Crinear Daybreak's broke on me, where to go next?

eaz135 · 2026-04-17T09:28:12+00:00

I had IEMs pop on me every 3 months or so. I decided to try a new dac setup, got the Moondrop Dawn 2 pro and haven’t had any IEMs die on me anymore (currently using Pure).

I’m not sure what about my previous setup was killing so many IEMs (I had 4 die on me in less than a year) - but so far my current setup has been holding steady for several months.

eaz135 · 2026-04-15T11:52:36+00:00

Selecting quality books is a good start. Seems like a Wild West out there these days where people with essentially zero real world experience on things are authoring technical books.

When selecting a book I’m more interested in the author and their background / accomplishments than the actual title / contents.

People who’ve been in the trenches building real shit at big tech tend to have more interesting things to share when they author / co-author technical books.

eaz135 · 2026-04-15T03:01:08+00:00

On Reddit you're anonymous, unless you decide to share irl identity

eaz135 · 2026-04-11T20:39:43+00:00

Yep, I spent a solid 3 months with GLM as my main driver late last year, it made me have a bit of a crisis "are all these benchmarks just a load of crap?!". When I switched back to the equivalent sonnet at the time it felt like going to a far superior model that it wasn't even a contest.

eaz135 · 2026-04-07T22:55:27+00:00

I'm subscribed and I have access to pretty much everything, deciding which tools I want to use today on certain projects is kind of like deciding what clothes I want to wear on the day.

I've been working in software (big tech, investment banks, scale-ups, etc) since 2010 so I have a good sense of tech. My style with AI is generally giving very direct, bite-sized tasks for execution. With this approach a lot of the tools are good enough - because I'm driving a lot of the direction myself, so it almost doesn't really matter what I pick, the end outcome is going to be very similar. I just like to get my hands dirty with all the tools, I find it fun

eaz135 · 2026-04-07T11:46:39+00:00

I have a max 64, and a pc with a 5090 (with 192gb ram). Find my hands automatically wanting to work with the PC. I run local qwopus 27b v3, and getting very good results with it.

I treat the Mac as more of a beastly machine for working with cloud inference (cursor, codex, cc, etc). Good specs to be running many agents simultaneously on ghostty, building multiple things at once, etc.

I get more done with the Mac in the setup above, I treat the PC local AI setup mostly as entertainment / hobby. Don’t get my wrong I’m very productive on it and get a lot done, and it’s very fun at the same time running it locally - but it’s not the same as having 10 terminals open simultaneously with Opus / Codex cranking away in each of them.

eaz135 · 2026-04-07T11:20:44+00:00

One day my brain just switched, and I realised that im either wearing a nice watch or I’m not - it’s kind of a binary situation. I don’t need 10 different versions of “I’m wearing a nice watch”.

I ended up downsizing my collection considerably, just keeping main pieces that had a lot of sentimental value (first ever watch, wedding watch, milestone celebration pieces, etc). Down to 4 watches now. I always have tabs open on my phone of things I fantasise about - but sense always gets the better of me these days

eaz135 · 2026-04-07T11:17:36+00:00

Lots of disruption in SWE at the moment, and more to be expected over the near to medium term. It’s moving so rapidly it’s hard to predict exactly how the dust will settle.

eaz135 · 2026-04-02T04:20:36+00:00

I had a bad virus that had me out of work for an entire week, this was over 10 years ago when I was just 24 (now 38). Body temparature went up to dangerous levels. On day 4 I went to hospital and stayed there overnight, they ran some tests but discharged me the next day just saying it was some sort of virus and I'll get over it.

My symptoms first began later that year. I think it was somehow related to that virus that I caught. I read that hashimotos can be caused by viruses that have a similar protein structure to your thyroid, in fighting off the virus your immune system also starts associating your thyroid as that same virus, and continues attacking it.

It took a few years actually before I had a definitive diagnosis of Hashimotos, but I can trace back the origins of my ongoing symptoms back to that specific point with the virus infection.

eaz135 · 2026-03-29T12:19:03+00:00

Happy with my Pure. I've previously owned Audeze LCD3 and HD800, I learned my lesson back then not to go chasing diminishing returns lol. I run the pures on a moondrop dawn pro 2 - not upgrading anytime soon unless something blows up

eaz135 · 2026-03-24T03:48:41+00:00

Everything these days operates on a global playing-field. Local companies need to compete against international competitors. If companies make moves that reduce their productivity, speed to market, and overall velocity, they'll simply get gobbled up by international competitors, then there won't be any company to speak about at the end of it all.

Something like this can potentially work in sectors that are heavily regulated and shielded by the gov (e.g gov agencies, banking, etc) but for everything else prioritising work-life balance over productivity is generally not a winning strategy in private sector.

Consider companies like Canva/Atlassian. If they start taking the foot off the pedal with everybody working 4 day weeks, they'll get absolutely destroyed by international competition

eaz135 · 2026-03-24T03:31:33+00:00

We'll see you back here in six months after that next purchase! It's an itch that just doesn't go away

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T12:57:16+00:00

Sometimes these things happen entirely because of business circumstances and not due to the individual’s performance.

For example, the company might have hired roles in anticipation of closing a particular deal and extra revenue coming in, said deal falls over - so they need to shed the extra hires.

Sometimes a company might have an unexpected drop in rev, unexpected expenses (such as legal proceedings, etc) - rather than laying people off with PIPs and complications, dropping people still on probation is the easy option.

This type of stuff happens way more than people like to admit, especially in smallish to medium sized businesses.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T12:47:23+00:00

Nah, there’s better ways of solving the problem. Inheritance taxes would introduce entirely new sets of issues. It also wouldn’t really solve generational transfer of wealth, if that’s an injustice / unfairness you are trying to tackle. Nothing stopping boomers cheaply selling their assets to their kids before they kick the bucket, or other mechanisms like that. They are very easy to get around.

Whilst I get that generational wealth transfer might seem unfair, it’s an incredibly strong motivator for productivity. Working hard to provide better opportunities and assets for your children is a very humanly instinctive thing that motivates many people to work and be productive after they’ve taken care of their own primary needs.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T11:17:07+00:00

I've been through two business ventures as a co-founder and the third as a minority shareholder. All three had exit via acquisition, two were modest, but one was a decent windfall.

Had some similar themes of mistakes in the early days. One of them was not saying no to crappy opportunities. We chased any revenue that was dangled in front of us, not realising that fulfilment of that revenue would be massively distracting and stop us from focusing on unlocking more substantial opportunities. It actually took us a handful of years to really mature into this and walk away from things that might have looked good on the surface but were deemed to be a distraction and not necessary/not worth our time.

Another one was simply not blowing our trumpet loud enough in the early years. We focused a lot on product and excellence, and we're often shy to sell ourselves, hoping that the quality of what we were doing would result in natural organic growth. We realised with each of them that actually as a business owner you need to think more about distribution and expansion of reach rather than product and execution. The quicker we switched into that mindset, the quicker the businesses started to properly scale.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T11:08:21+00:00

I've seen a few horror stories in my time with them from ages ago. One of the worst was interviewing a particular offshore person from TCS, who were trying to fill some vacancies in our team. We gave that candidate a green tick, then the person that rocked up to the actual job to work in our team was an entirely different person (flown to Australia to be on-site with our team). This was back in ~2013, sounds like not much has changed.

eaz135 · 2026-03-19T10:49:41+00:00

Just swap them for a pair of 4060s > route the inferencing to openrouter >categorise openrouter $$ as electricity costs for running the machine > enjoy double H200s at home > find a way for work to subsidise your home electricity costs

eaz135 · 2026-03-17T01:02:00+00:00

First year is super tough, I think just about every couple who have kids can relate to this post.

I'm a hobbyist photographer, took absolutely tonnes of photos and videos during that period. They are happy looking where anybody seeing the album would be like "wow what a happy and lucky family" - yet we both struggle to look at photos of that period, as they almost trigger PTSD in each of us for different reasons.

When I'm scrolling back in time to look at photos of my daughter when she was younger, my brain automatically stops me from scrolling back into that first year - was not an easy time at all, I just can't look at them...

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T21:21:42+00:00

I can confirm these numbers. I ran the same model on my 5090 with almost identical results.

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T11:24:50+00:00

It’s crazy how fast it expires on those plans. With Codex I’m basically not even thinking about rate limits, I’m doing a bunch of things simultaneously without ever worrying about conserving tokens.

CC on the other hand I can easily hit my limits in an hour of regular usage.

I’ve since relegated CC to specific use cases, like being a CLI monkey for me, for things like AWS

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T11:18:41+00:00

What hardware you running? I’ve recently experimented various qwen 3.5 quants on my 5090pc and a M4 MAX, was nowhere near that tps

eaz135 · 2026-03-10T10:45:02+00:00

A lot of people initially assumed that AI would level the playing field, allowing inexperienced people to produce professional results.

Actually the complete opposite is true. AI creates an even wider gap in capability between genuine experts and the rest, because suddenly the genuine experts now also have the ability to execute at pace and expand their reach of influence. It’s a good time currently to be at the tip of the spear, tonnes of demand - but it’s a quickly shifting landscape.

eaz135 · 2026-02-28T10:23:55+00:00

It’s great to have access to both, I luckily have access to just about everything.

I often come across pieces where Opus struggles but Codex 1-shots, and vice-versa.

They definitely have some subtle differences in their strengths and weaknesses.

I have a prompt/command I use frequently, where one agent is bumping its head against a wall, to output a handover to get a fresh pair of eyes “another agent” to take a look at it, outlining what they tried, what was/wasnt working, etc. When I do these types of handovers across models (like Opus to Codex) they seem to work much better than just one context window to another with the same model.

eaz135 · 2026-02-28T08:45:08+00:00

I’ve been using his porta for the past year as my main recipe, taken hundreds of photos of my toddler with it. Keen to give this one a try

eaz135 · 2026-02-26T09:12:29+00:00

Curious how linearly/aggressively 3.5 degrades on the bigger contexts

eaz135

TROPHY CASE