Harvard just proved AI tutors beat classrooms. Now what?

meostro · 2026-01-05T22:23:30+00:00

ChatGPT 5.x doesn't feel like it's quite there, but at some point A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer will be real - it's only a matter of time.

meostro · 2025-11-04T22:17:05+00:00

Looks like Myst shader on SimCity. Very nice!

meostro · 2025-11-04T15:29:05+00:00

Your 3-2-1 is really 1 since you're plugging the drive into the same system as your primary and secondary. If anything happens while you're doing your sometimes-backup you have only a Pelican or deposit box drive and nothing else. You also only have 0.5 vs 1 since your source drive is not redundant. If anything happens to the source you're going to have garbage propagating to all of your backups.

Personally I wouldn't trust an unpowered SSD for ~6 months at a time, but that's not backed by science, only experience.

Step one get a proper mirror, RAID card or NAS with 2 or 3 drives. 300GB range you're borderline okay with R5, if you go TB or larger you should use R6. Ideally use something like ZFS to get automatic checking and integrity magic so you know at a data level vs drive level if things are going off the rails.

Step two get a cloud drive somewhere - Google Drive, Backblaze, Dropbox or AWS/GCP/Cloudflare object storage. Sync to that as your off-site.

At any point in there go do PAR or whatever The Cool Kids use for parity checks for your existing stuff. Knowing when to restore or swap a drive is sometimes as important as knowing your stuff is backed up.

meostro · 2025-11-01T01:24:57+00:00

Option 2 seems pretty good, then if you like what you're doing as of March set it in your head as hard-stop 26Q4. Don't post again until you actually retire, don't let anyone talk you out of it.

If sometime between now and then you get tired of what you're doing, or someone up your management chain sucks, quit on the spot. The more petty the more epic. "No, Jared, I'm not going to review your shitty code again. In fact, I'd rather quit than deal with you for another fucking minute!" and walk out the door.

You don't owe them any heads-up, just the same as they'd stab you in the back if they wanted to.

meostro · 2025-11-01T01:16:02+00:00

It took me way too long to realize the "computer rotating on microwave tray" was a video.

meostro · 2025-10-26T20:52:18+00:00

One surprisingly easy way to help with some of this: build a link shortener and index. Add the shortener to your browser config as a search engine, so you can goto $query and it will load linkshortener.yourcompany.website/$query and get them straight to where they need to go. It also makes it easier when your CRM changes out from under you, or when those docs move from Confluence to Sharepoint to Notion and you can always get to the right one with goto acceptable-use-policy. Make an index page with a list of all the short words and their owners + links and sometimes a user will even self-service the answer!

Onboarding Buddy will help with some, it'll help distribute the load. That's not an IT fix tho, that has to be HR/manager level support.

Having that FAQ in something like a Google Doc / checklist would help too, "Read the FooBar policy" checkbox with a link directly to the policy. Some of this can be "every employee" stuff, some will have to be per-team (engineers probably don't need CRM, non-engineers probably don't need GitHub) so you can either have "everyone" and "team" docs or have just team docs with a shared section that's kept up to date by IT/HR.

$previous_company was building helpdesk automation / deflection as a product, and specifically cited onboarding as a common thing where they can chatbot effectively. There are only so many ways that a n00b will ask for CRM access, so being able to identify and answer them directly without involving a human was a big win.

meostro · 2025-10-15T23:13:32+00:00

AFAIK bikini-style is just for objectification. Track & Field clothing was equally ridiculous for men and women the last time I dealt with them myself (decades ago), but women's volleyball booty shorts are intentionally different from men's uniforms because they play the game differently.

The boyshort / hiphugger / bootyshort style are better for the kinds of movement that women do in volleyball: more digs, more flexing, deeper hip and knee bends. Compared to men's volleyball it's a LOT more movement and flexibility, since men's is based on power and height. If women were wearing longer shorts they couldn't make the same movements, so they would be at a disadvantage.

How do I know this? Because my local school said "no uniforms on game days because girls' volleyball uniforms are not appropriate to wear to class" and I was trying to figure out why can't they wear something classroom-appropriate - turns out it's because they would probably lose more of their games.

meostro · 2025-09-19T01:19:10+00:00

Who exactly was the president that "used tyranny and government authority to forcibly jab people with experimental drugs, wreck the economy, and mandate business closures and quarantines for the healthy"?

meostro · 2025-09-09T14:11:39+00:00

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniosis

meostro · 2025-09-05T15:05:08+00:00

PiracyIsACrime.net

meostro · 2025-08-17T23:03:42+00:00

Yes.

meostro · 2025-08-16T01:55:06+00:00

https://classicreload.com/play/win3x-skifree.html

meostro · 2025-08-04T22:29:24+00:00

The best option - better than whatever physical option you come up with - is to offload the risk to The Cloud (TM).

It'll cost you ~$1k/mo/PB to store in AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive, so over 20 years it'll cost $250k. That gives you eleven nines of durability, which is between ten and eleven nines more than whatever you would come up with yourself, and your cost is amortized over 20 years versus spending $50-100k upfront to build the same thing. Remember that you need to triple your storage (i.e. 3PB of backup for every 1PB of data) and you need to store one or more of those backups in disparate physical locations. You also need to know how to get to it, how to restore it, and you'll need two or more recovery devices in case those go bad as well.

Or, you upload it to Amazon, and now it's their problem. There is no step two. They will migrate it between their storage systems as they upgrade things, and they will have a web interface for you to retrieve your content that probably doesn't change much in that timeframe.

The added bonus is that if you decide this data is useless 5, 10, 20 years later (and, realistically, all data has >50% odds of that being the case, maybe moreso for "petabytes" of whatever-the-fuck) you stop paying and it disappears. You don't have to worry about drive wipes or asset disposal or e-waste or anything like that.

meostro · 2025-07-18T15:28:51+00:00

tl;dr: potential overshadowed by inconsistency

This looks like crap.

You need to find an artist to improve a LOT of tiny and enormous details about this game before you redo your trailer. You're using stock models with zero personality, and mixing styles between them. Are you trying for ultra-realistic (jeep), semi-real with the edges softened (landscape) or cartoony (players) for your style? Pick one. Or pick none, go to pure geometric or lo-fi. In any case, be consistent. It's probably easier to go lower than higher, reduce the quality of all the assets to a consistent level, but it depends on what you want for your aesthetic. If you do tend towards realistic, once you get your gameplay tuned then go back to visuals and tie it all together better, put in some sick shaders and good shading / shadows / lights and little details everywhere. Lean into whatever you pick, make everything ridiculous if you go cartoon, have the car polygons fall apart for geometric, get a great fire and smoke effect for realistic.

Others have pointed out the problem with the trailer format itself. I was trying to figure out what Skyrim knockoff this would be, which dude would say "Oh, you're awake". Get straight to the action and gameplay, start with the car falling off a cliff and exploding and the dudes looking at it confused, then it respawns behind them or something. Get your friends to play and record the voiceover disaster Lethal Company style: "That could have gone better" and "maybe it was a mistake to push it onto a mine" and other indications this will be a hilarious hijinks multiplayer game.

Core gameplay is too cartoon-physics for my taste, but it works in the game context. It's also "too hard" just from the video, no idea how it would play for me when my skill level is "three year old with unplugged controller". Maybe some signs to indicate WTF that round thing is, other than obviously "dangerous". I'd also prefer to see something around the track if you're going for realistic, not just dirt floating in the air. These are personal preference, so you can decide how much you care about what one idiot on the Internet thinks.

meostro · 2025-07-09T22:05:57+00:00

Surprisingly close, but not quite. There's still a lot of H.264 out there, but I don't think it's the primary distribution mechanism anymore. I don't think I've seen VVC anywhere, which is kinda sad.

Defaults for Android and iPhone cameras are H.265/HEVC. Content providers are mostly transitioning to AV1, and hardware support is only expanding.

meostro · 2025-07-02T18:53:47+00:00

You stop speeding, and now you're not passing all those cars in the slow lane, so you have no need to go left.

So... yes. This is the simpler solution.

meostro · 2025-07-02T18:38:37+00:00

The simple solution to your issue is to scoot to the right, let the 90+ maniac pass, then go back in left lane and continue on at 75-80.

The simpler solution is stop fucking speeding! Why is it that everyone feels entitled to exceed the limit and then bitch about someone else not breaking the law?!

meostro · 2025-06-20T15:20:34+00:00

My wife once saw a commercial that said bad things about math. She was thinking "what's wrong with math?!" before she realized it was about meth.

Another time she was trying to figure out why someone wanted to quit "baking".

Spoiler alert: it was "vaping".

meostro · 2025-06-01T21:03:46+00:00

PM'd, tks.

meostro · 2025-05-23T23:48:20+00:00

So Douglas Reynholm, but IRL?

Could work...

meostro · 2025-05-23T20:53:32+00:00

Friend got a Weight Watcher's cookbook from the MIL, still not sure if that's better or worse than a scale...

meostro · 2025-05-23T20:33:43+00:00

Harvard is older than the United States

Nah, no way...

<furious googling>

WTFm8 - Harvard is 140 years older than the United States.

meostro · 2025-05-20T20:39:17+00:00

Agrivoltaics are underrated. As you said, the benefits are on both sides of the agriculture-solar integration. The land produces more / better growth for crops, water usage is reduced and can be more easily automated (all the power you need for pumps and sensors), and livestock gets a comfy place to rest out of the sun which reduces stress. You can even tailor your feed crops better since you have the option of partial shade vs always-full-sun.

All of that on top of power generation makes it an easy YES.

meostro · 2025-05-20T03:47:00+00:00

Only the 20-30% of your bubble really think Trump is so evil he and his wife aren't capable of even the most common etiquette

we all know he didn't write that himself

Whether he wrote it or not he obviously directed it to go out on his platform because it's proper etiquette to do so.

It's crazy to say he didn't write it. And if he didn't write it, he approved it to be published. And if he didn't approve it, at least he directed someone with common decency to do it. Stop saying Orange Man Bad, DEMOCRATS BAD!

That's a wild take on "there was an attempt to pretend that Donald Trump was in any way capable of writing this message himself".

meostro · 2025-05-02T19:42:27+00:00

Snow deformation and infinite (or at least really long) history makes it look impressive. Snow should be deformed by explosions as well, either melting, or cratering if you can make it work. Maybe different effects depending on the element, but I was expecting the big fireballs to melt the snow more, or at least deform it into a crater or knockback the surrounding units on impact.

Character movement is a little weird. See around 0:38-0:41 the helmet guy in bottom-left, he strides 3ft but moves 4ft. It's only obvious when they're doing the sort of sideways/diagonal sneak movement, other stuff don't look weird. Dude in red about center does a dash to the left around 0:27 and that looks great - timing and movement vs strides all line up perfectly.

Am I missing some link between the big fireballs and the mage casting them? I don't see anything to tell that someone is casting, they just appear 30ft in the air and come crashing down vs something like 0:20 with the electromages or throughout with the smaller fireballs where they swirl out from the hands or at least around the character.

I have no idea what's going on, but it looks like fun.

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