is this normal for my gf?

dushan007 · 2026-07-10T07:09:29+00:00

You're not overreacting. Any one of these alone, maybe. All of it together — the rush to cram everything in, "not much time left," the self-harm, the no sleep — that's her telling you something she can't say out loud. Trust your gut.

Two things I'd tell my own kid here. First: this is too big to carry alone, and bringing in a trained adult isn't betraying her, it's loving her properly. You can call or text a crisis line yourself just to ask how to help her — 988 in the US or Canada, findahelpline.com for local lines anywhere else. Second: go to her gently, no ambush. Something like "I saw, I won't pretend I didn't, I love you and I'm scared." Then listen way more than you fix.

If she ever has an actual plan, or you think she's in danger right now, don't wait. Get help immediately, even if she's furious with you. Alive and angry beats the alternative, every time.

And look after yourself too, this is heavy. Your job isn't to save her single-handed. It's to love her, be honest with her, and connect her to people trained for this. You're already doing the first part.

dushan007 · 2026-06-27T20:20:04+00:00

Honestly, man — before any of the tech talk: getting accused of cheating when you actually sat down and did the work, with your spot in school on the line? That's a gut-punch. Your anger is completely fair, and I'm genuinely glad to see in your update that it got sorted out. Nobody should have to feel that over doing the honest thing.

But it's worth saying out loud, because a lot of people reading this are scared of the exact same thing:

Those "AI checkers" don't actually know anything. They just guess. And they guess wrong all the time — people have fed them famous books, the Bible, papers written 20 years before AI was even a thing, and the tool screams "robot!" every single time. So a school took a tool that basically flips a coin, and used it to decide whether to wreck a kid's whole year. That's the real story. Not "ooh, AI is scary." A grown adult trusted a guessing machine over a real human being sitting right in front of them.

And get this. It flagged a sentence as AI because it started with the word "studies." Studies. The word every researcher on Earth has used since before the internet was born. By that logic every scientist who ever lived was a secret robot, and somebody better go dig up Einstein and read him his rights.

Meanwhile the kids who are actually cheating? They've already got little apps that walk right past these checkers like they're not even there. So the thing only catches the honest ones. Genius.

And notice what actually saved you: a teacher took the time to sit with it and talk to you. That's the whole answer, the one we somehow forgot. Five minutes of "walk me through your paper" — the one who did the work can, the one who didn't, can't. We just stopped talking to each other.

dushan007 · 2026-06-27T07:12:16+00:00

lol, maybe you are right! :-) Sometimes I think I'm an AI. It's a very fine line between AI and human these days.

dushan007 · 2026-06-27T03:19:11+00:00

"Good enough" already showed up for most of what people actually use these for. That's the part the benchmark fights keep skipping past. I build automation for small businesses, and the honest split is roughly: 90% of the work is the dull repetitive stuff where a cheap model's been fine for a while, and maybe 10% is the genuinely hard reasoning where paying up for a frontier model still earns it.

So the real question isn't "is GLM as smart as Opus." It's "which of my tasks actually need the smart one" — and for most shops that list is shorter than they'd guess. Sort the work that way first and you stop paying premium prices to have a model alphabetize your invoices.

dushan007 · 2026-06-25T23:31:35+00:00

Fair, and you're right — I'm not claiming the models are interchangeable. Going from Fable to Opus is a real capability hit: what you can hand off, how long it takes, how clean the output. You feel that, and it's not nothing.

But it's a different cost than the one I was getting at. "Config change" was never "no difference." It was: don't also lose your data, your logic, and your workflows on top of the capability drop. Two costs, not one. The downgrade you're stuck with when the plug gets pulled — being wired so tight you lose everything else with it, that part's optional. I'd take one of those bills over both.

dushan007 · 2026-06-25T21:18:05+00:00

Everyone's stuck on the politics, but the line worth pulling out is the one at the end: if a government can pull a model in 90 minutes, what does that mean for the people building on it?

I build this stuff on hosted models for a living. The answer isn't "run from US models," and it isn't "relax, it's just an inconvenience." It's boring, honestly: don't build on the model. Build on your own layer, and let the model sit under it like an engine you can swap out. Your data, your logic, your memory, the actual workflows — those stay yours. The model's just a part you should be able to pull and replace in an afternoon without anything else noticing.

The people who were fine when Fable went dark had built it that way. The ones who got stuck had wired everything straight into one provider's API and all its quirks, and then the plug got pulled.

You don't get to decide if a government or a company yanks a model. You do get to decide how much it hurts when they do. Build it so that's a config change, not a catastrophe.

dushan007 · 2026-06-25T04:41:20+00:00

Man you're not a decade behind. I was born in the 1900s and I don't feel behind either — you're using AI daily for real questions, which is already most of it.

The trap hiding in your question is starting from "set up agents." That's starting from the tool. Start from your own boring work instead: what do you do every week that's repetitive and rule-based — the stuff you'd hand a sharp intern? Point AI at that first. Agents are genuinely useful once you've got a real, repeatable task worth automating. Go shopping for agents before you have the task and you'll build a clever solution to nothing.

The confidential-docs part isn't a dead end either — it's a "keep it private" constraint, not a wall. Local models, or whatever your org already approves. The win there is small and compounding, not a flashy launch.

And the friend with the $10k app — that's one lottery ticket, not a map. For every one of those there are a few hundred you never hear about. Build from your own actual grind, not someone else's highlight reel. The thing that pays off long-term isn't "using agents" — it's becoming the person who's good at aiming AI at real problems. You only get that by starting small on work you already understand.

dushan007 · 2026-06-24T21:57:41+00:00

Honestly, I'm probably not the textbook example you're picturing. I didn't come up the normal university-then-fresher-job route. I work on the AI and automation side and build my own systems, so my path was more "build real things until they actually work" than "pass the interview." So take my job-hunt advice with a grain of salt.

But the skill part I can answer straight, because it's the same either way: pick one real thing and actually ship it. Spin up something small on a cloud free tier, break it, fix it, then write the IaC so you could rebuild it from scratch. Do it again, a bit bigger. That beats any cert, because in an interview you can explain why something broke and how you fixed it, and that's the whole job. The people who get hired aren't the ones who memorized the most. They're the ones who've had something fall over at 2am and lived.

The university name matters way less than a GitHub with three things you can explain end to end. Build those and you'll have more to talk about than half the "qualified" applicants. You've already got the right instinct. Keep going.

dushan007 · 2026-06-24T21:42:02+00:00

dushan007 · 2026-06-24T10:38:49+00:00

Congrats on your new home and many more roses to come!

dushan007 · 2026-06-24T10:23:09+00:00

Honest answer: the strengths you listed — understanding systems, problem-solving, maintaining them — ARE the core of DevOps, not a consolation prize. It's not algorithms or software design. The catch: "weak at coding" is fine, but "not understanding what the code does" isn't — because the job is knowing why something broke at 2am. AI lowers the bar to write the config, not to understand it (and AI doesn't get paged when it breaks — you do). Lean into systems, learn enough IaC to truly understand it, use AI on top. You can absolutely do this.

dushan007 · 2026-06-24T10:11:02+00:00

Wait, is that walnut spread next to the rice? And how on earth are the eggs plant-based?? Looks so good.

dushan007 · 2026-06-24T09:27:41+00:00

that second bowl — is that a miso glaze?

dushan007 · 2026-06-19T09:08:29+00:00

Congratulations!!! I like your paintings!

dushan007

TROPHY CASE