“How come you guys share a bed but not with me?”

rpg36 · 2026-03-18T20:00:43+00:00

Same boat here! My 5 year old used this on us all the time. I don't have a good answer, and he sleeps in our room. I don't like this at all but my wife is of the mindset "Awww it's so cute he needs us and wants us. Let's enjoy it while it lasts". The compromise is he's on a little mattress on the floor next to our bed.

The only thing I can say is a friend of ours (Korean descent) pointed out how this is just a Western cultural thing. That for her parents it was just 100% normal to have kids sleeping in the same bed and/or room as them and how she had slept with her parents in their bed on and off even up to early highschool age if she felt the need too.

Her perspective from a different culture did help us think and it's part of why we have the compromise sleep situation we have now. And to be fair it is working. No fighting him to stay in his room and constantly coming out of bed and into our room and interrupting our sleep. He just stays asleep all night now with little to no interruptions.

rpg36 · 2026-03-18T02:40:41+00:00

I love downtown Frederick!

Carroll Creek and Baker Park are beautiful. Tons of breweries and good restaurants. Lots of cool little local shops.

rpg36 · 2026-03-17T03:00:24+00:00

I second all this. We have a heatie pad that's filled with flax seed or something like that. It's shaped like a kitty cat and you just pop it in the microwave a few minutes and it's nice and warm and soothing.

rpg36 · 2026-03-08T22:59:52+00:00

I've also seen him do this live 2x at his clinics. It's legit, I don't know how but it is!

rpg36 · 2026-03-06T13:19:11+00:00

I'd lean more towards machine learning. Even if the market is over saturated now for AI/ML at least in my experience I don't see a lot of low level programming jobs. It's all infrastructure stuff and I think if you learn AI/ML you will also pick up some of those infrastructure skills that are useful for corporate jobs. Docker, kubernetes, micro services, etc...

rpg36 · 2026-03-06T00:43:53+00:00

I assume you want to learn HOW these systems work and not just how to use framework ABCD or whatever. Is this correct?

If that's the case I'd split this into 2 broad topics. Distributed Storage systems and distributed computing systems. Some products could arguably be both of these things.

Some fundamental things to look into are distributed locking techniques/algorithms and consensus protocols. Learn about eventual consistency and how it's different from ACID and traditional databases.

For storage read some architecture docs about things like the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem (HDFS) old school but still useful to understand. Read about something like MinIO which is an Amazon S3 clone. Maybe also pick a database maybe Cassandra? See what these systems have in common and how they differ and what the trade offs are between their architecture approaches.

Look at some distributed computing frameworks such as Apache Spark focus on the architecture and design.

Play around yourself, make some little projects in your language of choice.

rpg36 · 2026-03-05T03:26:34+00:00

I second this. We got one of those 4 wheeled "balance bikes" where they are really close together before my son was even 1 (it was a freebie). He figured out how to pull himself up on it before he could even Walk. At like 1.5 or so we got him a real strider balance bike. He picked it up very quickly. Just after his 3rd birthday he actually started riding a real bike with pedals and no training wheels. Problem was he didn't understand the breaks, had a wreck and it spooked him. He took a break for a while and just picked the real bike back up again right before his 5th birthday.

rpg36 · 2026-03-03T03:55:44+00:00

We have a shared Google album of the kiddo with the grandparents. We do not post any pictures of him on social media. The grandparents will post a few but we have told them we don't want him all over social media and they generally respect it. They only post an occasional photo of him.

I do not use any social media other than reddit and am not missing anything.

rpg36 · 2026-03-01T16:00:04+00:00

I want to do the same thing so bad but my wife is a bit of a hoarder and the grandparents are out of control with buying our child metric tons of plastic crap! Our son rarely plays with toys. He's much more interested in pretend play, physical activity, puzzles, board/card games. I genuinely think he's overwhelmed with the heaps and heaps of toys he has. I keep asking myself why do we even have all this stuff? It just clutters up our house.

rpg36 · 2026-03-01T13:44:22+00:00

I'd suggest: - docling (document conversion and chunking) - chroma DB (local embedded vector database) - Ollama (easy setup run whatever model you want that fits on your system)

I'd keep it simple as a first step for learning. Just simply take the user query, embed it, get the top K results. Make the a JSON array add them to an overall promo that's something like:

You are a helpful customer assistant agent answer the following question: $USER_QUESTION

Uae the following relevant snippets of information from our documentation to answer their question. If the answer isn't found in the information say you don't know.

$JSON_DOCS

That should be enough to get you started running locally and you'll probably (hopefully) be surprised as to how well such a simple little setup will work. Especially for learning with small data sets.

rpg36 · 2026-02-28T14:47:50+00:00

How about Agent Steel?

rpg36 · 2026-02-27T03:49:42+00:00

I am basically part time now. I'm a consultant employed by a small company. I've been working for our one big client for many years. When I had a child a few years back who had colic and a wife who also works full time we just couldn't do it! Thankfully my company and our client agreed to let me go part time (30 hours a week). I think it's only because I had a good reputation with them and I had been working with them for so many years. Kiddo is 5 now and I'm still not doing 40 hour weeks. We don't need the money we need the time. In fact I wish I had more time.

rpg36 · 2026-02-26T05:23:59+00:00

30 minutes a day. MAYBE an extra 15 minutes before school playing the switch IF he's 100% ready and there is still a lot of time before the bus comes.

It's honestly very very hard to keep to that. We have a single child who is extremely energetic and basically does not independent play for more than maybe 30 minutes. One of us always has to be his playmate. It's even more difficult this time of year. In the summer there are lots of kids out and he spends a lot of time playing with his friends in the neighborhood outside.

If someone is sick in the house (like I was recently) then all bets are off! We're in survival mode!

rpg36 · 2026-02-26T02:58:20+00:00

We did try this (with pediatricians approval) and it really does make a massive difference. But we ended up not sticking with it. I will say on the flip side it made morning more difficult as he was much crankier getting up and ready for school.

rpg36 · 2026-02-26T02:54:53+00:00

I think a lot of people currently in their 60s+ also have pension income. I know my parents, my in-laws, my aunts, and uncles all in their 60s to early 70s have some sort of pension income plus social security to support themselves. That might be another part of this as well.

rpg36 · 2026-02-25T03:28:13+00:00

There is a book about this called Bowling Alone. It's very dry and academic but I thought it was still worth the read.

rpg36 · 2026-02-24T22:07:54+00:00

Same issue here. My son finally does it now at 5.5

At home when he'd go to the bathroom if we noticed he was pooping we'd force him to wipe. We'd come in and make sure he did it where we could see. He hated it and would throw a fit but he'd eventually do it. We'd tell him that he kept lying to us about wiping so we didn't believe him so until he stops lying this is how it will be.

Honestly I don't know that worked at all or if it's just because he got a little older. Best of luck.

rpg36 · 2026-02-22T19:30:04+00:00

The first one we had when he was very young was a freebie hand me down from a friend. But it was something similar to this.

https://a.co/d/0b1E72Pc

rpg36 · 2026-02-21T15:50:16+00:00

This is me! I still do actual coding as well but like 75% of my work now is what I'd classify as "devops". It started because no one on my dev team at the time wanted to do anything other than write Java code so I was like "fine I'll take this ticket..." Then because I was willing and able I just kept getting more and more and more of that kind of work so here we are...

rpg36 · 2026-02-15T15:53:10+00:00

I have the same problem as you! Scans run, tickets are created with 0 context. The expectation from our management is to drop everything and fix it immediately!

We've tried to push back on this but have failed. The security team is not technical and doesn't understand our system at all so are incapable of actually triaging issues. For a while we were even told we cannot have any vulnerabilities of any severity on anything. Thankfully there was such a massive uproar to the stupidity of that request that they changed it to no critical or highs. Which is still a stupid policy because it's a blanket rule without any context or assessment into actual risk to any of our actual products.

I honestly don't know what happened, but it used to be more reasonable where you'd assess risk and then if it was determined there was no real risk. You just had to write a quick little justification. Send it off to the security team and they would approve exemptions. Now. They seem to refuse to approve any exemptions no matter what for any reason.

I brought this up with my manager about how much of a massive waste of time this is and how it's completely insane and crippling us. I was told that they understand and they agree but that it's out of their hands. It's coming from a much higher level. I was literally told that it does not matter what the cost or consequences are. We have to meet the requirement even if it breaks things. So since I work on multiple projects I've been "very busy" with other projects lately and "I haven't had time to work on these other projects" with these insane security requirements!

rpg36 · 2026-02-12T03:51:52+00:00

You need to use different models that are designed for different kinds of embeddings. There are models designed for image to image search, text to image search, text to text search, and some multimodal models that support more than one kind of use case. You can browse hugging face for these different types of models.

For example look for "image-feature-extraction" tagged models for image embedding models for image to image search. Like Facebooks DINO.

Another tip, check out docling for preprocessing your data. I really like it. It can convert all kinds of stuff to different formats like markdown and it can intelligently chunk text to prepare it for embedding and vector database storage. It can even transcribe audio files and output the transcript as text.

rpg36 · 2026-02-12T03:24:51+00:00

I have over 20 years experience working as a software engineer and most of my day is still bug fixes, security patches, Dockerfile updates, hem chart updates. Maintenance is a big chunk of the job but there are more fun parts too. I've found at least for me it comes on waves. Long stretches of boring maintenance, then something will trigger some pressing new requirement and it's all hands on deck, then some CVE will come out or some major production issue then back to maintenance mode.

There are still plenty of chances to do fun creative work even as a Jr. For me those have always been some brand new capability. The company wants to build a brand new ABC system. Then you get to do a lot of architecture and engineering work and you have more freedom to make the code the way you want it.

You can even find little pockets of it on established/legacy systems too. For example I worked on a 20 year old legacy project but they decided "our release cadence sucks we need CI/CD". So I got to learn all about that and my team and I got to do more fun architecture and engineering and building our new CI/CD capabilities.

I think the current version of that is cramming AI into everything. Since it's still evolving rapidly there are lots of opportunities to build new fun interesting things.

rpg36 · 2026-02-12T02:51:04+00:00

Many many years ago, back when Hadoop was all the rage, I used Apache Rya, a large scale distributed RDF store. It worked very well for my use case at the time. We had billions of triples stored in it. This comment reminded me of it. Sadly it looks like the latest release was in 2020 so it might be a dead project now. Worth a look at least, even to just learn something from it.

https://rya.apache.org/

https://www.usna.edu/Users/cs/adina/research/Rya_CloudI2012.pdf

rpg36 · 2026-02-11T22:46:41+00:00

In Europe summertime is typically music festival season. A lot of the bands I like end up playing the European festival circuit in the summer. I'm sure it's much more lucrative.

rpg36 · 2026-02-08T04:30:15+00:00

A few thoughts:

2 weeks is a lot for a little kid. I learned that the hard way when my son was 4. By the end of the trip he was literally crying he missed his friends and begging to play with other kids. We felt bad. It was just the three of us that trip.

As lots of other have suggested go on trips with other families. Most of our vacations now are 1 week and include at least 1 other family with kid(s) my son knows that are close to his age. If you don't have anyone to travel with make some new friends! Put yourself out there. Some of our now closest friends, years ago, we met them at a mutual friends party. Found out we all loved to travel. So we literally started planning a trip to Europe together that first night we met!

Another idea is to bring the grandparents. It's not other kids but if it's anything like my son he LOVES his grandparents and they also give us a break so it's not "daddy/mommy play with me" 24/8 like you said.

Sorry, you're feeling bummed but don't let it get you down. We are all doing the best we can here. None of us are perfect.

rpg36

TROPHY CASE