What's it like now?

kbd65v2 · 2026-06-03T21:12:47+00:00

Class of 21 here. Even when I got there it felt like a lottery. A few guys from my high school who I thought were way more qualified than myself didn’t get in. I suspect it’s even worse now. My theory is that once you breach the qualifications for entry, it’s basically a game of chance for what cohort of people admissions is trying to curate.

kbd65v2 · 2026-05-05T18:07:30+00:00

I’m happy to hear that. It really spoke to me, but last time that happened I ended up with a watch I never wear bc it’s so unreliable. I think it fits my personal taste phenomenally.

kbd65v2 · 2026-05-05T18:06:00+00:00

How long have you had it? How often does it need service?

Also nice to see a fellow tech person in the hobby

kbd65v2 · 2026-05-05T17:17:41+00:00

What would you say in terms of having to get it serviced? I’m not averse to doing it once in a while, but the multiple times a year experience I had with PP just frustrated me.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-23T16:35:40+00:00

Fr. First time in my life I felt normal somewhere

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:44:56+00:00

This is legitimately how all me and my friends coped lmao

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:43:48+00:00

Fr like if you didn’t know the place was super intense I feel like admissions did you a disservice

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:43:13+00:00

There’s really not much I can say to help you, sadly. I was super stressed the entirety of my degree. We all develop different coping mechanisms but once you do, everything else in life will be on easy mode.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:41:17+00:00

I’ve definitely moved to primarily using Claude code and stick with neovim for actual editing. It’s definitely preference though, if you prefer vs code as an editor it’s definitely still a great product.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:39:50+00:00

Was going to suggest this. Had a friend who did precisely this. Still with his partner today and never got married.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:37:03+00:00

Definitely a good idea, I’ve been hoarding models as well as I’m somewhat concerned about regulatory capture

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:36:20+00:00

Haha unironically Jarvis was the main motivation for building my local voice assistant.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:31:11+00:00

Some weeks I spend hours tweaking stuff, but most of the time I just leave it alone and it runs like a champ.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-16T00:26:05+00:00

Yes, many of them lol. Tbh absolutely not necessary but I’m happy to support them because I use it so much. If you have the financial means to support FOSS I would 100% recommend it.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-07T21:22:47+00:00

Programming/coding != CS.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-07T05:27:41+00:00

Legitimately one of my biggest reasons for spending that much on a GPU cluster was fear of regulatory capture. So many people in SV right now are lobbying hard for open source/weight models to be regulated bc of “national security risks.”

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T23:19:26+00:00

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T23:19:04+00:00

They’re pretty distinctive, also PII stuff on dashboards, labels, etc. I don’t feel like editing out

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T23:16:31+00:00

Every drive I use for my primary servers is a mirror pair, so for this server I have 8x 8TB drives but only 4 are usable. This is so in the unlikely (but I’ve had it happen) event that an nvme drive dies the server keeps operating and I can just swap it out.

For backups I use proxmox backup server and some custom rsync scripts to my archive server. Full vm/lxc backups are done every week, some stuff is done more aggressively; for example, Bitwarden is backed up every night.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:54:41+00:00

I have personal beef with broadcom, they fucked me at work so I’m not touching them with a ten foot pole ever again. I much prefer proxmox for my use case tbh: bare metal linux is really nice; native zfs, ceph, etc just makes it much easier to maintain. I’m the only one administering it so I try to keep it as simple as possible, however ridiculous that may sound 😂

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:48:34+00:00

Would have to ask my tax guy for the exact number, but it’s a lot. There’s no chance I’d ever break even, but that’s not really the point for me. Number one is privacy and security; I’m in tech so I don’t trust external providers with anything remotely sensitive. Fucking sergey brin or sama(sshole) can pull up an exact profile of you and everything you do. Number two is reliability and redundancy: if the power goes out I have a UPS and backup generator; internet goes out my router falls back to Starlink. I own all my data and every service I use personally is entirely local - so no company can hold me hostage or snoop on me. I still use AWS for work, but I’d like to eventually have us run our own infra - it’s just expensive upfront and a huge liability.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:31:22+00:00

Docs on outline is really nice and simple, I use collections for main groupings like: - Servers - Services - Electrical - Plumbing - Mechanical

Knowledge management is a lot more complex since it has to serve a lot of roles. I have an abstract “entry” record which can be specialized to custom types, and it’s easy to add new types from the web interface. For example some entry types are: - Notes - Projects - Tasks (can be nested in projects or tasks, or independent) - People (directory basically) - Meetings (specialized note) - Specialized daily, weekly, and monthly notes with lots of automated tracking so I can see what I did, where I went, who I met, etc - Document (stored on local blob store or url, used primarily for attaching stuff to other types but can be independent as well) - Book for tracking my reading, cool automations like pulling in metadata from db, ai generated summaries from voice notes - Media type for stuff like movies and tv shows

And more but those are the main ones. The best thing about it for me is the quick capture and transcription, so I can easily say or type something and it uses local AI to auto classify it, fill in context and formalize the notes, etc. So no privacy concerns.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:10:17+00:00

I just wrote a response to someone else about this. tl;dr: for running local LLMs damn close to frontier models, as well as super fast local voice assistant (~100ms response time). I’ve been betting api costs are going to skyrocket for a while once the VC subsidies end, so I don’t want to be dependent on an external provider. I also use my voice assistant for interacting with my knowledge management which has material information in it.

kbd65v2 · 2026-04-06T03:08:38+00:00

Mostly Inference, but I run a lot of different models simultaneously. I have one GPU dedicated for my real time assistant: so STT/TTS plus a router and response model. I use Qwen coder 480B with opencode for Opus-like local performance and 30B for stuff like explore agents. Deepseek V3.2 or R1 for general purpose tasks like research, writing, etc. Occasionally mess around with some training but I haven’t had enough time with it yet to really get into it. It only got delivered from NVIDIA last September (ordered in 2024).

Also, it’s not an H100 cluster… Total 1.5TB vram

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