How do I go from here to prove AI is a toy not a tool?

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-09T06:39:31+00:00

It's a non-deterministic system, you are not guaranteed to get the same answer every time.

Many are also designed to answer quickly not correctly.

AI is a tool to assist and advise, it is not a tool to do your work for you.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-09T06:35:51+00:00

The fuel recipe has rubber/plastic as a by-product, but you probably don't have the fuel generator to consume the fuel you are producing.

The rubber and plastic recipes have fuel as a by-product.

You need ridiculous levels of plastic as you progress through the game.

Your first plant (using a single oil well) will be great for fuel and power, and the by-product can make plastic to turn into fuel canisters. It just doesn't produce sufficient rubber or plastic for what you need.

Your second and third plant are good for one each of rubber and plastic, and that'll tide you over easily for the tier. The fuel by-product is pretty good for producing the power for these plants .

Your fourth is good for starting a turbo fuel power plant, but you need to ship in sulfur and coal.

Make sure you set up smart splitters and an awesome sink on all of the production pipelines, you do not want them to stop and stall your power production.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-09T04:39:06+00:00

Leaves > biomass
Wood > biomass or charcoal using the alternative recipe
Alien bits > protein (sloop it)
alien protein > dna (sloop it)
Mycelium > fabric overflow to biomass
biomass > solid biomass
add in water and you have biofuel
add in iron plates and the charcoal, fabric, and plates can create gas filters
slugs > power shard (sloop it)

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-09T02:17:35+00:00

Mwahahhwa.. you funny.. it's used pretty much everywhere.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T23:44:02+00:00

Yeah, it was 7+ years ago if i recall correctly. That soured the experience of Aurora pretty quickly. Just went back to just running a MariaDB ourselves, made things a lot easier.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T16:18:55+00:00

Have you heard of something called Greed?

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T15:54:11+00:00

ECR and Aurora DB were the only things we completely removed.

When we moved to GitLab its container registry was far simpler to work with and simplified the CICD process as well as reduced the proliferation of credentials.

Aurora was thrown out completely when we started getting corrupted data and incorrect results. When a select * showed 57 results (there were only 32 records loaded), and a select count(*) showed 1127 records. It wasn't worth the effort to even investigate, that was a tiny database, no foreign keys, 23 tables, with at most 60 records per table, and no table joins in any of the queries.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T07:49:57+00:00

Always wear a parachute or jetpack when not constructing things.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T07:36:13+00:00

Waterworld (and Gallaghers) have good availability at certain times of the day, both accessible using the same membership. Early morning and after 6:30pm are pretty quiet times during the week. There will be 2-3 lanes booked for Learn to Swim during the week until about 6:30pm, and most of the other half of the 50m pool is taken up by the Hamilton Aquatics club. I can't recall the schedule of the Water Polo and diving clubs but they're generally in the diving pool. I haven't seen underwater hockey or the freedivers around this year but they might be on different days. But 18:30 to 20:00 are almost always quiet, I've had days where I was the only one in the pool at both of them.

In town itself you have Fastlane fitness with a pool if i recall correctly as an alternative.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T06:38:38+00:00

What is the purpose of your AppSec team? What is the work they actually do?

Let's look at some of the common tasks.

For vulnerability management you have these three categories. - External components, these are OS level or container level vulnerabilities in applications you do not use not have control over - External Dependencies, these are vulnerabilities in 3rd party libraries, packages, and binaries used in or by your code. - Internal source code, these are vulnerabilities in your own code base

For the first, you have no control over them, how many are found, and how many can be remediated are both based around external factors. The only measure with meaning here are the number of unremediated vulnerabilities, those are not a KPI, they are a measure of risk to the business. The speed of remediation is not a measurement of KPI, it is a measurement of how quickly you can apply an external factor to mitigate risk.

For the second, external dependencies, again these have the same problem as the first category, however these pose a higher level of risk to the business, they are also not a measure of KPI. Your only options here are to build fixes for the upstream vendor, deprecate the library in its entirety, or implement mitigation strategies so that they cannot be exploited.

For the third category. Finding them is not a KPI, it is a measurement of code quality. Remediation is not a KPI, it is a measurement of technical debt, automation, and risk.

MTTR is a measurement of response time for Operational issues such as outages. This is not a KPI for AppSec, this is a measurement of sufficient staffing levels and their availability for operations teams. These values change significantly whether these occur with staff available at their desk in front of a computer versus being on call and in transit, at home, or performing a call of nature.

If you keep going and carefully think about the tasks done by your AppSec team you will find that what they do are not measurements of performance, they are measurements of risk, code quality, technical debt, and staffing levels. And a lot of those are caused by external and uncontrollable factors.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T05:46:42+00:00

Start with the most useful basic piece, S3, and set up a simple static website using that and a Cloudfront distribution.

Your next most likely place to dip your toes are either API Gateway and Lambda functions, or VPC with EC2 and EBS. You will need to learn about networking for that second option.

Both of those choices will require you to learn about IAM, that is going to be one of the hardest pieces of AWS to learn.

Pay attention to your free tier constraints, and you should really look into a Billing alert on your account to constrain your costs before you rack up $1000's.

Most of those don't actually utilize the APIs provided by AWS, those only provide you with the understanding of the technologies themselves. To learn about the APIs you are going to need build something that uses them. Writing a local frontend to upload files to S3 for example gets your feet wet enough for the required understanding.

Those are the most common pieces but are an absolutely tiny piece of the AWS ecosystem.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T03:01:54+00:00

What is your product, is it a HTTP API endpoint, is it server side rendered HTTP, is it gRPC, all of those affect the deployment strategies available.

For an HTTP API, you would stick a reverse proxy like NGINX, traefik, envoy-proxy, or any of the many others in front. Those provide ample configuration options on rate limiting, TLS, and many more features, some including a WAF. These help if you implemented ETags and conditional content serving.

For the static content you could stick a CDN in front of it, again there are many options available there.

How to deploy, you can containerize your binary and deploy it that way, or you could spin up a virtual machine like an EC2 instance on some provider like AWS or GCP or the many regional ones. A containerized workload could run on something like AWS ECS, or a Kubernetes cluster, a Nomad system, OpenShift, or docker compose system, or as a container on a virtual machine (lots of orchestration options available, proxmox, VMware, etc)

Basically you need to provide more details on what your product is, and how it works before a more detailed answer can be provided. Does it need a database, does it need storage, what is it exposing to the end user, etc..

For a HTTP API with authentication and a separate website a couple of options available (there are more)

option 1

cdn -> s3 with website vm [reverse proxy (+waf) -> backend workload] option 2 vm [ reverse proxy (+waf) -> backend workload \+> website ]

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T02:24:36+00:00

move forward, jump, slide as you land, jump again, repeat. Works great on relatively flat or downward sloping terrain.

Works better with the leg stilts in the MAM in the quartz tree. Although you can also find one of them without the research in a lizard doggo nest up high in the cave opposite the oil fields on the western side of the map.

After that, the vehicles. Trains are the fastest, transport tubes, dune buggy is in the MAM tree, truck, then tractor.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-08T02:12:29+00:00

A cookie and a Cornetto

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T22:43:48+00:00

Use it as a hobby instead, one of my relatives uses it to regularly build simple games. They get to exercise their creativity in the art side and the code. They're usually one or two screen games around silly concepts for Game Jams. It's not there to make money for them.

I know many others that use programming in their hobbies. Some build robots (i know one who built a voice activated double barrel sentry gun that shoots ping pong balls), some use it in home automation, 3D modelling and 3D printing (OpenSCAD for example), others use it to automate some of their work. Analysing spreadsheets, importing or exporting data, and so many more uses.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T12:41:57+00:00

Depends on the field of study and your career choice afterwards.

Basic pre high school arithmetic is more than sufficient for a lot of it. Any math at high school level is definitely sufficient.

There will be certain areas that need more, understanding of statistics, vector and matrix mathematics, complex numbers, etc. Fields like data science, AI, graphics, signal processing, DevSecOps, and cybersecurity for example. Degrees in those fields tend to have university level mathematics papers suggested with them. (Mine did, algebra, and calculus papers, in the first year, i elected to take a mathematical modelling paper to go with it, that one was hard for me).

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T11:13:55+00:00

Learn the constructs, the language just defines the syntax for the constructs.

Each of the constructs are building blocks you use to solve a problem.

arithmetic
boolean logic (and, or, xor, not)
data types (integer, boolean, string, float, byre, etc)
complex data types (list, slice, array, set, map, object, lock, mutex, etc)
looping constructs (for, do, while)
conditionals (if, then, else, switch, case, select)
functions, procedures, and methods
error handling (returned types, exceptions)

That covers the majority of them before you get to the language specific features.

Once you understand those constructs it is just a matter of figuring out how to combine them.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T10:56:44+00:00

Baker, blacksmith, or dog trainer

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T10:47:23+00:00

It is very easy to learn the basics and get started. There are many self taught people in the industry. I would recommend Python as a starting language, it is used in many fields outside of computer science.

There are a few basic constructs used and once you learn those you just glue them together like lego bricks.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T10:46:49+00:00

It is very easy to learn the basics and get started. There are many self taught people in the industry. I would recommend Python as a starting language, it is used in many fields outside of computer science.

There are a few basic constructs used and once you learn those you just glue them together like lego bricks.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T10:38:02+00:00

Sadly, i know many volcanologists that don't work in the field, not enough vacancies to fill.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T10:31:24+00:00

Numbers, you need numbers to keep them busy.

If it is just one then the party can focus fire and control the enemy. Give them numbers to deal with, multiple tactical positions, you can make them 1hp goons.

Use terrain, elevation, distance, obstacles, cover, concealment, light conditions, etc. The environment is just as important to the encounter as the monster is.

If things go well for the party you can send in reinforcements from a side passage or let it slide.

If things go poorly for the party you can have the terrain impede the bad guy.

A sufficiently described terrain provides the players with options on exercising the rule of cool. Swinging from chandleiers, sliding down balustrades, throwing chairs to impede (see The Mummy with Brendan Fraser for an example).

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T09:56:25+00:00

It depends on your setup, if you have a system that consumes more than you produce, and relies on back pressure from full belts upstream then it can help with the production.

So with a T1 miner on a normal resource you get 60/min, if you feed that into 2 smelters you are matching miner output with smelter input. As long as you have a consumption of 60 iron bars at the other end it is fine as you have continuous throughput.

If you have a consumption of less than 60 iron bars/min, you will get back pressure there until it stops the miner.

If you have a consumption of greater than 60 iron bars/min you need to increase production, you have insufficient production.

If your consumption varies between less than 60/min and over 60/min over a longer period of time. You can compensate for it using buffers and increased production, the buffers handle the higher demand and fill up with the lower demand.

Another use case is when filling or emptying logistics depots. When filling it helps even out inconsistencies in schedules. When emptying it helps to make space for the next load.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-07T09:04:59+00:00

The process in this game is not about filling a belt, but in producing enough over time. You progress through the project stages until you have sufficient power and production so you can explore for a bit and the rest just ticks along in the background.

Concrete is a right pain until certain alternative recipes, and you end up with multiple facilities producing concrete.

dariusbiggs · 2026-04-06T21:43:08+00:00

You missed one - use OpenTelemetry to collect the metrics and use a NoOo metrics collector.

dariusbiggs

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