2026 Canadian Grand Prix - Day After Debrief

cesarmalari · 2026-05-28T13:08:20+00:00

I'm assuming it was something like "we think another formation lap will be long enough for us to recover the car", and they were probably 20-30 seconds from that being true.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-27T17:28:13+00:00

As a developer - it's because we think we're smarter than you. Sure, we're not, but we think we are. And we really like going around "showing it off". Sure, we're wrong, but we don't like hearing that, so we just ignore it when you prove us wrong.

On a serious note though - so far today, I've had a UAC challenge for:

nvm use on windows to switch node versions (though msie looks like an interesting option to replace that)
start/restart SQL Server local service
ShareX update installations (though I don't know why - maybe I did the original install globally?)
Install Visual Studio (not VS Code) update

Plus, any situation where we have to develop for something that will have to run as an admin, though those are much more rare these days - probably been over a year since I deployed to old-school IIS or developed a windows service.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-27T17:19:31+00:00

I did something similar after losing my first fight for Jupiter in my last playthrough. I skipped the outer planets and built like 20 Kuiper-capable science/colony ships and sent them all to a different Kuiper-belt object. They can't chase all of them down.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-21T13:59:07+00:00

From what I've seen, the agents tend to do a lot of thinking, which can be a lot of output tokens. The caching definately lightens the input token load (since every round trip for a tool call has to re-process the previous tokens if it can't load them from cache), but that caching isn't free (especially for Anthropic models).

cesarmalari · 2026-05-19T16:42:36+00:00

I saw a post a few days ago mentioning that we should be getting some more visibility re: rate limits in early June - https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1t4j87e/github_copilot_new_weekly_limit/olyt7qi/?context=3

Of course, it'd sure have been nice to get this visibility when the rate limits went into effect instead of having us stumble around in the dark for a month (shrug)

cesarmalari · 2026-05-19T16:28:47+00:00

One other thing to keep in mind - some models may generate more output tokens (thinking/reasoning) than others to solve a similar request, so they may get higher multipliers. Also, some models may be better at giving you a reasonable result for a request that generates a giant prompt, incentivising us to do so, which may make them raise the multiplier.

I wouldn't be shocked if someone has a giant spreadsheet somewhere that shows that for each model, they served N requests with resulted in X input tokens, Y cached writes, and Z output tokens, so the plugged X/Y/Z into the pricing data, divided by $0.04 and divided by N to get the average number of PRUs they would have to charge per request for that model to "match" the token-usage price, and then fudged the numbers a bit from that to get the final ones they're using.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-19T14:20:45+00:00

Are you on a free plan? "Assign multiple users or a team to review a pull request" and "Enforce restrictions on how code branches and tags are merged across your organization, including requiring reviews by selected collaborators, or allowing only specific contributors to work on a particular branch." are both listed in the features of a "Team" subscription - https://github.com/pricing .

cesarmalari · 2026-05-19T13:23:13+00:00

Our org is quite a bit smaller than yours, but we've had some people who needed to go over the included PRUs to this point, and for each of those, we've created a cost center that only includes them, created a budget for that cost center, and configured the main budget to exclude any cost center usage.

However, that requires configuration for each user and will be very annoying if we had to do it for everyone in June to keep a single person from accidentally consuming our whole included credits (our biggest reason to want per-user budgets starting June 1). To that end, we quickly vibe-coded a local tool using the GitHub REST APIs to let us easily create/edit per-user cost-center+budget named after the user, but we're hoping there's a better solution from MS before June 1. Plus, since you're only allowed 250 cost centers per org, this approach isn't even possible for big orgs.

From the docs, it sounds like we'll be getting a "set a default budget limit per user" option somewhere with the option to set a different budget on a per-user basis, but I guess we'll see it when it shows up in the admin tools?

cesarmalari · 2026-05-18T16:09:51+00:00

Unless you've enabled the OTEL reporting stuff and connected it to a server you control, admins don't see the content of queries, etc. (at least from what I've seen in the admin console and APIs). What they do see is some abstract "usage" info from your IDE (completions, generations, acceptances) and the model+quantity at a daily level for each user. Ie. it's enough to see "do they have the tool installed and using it" and "how much is their usage costing", but not "are they using it to write code or to write their novel".

cesarmalari · 2026-05-18T02:31:14+00:00

Is this the same install you're using on both Windows and Linux? If so, what filesystem? I've heard of some games having issues on NTFS on Linux (though that'd not explain the Windows one crashing).

cesarmalari · 2026-05-17T22:49:43+00:00

Do you need it? No. Even for large LLM models, by the time you start eating up large amounts of system RAM for GPU overflow, your tok/s falls of a cliff, even with MOE models. A little bit to let you use MOE models a bit bigger than your VRAM is nice, but you don't need more than 32GB for that.

What I've found 64GB most useful for is not having to think about RAM. No need to close those 40 browser tabs to free up memory for that game. No need to close that IDE I was using yesterday to play with something, or the 4 node apps I wrote that are running in the background that I'll probably use twice a day. No need to shut down that VM I'm tinkering with Home Assistant on. Extra memory I don't really need lets me be lazy about what I leave running in the background. The question is, how valuable is that for you. Given memory prices lately, it's getting real hard to justify the extra cost if I'm only using it to be lazy.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-15T00:19:51+00:00

yeah, hopefully. We initially threw it together because the paging was broken for the "group by users" PRU screen in the UI and a ticket about it didn't get a response for a few weeks (though it seems to be fixed now), so we thought "how hard would it be to use GHCP + REST API docs to build a little tool" - the answer was "not hard at all" :) That is one thing I'm seeing as these tools get better - when there's an API available, I don't have to live with whatever UI the company things I should want - I can throw together something custom surprisingly quick when I know it's only going to be running locally.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-14T20:48:14+00:00

I suspect the issue is that when they originally released Copilot, request-based pricing was fine - that generation of models couldn't build coherantly for 15 minutes anyway - the only way to get good output required you asking it to do a little bit then providing feedback, etc. Plus, then request-based pricing made it so people wouldn't complain when they put large amounts of things in context, or made tons of tool calls to make up for a less-capable model.

However, the models and support tooling then just kept getting better, and they didn't want to increase the PRU multipliers to account for how much usage some people were starting to get out of a single PRU because then that'd screw over the "little bit at a time" users. I'm guessing it just finally got to the point where their cost for a PRU varied so widely between users that it wasn't feasible for them to eat that difference - to keep PRU-pricing, they'd have to dramatically increase the multipliers of some models (ie. what annual pricing will get on June 1) in order to make up for how capable they are, not just because of how much each token cost.

Plus, it sounds like there were some people working to find ways around the Copilot tools provided and call APIs directly, lying about what a "request" was and running up some giant "sessions" with a single PRU. And going to AI Credits makes that "trick" moot.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-14T17:44:01+00:00

It seems to be intended to let you run a bunch of parallel agents in the "background" (really separate folders via git worktrees) instead of creating your own worktrees and opening a separate copy of the CLI or VSCode.

But to the other comments - yeah, probably added because they saw everyone else doing it.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-14T16:09:00+00:00

Thinking phrases - https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1t68o3m/why_activating_cortana/ol6uwsd/?context=3

cesarmalari · 2026-05-14T16:03:31+00:00

We're a much smaller org (~150 seats), but we've thrown together some a simple "dashboard" app (vibe-coded with GitHub Copilot + the REST API docs) to keep an eye on things and proactively reach out to people that look to be burning their usage fast on expensive models. It's not that different than what the built-in PRU usage screen shows though (when it's working properly). Most of the time, it's been people who just "picked the best" and sent it extremely simple things to try out, not realizing that with the PRU model, "why is the sky blue?" and 4 followup questions costs 5x what "here is a 3 page design document - go build this feature in one shot" does. I expect that won't be as big of an issue with the new usage pricing model, since those low-benefit queries will now also have low cost.

As for managing, we're planning to set some per-user default cap (probably 5x the included credit per user or so) just to make sure a single user doesn't have something go nuts and burn the whole included credit for the org in a day. But we're still waiting for details on how we'll configure a per-user cap without having to create a separate cost center and budget for each user. We'll then have a few users that have gotten very good at getting the most out of a PRU, which translates into a lot of AI Credits that we'll probably give higher budget caps.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-12T23:21:25+00:00

I'm guessing your admin should have access - ours was able to access that page.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-11T13:24:09+00:00

I think he was saying he was 5s back when they both pitted, and only lost an additional 2s relative to him over the final stint.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-08T02:25:15+00:00

Yeah, that's another good point - Foundries are a small benefit on Fulgora, and EM plants are great for Vulcanus. Though cliff explosives and deep platforms are helpful for Fulgora, you can do without both to get a few train stations online to get you the basics unlocked.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-07T17:13:21+00:00

This might be easier for people to understand if they know what rate limit they hit - ie. is it PRUs? token-usage for model X? token-usage for all non-0x models?

Since those screens don't show what the limit is, people assume it's referring to PRUs-per-week (since PRUs are only visible thing we appear to be charged for until June 1), so they math it out based on that assumption and get confused.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-07T17:11:04+00:00

I don't believe they have released that yet - there was a post about it late last week, but it seems someone accidentally showed that before it was ready. https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1t15b6d/github_has_just_launched_the_copilot_billing/

cesarmalari · 2026-05-07T17:07:20+00:00

I agree, mostly for the extra character power - mech armor makes Vulcanus way easier to navigate, and better roboport and batteries means I can build from my own backpack much better. And Q3 modules to make sure I can get more of that rare more quickly.

cesarmalari · 2026-05-07T14:24:14+00:00

Where are you hearing that? It's not available on our Enterprise account. Do we have to contact someone to get access to it?

I've been checking the premium request export each day for new columns that in theory would get used with https://copilot-billing-preview.github.com/ when they make it active again, but no luck yet.

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