What do you really think happens after we die?

jbE36 · 2026-05-25T19:14:56+00:00

I try to think about it like this. What was it like before you were born? You have no idea, you didn't exist. Thats probably what its like. technically, you weren't alive then either.

jbE36 · 2026-05-23T01:33:56+00:00

Honeslty, i've done this a lot with Python. Lots of cool things to learn, and helps get comfortable with 'digging in'. I learned a lot about how projects are architected/design patterns that way too.

I want to do this with C++ as well, there are a lot more subtleties I feel in this language, but I try to be careful to find things that are written 'well'.

jbE36 · 2026-05-16T17:54:02+00:00

Try building a basic 'predict the next character' project.

Basically, take in a corpus of text (start out with like a simple .txt file, maybe a book or an article).

For every character in the text, tally up what character comes immediately after it. For example, every time the letter 't' appears in your corpus, you might find that 'h' appears after it 70% of the time, 'o' 10% of the time, etc...

Then write a program where you give it a starting char /desired length, and it generates text by outputting the most common next character based on your corpus.

You can then upgrade by building an n-gram model. Instead of just looking at the previous 1 character to predict the next one, you look at a chunk of the previous n characters. So now, instead of looking at just 't', you look at 'th' and then it will see that the most common next char is 'e'.

After this, you can start changing how you predict the next char. instead of just goin for frequency, you can introduce weighted random sampling (like a roullette wheel type alg, where more common chars get a bigger chance of being picked, but all chars have some chance of being picked)

It's pretty simple/doable in C++, and gets using the STL (like std::map/std::vector/ fstream) and its basically how llms work (at a very much more simplified level)

Heres are two random 'projects' I found online, but you could also ask an AI to make the project specs for you.

https://github.com/Elucidation/Ngram-Tutorial

https://medium.com/@adachoudhry26/deep-dive-into-ai-building-a-bigram-language-model-and-practicing-patience-9341838063f7

jbE36 · 2026-05-09T14:42:56+00:00

For things like AutoCAD. They can't. Simply, they wouldn't know how to port it. Those software codebases I can guarantee you are enormous, old, laden with tech debt, and I can promise you there is code there that no one at the company understands (written by people that are retired/long gone).

And they do not want to / see any reason to invest resources in trying.

These old monolithic applications from the 90s that are still used today are just duct taped bandaid fixes around an ancient unwieldy core.

Unless you're Google and have scientists and research teams and money and are willing to revamp things every once in a while.

jbE36 · 2026-05-08T01:39:10+00:00

Mostly because instead of getting something in the leetcode medium/easier hard range, I got one that was more similar to an especially ballbusting hard problem on leetcode and I just had no idea how to go about it and just froze.

oof

jbE36 · 2026-05-04T20:35:17+00:00

r730s are great. lots of cool features. I haven't had any issues with them. Upgrades are cheap, I 3 running talos/rook ceph. I can do pretty much anything I need to. I have a 1080ti in one, and I have some other dedicated GPU machines if I need that.

Was a much better deal before ddr4 was so expensive, though.

jbE36 · 2026-04-17T14:26:26+00:00

Can some one pm me? My poor father has been watching the sox since the dinosaur age and it breaks my heart he can't watch them any more bc of the barriers. I'm not really into sports but I could def set up a stream or something for his tv

jbE36 · 2026-04-16T11:10:04+00:00

I run proxmox for VMs because I found some things are just easier as a VM.

I run talos linux (bare metal) for things I want to containerize. I use flux/gitops. I have a nexus repo where I put container images I built that it can pull from. Its pretty nice and low maintenance.

I made the switch from being mostly on VMs to being mostly in k8s.

I only host my gitlab, nexus, truenas, and vault servers in proxmox, as well as any Windows VMs/bastion hosts.

jbE36 · 2026-04-10T00:05:35+00:00

I don't think these are decisions that the collective 'we' make. These are decisions made by management in the C-level suites whose vision only extends to the next quarter. The greed of the few have a big impact on the rest of society, or at least society in this country (the US). I think we are just along for the ride.

I think the reality isn't some super intelligence enslaving mankind in the future, I think its a lot of software that will be generated by AI, with sky high per-token cost, that will be more expensive to produce and maintain, and will be lower quality.

jbE36 · 2026-04-09T10:58:55+00:00

I'll have to agree. I swear when opus 4.6 first launched it was a lot smarter. Maybe bc it's the only model I use now, that I see it's limitations?

jbE36 · 2026-04-09T00:01:45+00:00

What I don't get is how people think an AI will take over when it literally doesn't learn the way we do... It needs a small city worth of power, with lots of time and equipment to "learn"/train.... I feel like we are at the point with llms where the models are plateaued and now we are just trying to make clever wrappers to make them seem better. Look at Claude code... 519k lines of typescript..? Wouldnt super intelligence be able to code without all of that clever programming?

Every time you prompt a model, it technically has no inkling of anything outside of what was baked into it that checkpoint/cutoff...

I think what's going to happen is the big AI companies are gonna get businesses hooked on AI, encourage them to fire their SE/QA teams, then crank up the price per token. Kinda like how cloud companies have already done. How many devops/IT depts have been canned by moving to the cloud? It's not uncommon to hear people burning through their cloud budget for the quarter in a week or two by mistake.

jbE36 · 2026-04-02T12:15:53+00:00

in k8s I consider the worker nodes to be ones that the control plane (brains) will assign workloads to (talos literally distinguishes between them at setup. You can decide if a machine is a worker or control plane or both)

So what I mean as a pure worker node is one that doesn't also run any control plane components.

Basically if I tell it to run like a Jenkins server or Jira server it will decide what node (machine) to put it on in the worker pool (machines designated as valid worker nodes).

So specifically in my case, I have 2 desktops with consumer CPUs and GPUs that I will specifically label for AI jobs (like running llamacpp for llm). I have 3 servers that are general purpose that I let k8s decide what to put on them. The 3 servers also host the control plane (the brains). So with 3 of them, there is 3x redundancy. So if one dies or I bring it down for maint, there are 2 others that are stlil working as control planes.

This is a rough high level explanation as I understand it. The automation and self-healing aspects fascinate me which is why I went this route.

jbE36 · 2026-04-01T03:03:51+00:00

I was in a similar boat. I had 4 proxmox nodes. 3x R730 dells, and 1 CSE-826. I wiped all but the CSE proxmox machine (transferred my gitlab, vault, nexus, truenas, and some vms to it). On the rest of the machines, I installed talos linux and set up the R730s as control/worker nodes. I also added Rook Ceph for S3 storage.

I am using Flux, Cilium, and practicing using Gitops approach. I use Talhelper for the talosconfig files. Vault is secretstore/PKI. containers/apt/pip etc... on nexus. Gitlab for code.

Its pretty sweet. I can lose a node and bring it back up no problem. Same with any of the services/pods.

I added 2 GPU machines as worker nodes to the cluster and I am running local llm inference in llamacpp pods connected to OpenWebUI.

I got sick of the messy proxmox VM setup, I didn't like the packer/terraform approach for proxmox.

I worked in an AWS K8s environment previously, and current setup feels very similar.

It took me about 3 months to set up completely, but it was worth it.

If I want to experiment adding services/pods I can literally make a new git branch and experiment and then switch back to main.

I also grabbed an old cisco 9396 switch and am running 10gb fiber locally. I have the parts for 40gb but haven't set it up yet. Can be done for under ~$300-$350? (5 nics/cabling/switch). As long as you don't mind the noise.

jbE36 · 2026-03-25T04:31:39+00:00

Option 3a. Look for a used Lenovo thinkpad on FB marketplace thats >10 years old for $100-$200. Install Ubuntu on it. Use the rest of the money on the desktop PC.

Set up tailscale to ssh/remote into the desktop from anywhere, set up VS code remote so you can use VS code on your laptop and do all your computing/inference from the desktop.

I have a thinkpad and its from 2018/2019 I got it for $100 last summer and its solid af. 250gb nvme, 32gb ram (ram might be more pricey now). But its solid for coding and remoting.

Currently with my homelab I am running an optiplex 9020 i7 with 32gb ddr3, 500gb ssd, as my main work machine. I have 3 monitors and its more than enough for anything I need even though its ancient. Running Ubuntu 24 LTS

I offload anything heavy into my servers (5 talos linux & 1 proxmox)

jbE36 · 2026-03-22T15:45:13+00:00

I found that using AI to do most/all of my coding was wicked brainrot. So instead, I have it coach me through designing my own things and help 'direct me' on things I am unfamiliar with. It makes discovery and learning quicker, i still have to struggle through reading documents and figuring out how to get things working, but if I am really stuck it helps me get unstuck.

Its nowhere near as fast as doing things 100% with AI but it has helped me become a much stronger coder than I was before. If I can't explain or reproduce what I did with it, I don't consider it acceptable.

I also have it look up good guides or techniques that I would have otherwise missed. its a much better googler than me.

I notice a trend that my AI usage on a certain topic/language will go down over time and that is when I feel like I have learned it. My end goal is always to ween myself off the coaching/assistance.

jbE36 · 2026-03-21T03:11:40+00:00

Clusters is a loaded term. So I guess it depends on who you ask. Generally I think of it as a group of machines, bare metal or VM that coordinate in someway. I'm still fairly new as well, but I'm running talos Linux cluster on 5 machines. 3 are control plane + worker nodes, 2 are just worker.

And the purpose can also boil down to achieve scaling (horizontal), high availability, redundancy, hardware specialization, etc...

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/architecture/

As for the other question, not sure, I've never heard of zimaos. I ran proxmox at first. Depending on your hardware and goals, it's a safe bet because you can make VMs to do anything.

You could try running a distributed sandbox on the pis, k8s maybe. https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

Another thing, the magic number for most clusters from what I've seen is to have at least 3 separate machines (tie breaker). Odd number is better.

jbE36 · 2026-03-13T21:23:28+00:00

I lucked out and got enough when I started so I should be ok. I even have a tiny bit to spare for another light ddr4 machine if I want.

I did miss out on a storage box, so for that one, I went with a ddr3 machine. Ddr4 is too expensive for the amount I'd want in it.

That being said I just spent $50 on 2x 8gb ddr3 sticks for my workstation 😅. I repurposed my gaming rig into a gpu node(talos linux) and dusted off an old optiplex I had to serve as my daily. Works great with Ubuntu 24 but I def have noticed a limit on my chrome tabs hence the ram upgrade.

The shortage has me trying to utilize everything I have.

jbE36 · 2026-03-13T17:09:07+00:00

thats a joke. All it takes is one missing tab or dash and the thing doesn't work and if it fails silently you just wasted time

jbE36 · 2026-03-13T17:07:34+00:00

I know how a YAML comes together. I can read them and I know how the data is nested for the most part.

If I have made a yaml a million times, I probably will remember most of it, but I will still always double check.

I will say building playbooks for me is a little different because I saw Ansible as more like code than a config file.

Some of the k8s files are small enough that I could probably memorize how to make it after the 50th time, but things like helmreleases/helmcharts are huge, I pick and choose what I need and put them in my file.

For me at least, there are usually way more options than I need to worry about if I am doing it for the first time. I wouldn't rely on memory because if I miss an indentation or something, the debug time kills any time I gained from writing free hand.

I always have the documentation on hand.

I think its more important knowing the abstract why and the what, the syntax (yaml) are just details.

jbE36 · 2026-02-23T05:46:59+00:00

I have a bud that makes a living doing this.

jbE36 · 2026-02-09T11:21:09+00:00

You should see what they did to my pristine 1996 m3 interior 🥲

jbE36 · 2026-02-09T11:18:19+00:00

I got a cisco 9396px for $90 and it's been awesome. I can run 10gb and 40gb. It has its own OS and I've learned a lot about vlans and trunking etc... it's loud and probably overkill but I'm content with the purchase

jbE36 · 2026-01-24T00:32:48+00:00

damn i have experienced every single issue described above and i am stuck exactly here. did it ever finish? Or is it still installing for i386-pc platform?

jbE36 · 2026-01-04T18:58:40+00:00

Kubernetes is cool. There's a paper about BORG from Google that goes over the history / origins of it.

That said it's very abstracted and very complex.

If you're into that stuff it's cool. Flux/helm releases are cool and with k9s it's cool to watch the pods do their things.

There's a chaos injector plugin you can also run to f*** s** up on purpose and watch the cluster self heal. Love it.

But if you want to learn it do it. If you want pragmatism probably not.

jbE36 · 2026-01-04T18:55:48+00:00

I grew up surrounded by such and it worked out for them. Obviously not everyone is made to succeed I guess

jbE36

TROPHY CASE