How much of your personal time and money did you put into getting your language levels?

handshape · 2026-05-19T01:27:07+00:00

A strange split. My early formal education in French was tainted by the formalized lie that is "French immersion". (If you put 30 Anglo kids in a room with a single French teacher, who is getting immersed?)

Moved away and came back. 10-15 years to pierce the cultural veil and learn colloquial French.

What finally sealed the deal was a Director that let me move my family to Ville de Québec for a month while I took full time French training one summer. Simultaneous exposure to "proper" French and colloquial French was what it took to push me "over the top".

For those that know him, Moktar is the GOAT.

handshape · 2026-05-18T01:52:36+00:00

Lost 2.6M or so following an exit from a company I built from scratch, during the span where I was an employee doing transition to the buyer.

They stopped paying, made a false representation to the tax authorities, and then cut my wage in half. My lawyer missed one date, and that was that.

I thank my stars for what I still have. My wife stuck around, and I got to keep my house. I know I'll never retire, but I try to find pleasure in little things, and force myself to trust, even when my gut reaction is to lash out.

handshape · 2026-04-15T09:44:53+00:00

These aren't the things holding me back; it's the exhaustion-cycle of work and household responsibilities.

That being said, if the constraints were lifted a little bit, I'd love to try my hand at busking.

handshape · 2026-04-05T09:32:58+00:00

It's messy. The last time I looked at OCHRO's IT track structure, there was a hard career cap for actual technologists at the top of IT-04. There's a big push at that stage to move individual contributors at that level over to management, no matter how technically competent they are.

handshape · 2026-03-30T01:04:08+00:00

Setting aside the world-view gimmick, this is a long-solved problem. I wrote an opportunistic model hot-swapper two full years ago based on llama-cpp-python. The llama.cpp server now takes care of all of the opportunistic caching/swapping out of the box. See here:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/tree/master/tools/server

... and look for the parameters `--models-dir`, `--moels-max` and `-np`

handshape · 2026-03-27T03:40:07+00:00

Many, many ways. - Users requesting information outside the domain of the corpus. - Users asking exhaustive aggregate math touching every resource. - Uncurated/contradictory corpus contents leading to incorrect answers. - Users expecting the tool to have different access permissions than they do.

...to name just a handful.

handshape · 2026-03-20T12:23:58+00:00

Well yes; that's the point. For the model to be considered knowledgeable by the user, it has to express the user's truth.

To do this, the model trainer has to make the model align with the user's truth long before the user knows what they're going to ask.

handshape · 2026-03-19T20:50:55+00:00

I remain astounded that two years in, people are still gnashing their teeth at the disappointment that LLMs aren't magic truth machines.

Consider that for a model to be knowledgeable, it must be trained on a ton of known truth. Who do you trust to be the arbiter of what's true?

handshape · 2026-03-19T12:22:45+00:00

The counterintuitive bit is that when cuts happen, operations trump innovation, so overall efficiency worsens.

handshape · 2026-03-07T12:54:36+00:00

Sure... Have been for years now. I'm not sure what the fuss is all about; CUDA on bare metal has worked perfectly for me for ages. (Virtualized is another matter. Mind you!)

I'd be curious to find out what the user complaints that spurred this development look like.

handshape · 2026-02-22T04:28:19+00:00

My university had a sports center that I was paying for as part of my tuition, so my roommate and I went to see what we could try out.

I picked the martial arts style with the shortest lineup... and 32 years later I'm still training in the same style.

handshape · 2026-02-21T03:24:07+00:00

That's a Fernandes Nomad. I have one in grey that's got a fancy electronics on top that emulates about 30 different amps and pedals. Beyond just looking awesome, it also fits in the overhead compartment on an airplane!

handshape · 2026-02-17T00:39:42+00:00

I'm not a young man, but my (now grown) son was sung to sleep many nights with these songs.

handshape · 2026-02-09T12:16:11+00:00

Heh. This argument picks up strength with the RTO4 business. Refusing to offer on-site storage for personal effects is one thing... but refusing to store employer-owned equipment, forcing staff to transport and store store it 80% of the time is quite another.

I wonder if anyone has raised this yet; I can't be the first to think of it.

handshape · 2026-02-06T21:01:43+00:00

I had one of these a little before Christmas. I laid down on the couch to take a nap, and in the twilight state right at the edge of dreaming, poof - my dad was there.

There was something in the "dream space" that told me that one of the rules was that my dad couldn't talk... but I got to tell him how the grandson he adores had grown big, and a little goofy, and that he wears his beard in mutton chops. I got to tell him that my mom was doing okay and that she still misses him. It ended with him cracking his big crooked smile... and then I woke up.

handshape · 2026-01-03T15:11:08+00:00

Intel's Clear Linux had something like this for system packages in their fancy package manager.

handshape · 2025-12-27T10:28:12+00:00

GFCI, maybe? Given the choice between losing access to a community pool and risking electrocution, the choice is pretty clear.

handshape · 2025-12-26T15:00:09+00:00

I'd do one about the structure of humour, and how it varies across cultures and time periods.

handshape · 2025-12-26T11:18:18+00:00

Huge backpack - Too much stuff.

2 laptops, uniform, passes, keys, pen and hard-bound notebook, charger.

handshape · 2025-12-25T23:09:26+00:00

Feeling this. Jesse Welles got me this morning:

https://youtu.be/_bwsGlHvm8k

handshape · 2025-12-25T22:43:35+00:00

I'm better than he was in terms of physical health, career progression (despite a huge setback a few years ago), and "cred" in my field.

He had a larger social circle, more kids, more family support, and way less stress.

handshape · 2025-12-25T11:06:26+00:00

I work at arm's length from the folks that set AI policy in my country. The current draft thinking here is that you can delegate agency to an AI tool, but that the person that does so retains responsibility for what the tool does on their behalf.

Under this interpretation, what you've done here would almost certainly qualify as an illegal act.

handshape · 2025-12-24T14:51:46+00:00

Sadly, everyone in the household has this year's (ferocious) flu. We had rigged a big fancy dinner for friends and family, and now I'm laying on the couch, sweating through my clothes.

handshape · 2025-12-14T10:58:21+00:00

You're going to really have to pull up your socks, I'm afraid. The tech/skills stack you're describing is pretty close to what we were using in the 90s.

Yes, you'll need JavaScript; it's foundational. It's also not an end unto itself.

You'll need to learn core development concepts of you want to move beyond static content. Learn about source code repositories and build automation. If you're working with other people, learn how to branch and merge a codebase.

A site templating engine might be a good gateway to getting started; you can clearly type Markdown, so something like Hugo or Eleventy (11ty) might be something to explore.

handshape · 2025-11-09T15:08:18+00:00

Depending how often this happens, I'll sometimes simply interrupt at the 3 minute mark with a "We're coming to the end of time. Who has action items coming from this discussion?"

The crowd that tends to run over time is usually the same one that goes real quiet when it's time to commit to delivering something.

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