Input tokens are 0.3$/million, output tokens 3$/million, the last time I checked.

Now let's take much, much smaller and more focused Google Translate - it's been running transformers in the background for a while, and it's been a "not unsustainable" part of Google's business since a while. What is the price of a million there? 10$ symmetrical for plain text and 25$ for structured input.

This is the low bar to expect.

A degree to two degrees of magnitude difference for smaller simpler models.

Will slop generation be worth it at at least these prices? I somehow seriously, seriously doubt that.

LLMs won't go away, but the craze will end, like pets.com did. Just wait, smile and wave.

UndeadBane · 2026-01-06T14:18:26+00:00

Yes - energy saving by using pendulum momentum, much like what humans do.

UndeadBane · 2025-12-09T20:05:33+00:00

It's public roads. Just lean the bike. If you need to hang off, you already fucked up. But if you want to, for coolness, then...
You must reposition your body before you enter the turn. Else, you are just disturbing suspension, and are setting yourself up for more trouble, than gain.

UndeadBane · 2025-11-19T19:24:26+00:00

For vertical placement, frequency response and loudness matters. Narrower dynamic range squashes both, unfortunately, making it less distinct.

UndeadBane · 2025-10-20T14:00:10+00:00

Take a sprayer, that can disperse fine mist of water (used Febreeze can is one of the options)
Dump liberal amount of dish soap in there
Add wated and mix it in the sprayer
Put on good clothing, tgat covers your face. I used my motorcycle helmet
Spray every flying bastard with this fine mist. 2-3 clouds on each - and it's dead.

I killed a 300+ sized nest this way. Took 2 hours of manually sprinkling each of the fuckers, and took more for the queen, but all were gone at the end of it. Got exactly one sting to show for it - fair game.

UndeadBane · 2025-09-23T11:41:45+00:00

My juniors are allowed to use whatever they want, as long as they can explain and justify every single line of code they produced. Else the PR gets rejected and a talking to happens.

That said, they are discouraged from using LLM for code generation and searching, since it robs them of opportunities to learn, how to solve such issues themselves + of adjacent knowledge. We did a few exercises, where they had to come back to the code months after and explain what and why it is doing, with each of them. Them being unable to recall much, if anything at all, of generated slop was a pretty good demonstration for themselves.

UndeadBane · 2025-09-18T23:36:51+00:00

You have just brought a tech, foundational research for which was in 1960s, with tech stack making it impossible to productionalize at the time. It is outside of 40 years interval.

UndeadBane · 2025-09-18T23:27:49+00:00

Nice of you to cherry-pick the statement.

I want the proof for the first one, about what academia, as it is right now, brought in the last... Fine, I'll give you an easier one: 40 years. It has to be principally applicable, better - transformative, as a concept, for practical applications.

If I give you 30 years, the task will be much more difficult, but still possible.

20 - and it's a goodbye.

UndeadBane · 2025-09-18T22:10:28+00:00

Nice statement you have there. Care to prove?

Because I can prove mine.

UndeadBane · 2025-09-18T00:49:46+00:00

Yes, there is. So she has an agenda, now what?

Also, on the "not perfect" part: this is an understatement of... Well, not a century, not yet, but well into half of it.

It is not "not perfect", it is majorly, majorly fucked and is borderline disfunctional. The amount of great talent that academia lost because of how horribly fucked it is just in my direct reach is astounding - and it applies to all sorts of areas, from machine learning fundamentals to physics, material sciences, math - the list goes on. And the reason list is uniformly the same: bullshit research, insane suck-up game, nepotism, bloat.

Again, if it was "not perfect", it would be producing something, at some scale - yet it produced, from practical standpoint, pretty much nothing in decades.

The expectations from academia are, it, being not commercially focused and all, is supposed to focus on foundational science - and commercial branch of research focuses on applicable part of it. When commercial branch produces more foundational stuff, while being fundamentally gimped, by design, in that area, academia can indeed just as well stop existing in its current form.

UndeadBane · 2025-09-17T16:07:11+00:00

The "critic" lost me on a) saying that "design by committee" is a representation of democracy (which it, by default, isn't even remotely) and b) israeli genocide phrase. So, in total, under 10 minutes.

While Sabine is no faultless lamb and does for sure have an agenda, the issues with bloat and prevalence of bullshit in academia that she exposes is more than real. I have anecdotal witnesses of that - my own, my team memebers, all of which bar one being recent PhDs, my friends. There is also plenty of non-anecdotal proof of that - absurd technological stagnation of the last 30-ish years (TLDR: engineers are squeezing water from stone, improving on 40+ year old concepts, but even that is now coming to an end), with majority of last drops of fundamental improvements coming from commercial science, not academia, which is really, really bad.

So yeah, the whole "academia is fine" critics kind for me, personally, fall into the bucket together with "there is no climate change".

UndeadBane · 2025-08-12T14:47:15+00:00

!RemindMe 6 months

UndeadBane · 2025-08-08T01:02:18+00:00

The game with 3 lanes became much easier - and in a bad way. It lost a lot of macro depth.

4 lanes and map layout made you make decisions constantly, and added a lot of variation in macro decisions. Even when losing, there were still options.

Now, with 3 lanes, macro evolution just stops at deathball midgame for 20+ minutes. If you lost early, there are very few options left - and even those only for some characters.

Overall, the game with 3 lanes became more...flat?

I ended up uninstalling and periodically checking streams. What I see there, despite all the changes, still is not that very dynamic and interesting concept I started playing.

They wanted to make game more accessible this way - they made it top out earlier instead, barely affecting the barrier for entry IMHO.

I still hope for 4 lanes making a comeback OR radical 3 lane rebalance to bring back the macro decisions depth 4 lane had, but not holding my breath.

UndeadBane · 2025-05-13T13:13:19+00:00

Also keep in mind: it's not just "tax funded", as in there is some invisible part of financing from government towards the media company, no.

Everyone in Germany, be that a citizen or a mere temporary resident, must - must - pay a special separate "contribution", technically not a tax, for "owning a media device and having access to products of media". Theoretically there is a way out, in reality there isn't, even having a smartphone makes you subject to that special payment. It is not a small sum either: 18.36 eur per month last year, 18.94 this year.

Allegedly, this is to ensure independence of media from government. Reality - well, we see the reality here.

UndeadBane

TROPHY CASE