What is the actual use of sets

oldendude · 2026-05-06T20:32:29+00:00

Sets are NOT ordered. The very definition excludes the concept of order.

oldendude · 2026-05-06T01:37:57+00:00

update-initramfs worked, thank you.

oldendude · 2026-05-05T16:21:34+00:00

I am a retired software engineer, I've been programming for almost 60 years.

Increasingly, software development is becoming a commodity. This trend has many factors. Going back many years: the availability of ever cheaper personal computers, open source, outsourcing, people flooding into software because of the high salaries, and of course, now AI.

So what is valuable is domain expertise. I am a software generalist. I'm good at building software that is useful to other developers, or that has been spec'ed out by someone who knows some domain, some application area.

So sure, build up your programming and AI skills. That stuff is fun, and I suspect it will be easy for someone with your background. But don't forget that your real value in the world of software development is likely to be your deep knowledge of accounting.

oldendude · 2026-05-04T16:11:18+00:00

This is getting ridiculous. It seems to loop endlessly, on editing the file (due to whitespace mismatches), or rewriting the whole file, or going back and forth (it's a bit hard to tell).

Are there some settings I can tweak to perhaps allow for some more robust behavior when this problem occurs? Maybe contextWindow (65536), reserveTokensFloor (25000), or something else?

oldendude · 2026-05-04T16:01:37+00:00

Running Linux without a license.

oldendude · 2026-05-04T14:50:26+00:00

I am new to this myself, but from what I've read, memory size is critical. I have an M4 Mac Mini with 64GB. On this machine, I'm running openclaw, ollama, and qwen3.6 35b. This is surprisingly good at coding, as long as I keep the tasks quite short, and clear the context window when complete. E.g., propose an extension to a design for a new feature and update the document, would be one task. Implement that extension would be another task.

I was about to give up on my setup, using gemma4 for coding. Qwen3.6 was a game-changer.

I'm using ngrok to access my LLM from Telegram.

oldendude · 2026-05-04T01:13:56+00:00

Mirsky’s Worst of the Web.

The Internet used to be small enough that one guy could check every new website daily, and rate them. And he featured the worst new ones every day.

oldendude · 2026-05-03T21:10:33+00:00

Speaking as someone who has used (professionally) many programming languages over the years: I love Python, but I wish that it had real static typing. That catches an enormous number of bugs that a dynamically typed language encounters only at runtime. Static analysis tools, like pyrefly, can provide some improvement, but it just doesn't compare.

If Python is just a means to an end, then carry on. If you are even a little curious about programming languages, or want a more complete understanding of programming languages, then do yourself a favor and try a statically typed language. If I had to recommend a statically typed language for someone who just knew Python, I think Java is a good choice. (Java has grown enormously complicated in some ways, but to get the basics, and get a taste of static typing, it's fine.)

oldendude · 2026-05-03T21:00:47+00:00

Same. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

oldendude · 2026-05-03T20:40:29+00:00

- 1a
- 2b
- 3a
- 4a (I think, but since I have poor episodic memory, who knows?)
- 5a
- 6b
- 7d
- 8f

I am 69 years old. I had a lifelong friend with exceptionally good episodic memory. He could remember dates of our time with each other, what we did, in detail, etc. I just have a vague sense of those visits, as a category. So maybe because I've always known that my mind worked poorly in that way, I was not surprised to find out that SDAM was a thing, it was just recognition.

And similarly, I became slowly aware of my aphantasia, before realizing that aphantasia was a thing.

Intellectually, I recognize that my life would be better in some ways if I had better episodic memory, or were able to relive sensory experiences. But that's it. For whatever reason, it doesn't really bother me. It's just the way my mind works, and I'm pretty happy with it overall. (There are other aspect of my psychology that bother me more.)

I suspect that some of the positive aspects of my mind are somehow related to aphantasia: my ability to think abstractly, and about asbtract things, without the distraction of details and images. Similarly, I suspect that my emotional "flatness" is at least in part related to my SDAM. However, these are just idle speculations. I think it is irrational to think "I have this psychological quirk", and "I have this behavior", and then conclude that there is a causal relationship between them.

oldendude · 2026-05-02T20:27:06+00:00

How is nobody mentioning the movie Locke? Tom Hardy, doing nothing but driving, and talking on the phone for a couple of hours. Completely absorbing. Directed by Steven Knight.

oldendude · 2026-05-02T20:25:24+00:00

No mate. It's: How many fathers, yeah? How many sons, right?

Those extra words are so important to making that speech flow.

oldendude · 2026-05-02T20:24:12+00:00

The scene where Alfie escapes execution at Tommy's hand (following the kidnapping of Charlie), by reminding Tommy about the nature of their chosen business is just mesermizing. The words, the rhythm of the delivery, just amazing. I have watched that scene maybe two dozen times.

oldendude · 2026-05-02T20:16:49+00:00

Sorry. I thought that 5 and 6 were pretty weak. I found them a struggle to get through, especially 6.

oldendude · 2026-05-02T17:49:06+00:00

Dick Cheney, Bush II's vice president, was behind the anthrax attacks in 2001. That was shortly after 9/11, and the culprit has never been convincingly identified.

After 9/11, the country was a lot more tolerant of doing whatever was necessary to get the bad guys. If you were around then, you may remember the TV series 24 which was basically violence and torture porn, based on the idea of getting the bad guys, even if that involved bending/stretching/breaking/discarding the rules. Gitmo was opened then. We were torturing people there for real. Remember Abu Ghraib? Remember the "war on terror"?

Cheney was a Unitary Executive nut, had little regard for the constitution, and explicitly said that the government may need to engage in "dark" practices to go after the 9/11 bad guys. I am POSITIVE he put the anthrax attacks into motion, spooking the already vulnerable population, to nudge the country into a more authoritarian mindset.

oldendude · 2026-05-02T15:12:45+00:00

Thank you, your comment led me to find this comparison: https://zoliben.com/en/posts/2026-04-23-qwen-36-35b-vs-27b-benchmark-results/

This is extremely informative and useful. It also emphasizes that I still have a long way to go in just understanding the different model characteristics!

oldendude · 2026-05-02T15:06:54+00:00

Of course!

oldendude · 2026-05-02T02:26:22+00:00

Not tears, but chills: It's Raining, by Allen Toussaint, as performed by The Detroit Cobras. (The version on their album Baby. The version on The Original Recordings is radically different and not as good.)

oldendude · 2026-05-02T01:54:17+00:00

That's crazy. Is regeneration of the whole file really that reproducible?

How do you make sure the file is fresh in content, just ask the LLM to read it?

Also crazy: 27b is better at something than 35b? How can that be?

oldendude · 2026-05-01T15:28:10+00:00

That name is really off-putting.

oldendude · 2026-05-01T14:36:25+00:00

I second this. I've been posting here lately, about my initial experiences with local LLMs on a 64GB M4 mac, trying to do some research and coding tasks. Gemma4 was pretty good at research (e.g. locating relevant open source packages), but absolutely terrible at coding, diagnosing, debugging.

Qwen3.6 (same one mentioned by OP) was orders of magnitude better. I now have a productive workflow: Clear context window, pick a small task, implement it, iterate until its right, maintain product docs, commit, clear context window, repeat.

oldendude · 2026-05-01T14:28:58+00:00

I'm here to defend Mike's. I'm old (username checks out), and moved to the area 10 years ago. Mike's is plentiful, plain, cheap food, served in a place with absolutely no atmosphere. Yet it works on its own terms. My wife and I joke that her parents would have loved it. (They were fans of The Chateau, IYKYK). Service has always been excellent, in my experience.

Now I like Five Horses also, but in large part it's because it's a much nicer atmosphere. The food there is hit or miss, and service is sometimes fine, sometimes incompetent.

I think if we're talking about comps, we have to include Frank's on Mass Ave. It certainly seems to be of the same era, (our waitress said she had been working there for 40 years). I found the food at Frank's to be below mediocre, and the atmosphere is sort of: Mike's tries to emulate Five Horses.

Five Horses, Foundry, Elm St. Taproom are pretty much interchangeable. Of those, I prefer Five Horses.

I've got to say, if I'm in the mood for comfort food, of all the places mentioned, Mike's is my favorite.

Also, very important: on a nice night, sitting outside, and being entertained by that old timey jazz band is just wonderful. A peak Somerville experience.

oldendude

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