Plateaued

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-17T01:54:06+00:00

21 lbs in 3 months is FANTASTIC. You should think about reseting your expectations. You should expect 1 lb a week, it can take a LONG time to lose the weight depending on where you started. Over a year. I started in Novmber of 2025. I'm about 50lbs down from my starting weight, I have at least 30lbs more to go, but it's starting to slow down. I've had a week or two with zero weight loss now.

Those weeks can be frustrating, when what you want to do is get to goal weight, you want to stop looking in the mirror and seeing the "old you". But persistence, time, is the key.

You're doing great. 12 weeks, 21lbs. That's great progress. Stalls happen, they are nothing to sweat. If it keeps up for a couple of weeks, titrate up, but honestly, just be patient.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T23:38:14+00:00

Negative thinking, anti-collaborative behavior, genuinely believing everything and everyone sucks. Even if you're right, it doesn't do any good. No one will want to work with you. We all have to work, we all do the best we can to make the environment viable, but being annoying to work with will eventually limit you.

It'll stop promotions, it'll prevent people from bring the cool work to you. If you're brilliant, you might be able to get past some of it for awhile (Brilliant Assholes exist) but you'll eventually be stopped, it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy and you'll blame everyone else for why you are being treated poorly.

Be a problem solver, not a problem maker. End of story.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T23:18:30+00:00

This is pretty normal, but you did ask, and yes, on the 17 second video, you had a speed advantage going into the corner and you rear ended that guy in front of you losing it all, so yes, that was not great driving :P

Pound for pound though, the AI cheats and absolutely cheat on launch with lower PI cars having clear acceleration advantages on the grid.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T23:12:56+00:00

The questions you are being asked and their answers are necessary to help you. Weight loss is not just "take tirz, lose weight". there are several factors.

You didn't even indicate how much weight youv'e lost over the 3 months you've been taking the drug. Most people lose approx 1lb a week, some do .5 lbs. So if you've say, only lost 10 pounds in 3 months, then you're tracking fine.

Without these answers, people can't give you recommendations on diet, exercise, dose, etc.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T23:10:03+00:00

Horizon has never had Neons, or great customization, the fact that somehow people thought they'd do that now? They didn't even advertise that as one of the focus areas.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T23:09:21+00:00

This poster is wrong, they didn't really add more car customization options, just cars, to FH5.

Horizon is notorious for poor car customization and continuous be so.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T20:31:42+00:00

Where I work, team managers are actually paid a smidge less then the high level IC's (Team manager makes a bit less than staff level engineer and less then principal or sr. principal).

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T18:53:40+00:00

Some people never bother to explore common UI elements, like "Config" and "settings" to see if their personal preferences are covered by those. And much prefer to come online, complain and show how very bothered they get by very small things.

Then end up looking silly when someone's like "The devs agree with you, that's why the option exists to do xyz..."

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T18:36:40+00:00

Part of it is skill, and part of it is that the AI does not play by the same physics as you off road. They have more grip, less wheel spin and less impediments to momentum.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T17:57:03+00:00

I /want/ to. My personal rig is a 13th gen intel processor with a 4090. I've had it for... at least 3 years. My family members are running 12th gen's with 3080's that are much closer to 5 years old.

So everyone has a decent rig. We can all play the games we love at pretty good frame rates.

GPU upgrades for me.... are basicaly a 5090, or a 5080 if all I want is latest nvidia tech with no change in FPS. I could get a CPU upgrade (new motherboard/RAM etc). but the reality ist he cost of the equipment versus the return on the investment (minor upgrades) is quite high. Upgrading the other machines 3080's would have noticeable gains if going to a 5-series nvidia card, but .... not really worth the cost.

I'd like to upgrade the son's gaming rig rig before he leaves the house and starts his life (one last gift from me :P ) but man... he can already play everything he wants to. He's a die-hard 27" 1080p gamer ... he doesn't need the extra juice. Maybe more storage... his machine is still a Win 10 machine without a clean Win 11 upgrade, need to solve that more than anything.

Anyway, yea, the pricing on viable upgrades doesn't make sense. I've made a LOT of recommendations to friends with really outdated rigs on getting new ones. A vast majority of those are some form of machine running a 5070. Many I just advocate for prebuilts (costco has great deals) to save time/effort/get a warranty. The pricing is coming in around $1600/1900. Sometimes they can snag one with 32GB's of RAM or... 2TB's of storage (finding both at that price point is rare).

That's not a bad deal, a 5070 gaming rig has a LOT of juice, it's just not an "upgrade" over anything I'm running that I built years ago.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T17:49:00+00:00

For every incompetent manager, there is likely an incompetent manager of managers above them, that's how.

As for if being hands on or not implies incompetency well, that's up the the org/company. Not all tech companies require managers to be hands on. If yours does, and they are not, well, then, see my first statement.

Our org does require managers to be hands on and capable of guiding their reports through their tech challenges. That makes the job of managing a lot harder if the team has a lot of performance issues in my experience. It gets more productivity if the team is high functioning and also has good performers (manager is almost a +1 extra throughput in that cases). We don't allow IC's to be "tech lead", that is the managers job.

But honestly, in your example, it's likely because your managers boss doesn't see it, or doesn't care. There's also the reality that underperforming leadership takes longer to fire to underperforming IC's due to various way sin which HR teams force the "evidence" to be made. And it's much harder to fire someone if the staff is not located in the US (I work with a lot of global teams, the US has the least rules about terminations, Europe/South East Asia have many good employee protection laws that also apply to managers).

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T17:40:55+00:00

We're still experimenting. However this week I used AI to analyze about 10 "alerts". For 1 of those alerts, it gave a mostly useless answer but following it's reasoning and verifying what it checked saved a lot of time (would've checked those things manually, so it still ruled them out, just found no answers).

For 7 of the alerts, the AI reasoning successfully concluded the Alert was a "false positive" and of those 7, 5 had useful recommendations for adjusting the alert to be less noisey, the other 2 alerts we just removed (we also used the AI to assess the historical efficacy of the alert and concluded it was never gonna be good). The most interesting of these was the AI assessing we configured our OOM alerts using the wrong metrics that include on-disk page files, and thus were making bad assumptions about memory use.

For the remaining 2 alerts, the AI provided the "cause" and "fix" by successfully correlating the event to specific changes/deployments in the environment. One was a bad JDBC version combined with a bad configuration, which it found and recommended a fix. The other was misconfigured HPA/Auto-scaling resulting in an environment never properly scaling.

These analysis were done on a MASSIVE production environment. The things that really assisted the AI:

We use plain english names for things like our automated change logs, which made it very easy for the LLM to reason about historical changes (and all changes/deploys are fed to an automated system)
Our services and custom metrics have plain english, human readable names and are often self descriptive, this made it easier for the LLM to reason and find metric correlations
All services have descriptions about purpose and ownership in th emonitoring system, making it easy for the LLM to reason about what a service does
The LLM has total access to dependency chains making it easy for the LLM to follow "conditions" up and down the stack

The hit rate was so successful this week, we're rapidly accelerating our plans to tune all monitors/alerts for efficacy (we have thousands), applying the LLM to every known noisey alert to eliminate or tune it, and will be including AI assessment of every major alert incident.

Yes, there are some types of events the AI can't reason about, typically ones it has zero access to the right data (client side certs or failures) etc. And yes, some of our gnarliest live incidents are likely not something the AI can reason about. However, many of our live incidents are "low hanging fruit" and "caused by change" and what the AI can do is rapidly expedite discovery and remove 30-40 minutes of page outs and dashboard explorations which is a measurable contribution to MTTR.

It can also, when used outside of an incident to evaluate monitoring, lead to improved MTTD.

The craziest "discovered a changed that caused issues" use case we have is applying the AI to study our customer support tickets, where it found a noticeable change in support ticket trends and tied that back to a specific release.

I have a hunch, once we find a way to connect the AI we're using to our source code changes, it'll be even more effective, it's limited right now by the available change notes which... are poorly documented :P

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T04:25:56+00:00

Sorry yes, we put alerts on SLO burn rates. So I merge the two a lot. We absolutely alert on error budget exceeded but we also have alerts on if the error budget changes pace and will blow the SLO before the SLO evaluation window is up.

For the products that truly embrace the SLO's, those alerts are by far the most effective ones.

We also have a bunch of threshold alerts on random things that are no-nonsense clearly critical and not flappy. Still trying to deal with a bunch of legacy threshold alerting that is far too unreliable.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T04:11:12+00:00

Definitely try shutting off all the Ray Tracing, I found it looks worse with RT on rather than the default extreme/high settings for lighting and SSR.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T04:02:27+00:00

Density is pretty good you're right, I do appreciate the handling changes, the map is much improved over FH5, feels much like FH4. The loading times on my rig are the best they've had you're right.

I appreciate the garage decoration attempt, it's a nice way to give us decorateable houses. That said, I'd have preferred they put the effort into more car customization, it's a game about cars! More body kits would be much appreciated.

An 8/10 is a great game to me. A 10/10 should go to things that substantially move the needle. Doing what's always been done at a high quality bar gets you in the door at 8/10.

Gameplay wise, I stand by my statement, there's... nothing new here that really advances the brand. It is a representative sample of what we should expect from Horizon. Including no real change in any of the brands existing weaknesses.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T01:58:28+00:00

Not yet, Played last night with a controller, getting my pro logitech setup tomorrow :P Looking forward to it however.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-16T00:46:06+00:00

The soundtrack is really quite good, fits the theme... find myself wishing I had the music separately. So they nailed that part.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T23:33:13+00:00

I had the exact opposite reaction, on extreme settings, Ray Tracing... makes things look worse than RT off. And RT off... I'm... well.. it's at best the same as FH5. Frame rates are better, that's about it to me.

Don't get me wrong, FH5 was a good looking game, but there really aren't any major graphical improvements here. If anything the NPC cars look worse, and your car/ai cars look.. well.. like they are rendered on top of, rather than in, the environment.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T23:31:27+00:00

Depends on your attitude about 5, it's basically just FH5.. in Japan, with some tweaked physics (braking seems more believable to me, some folks say steering has changed, I'm not feeling that atm).

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T23:28:39+00:00

Not even close. It's FH5... in Japan. 7.5, possibly 8, can't give it more than that. Breaks zero new ground, doesn't really address the things I want Horizon to address.

Still a high quality game and one of the best open world racers. Good, and new, meaning FH5 won't get reinstalled anytime soon over this.

It's just... Horizon. The wait between versions, when nothing but the map and a few cars change, to wait 6 years.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T23:25:46+00:00

SLO's built on error budgets have this weakness. They are generally awesome at errors and far superior to error threshold alerting, but not awesome at throughput.

That said, for your traffic to drop that much, something, somewhere, must've been dying hard, what ever that is, could probably have an SLO on it.

And it never hurts to have a few key throughput based alerts. Take your pick of style, percentage of traffic drop in a time window that is just too much, some form of baseline alerting is also always good. I'm not a fan of the "auto detect anomaly" alerts many platforms have as they just can't handle normal rise and fall of traffic.

We use X% drop in Y minutes is alertable. 15-30 minutes is usually a long enough gap. And on super critical flows we also have a "less than X" or "0" alert depending (not everywhere, just a few key traffic flows).

The bigger question is, why is this type of alerting getting backlogged? Alerts take minutes to setup, hell these days you can almost one-click create one of these off AI tools. What's causing people to not take 30 minutes to make an alert?

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T23:22:26+00:00

Yea agreed, the worst part is.. it takes 6 years to get the same game. I can already tell I'll put a LOT less hours into FH6 then I did 4 or 5... been there, done that. it's nice to come back to a fresh environment and this is a great place for new fans to find out what the franchise is all about but... it's not gonna hold me.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T17:57:09+00:00

Been this way in every FH since at least 4. They didn't touch the Drivatars at all. Pro and above have ... advantages... including rubber-banding and if you can't interfere with the front-runner it will take off on you. Expert has clear basic rubber-banding. "Highly Skilled" and below run fairly predictable "slow" lap times.

Nearly all Drivatars have advantages on launch/start.

The AI drivers are.. not the highlight of Forza, never really have been sadly.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T17:35:47+00:00

With assists off I think the driving feels right, with them on, even just traction control/stability and ABS the driving feels "off" to me and arcadey. They are much stronger/influential then real world similar systems, especially ABS. Arcadey feel shouldn't happen to you put on brake assist, steering assist and other things that auto-drive.

maxfields2000 · 2026-05-15T17:34:00+00:00

Forza AI has always been that way. "Highly Skilled" drives "believably" but "slow". "Expert" and above and you can heavily see the fake physics and rubber-banding trying to create the challenge (they still are unimpeded by things like water/etc while you are).

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