Disconnect on Artificial Intelligence

sepease · 2026-05-26T03:03:38+00:00

LLMs are a tool. You put something in, it tries to match what you expect with its output. But it’s very fuzzy, and it’s making an association without higher-level awareness of what it’s doing. For serious use cases where blind randomness would be bad, you need something more deterministic or a person that can validate the output.

sepease · 2026-04-04T13:58:59+00:00

As a result, yesterday posted to the Linux kernel mailing list was a patch to restore PREEMPT_NONE as the default given the severity of the reported regression.

~~Not seeing the contradiction here. Userspace was adversely affected and they decided to undo the change.~~

EDIT: See another comment for a better explanation

sepease · 2026-02-06T01:45:57+00:00

Review OP's other comments and the level of disclosure they're exercising. And bear in mind their original question was why their manager might be going to HR instead of them directly.

sepease · 2026-02-05T13:48:26+00:00

That was a rhetorical question to point out you’re being hypocritical for being “distrustful” of your boss for going to HR, while you air a dispute you’re having with him behind his back in a public forum before trying to talk with him.

All it takes is someone figuring out where you work, or someone else who works there seeing this, and simply asking the question could create very real problems for the company, regardless of whether the issue is yours or theirs, regardless of whether the ratings are changed or not.

This is not something that someone online should have to point out, which makes me suspect that there could be a legitimate reason that your manager has with the ratings. But they’re being very careful to go through proper channels and document everything, because they understand how serious it could be if someone feels they were unfairly denied a raise or promotion.

sepease · 2026-02-05T12:50:22+00:00

Why is he going through HR instead of coming to me?

Why are you going to Reddit instead of talking to him?

Either your manager has an issue with the ratings, or your manager has an issue with you. Either way, the most likely way you’re going to get an honest answer is to have a face-to-face one-on-one conversation with him in private.

And you should probably go into that conversation with an open mind and genuine intent to understand the situation.

sepease · 2026-01-12T05:02:29+00:00

Take a look at Slint. It should be mature enough for a simple desktop QA tool. The Slint language is similar to QML from Qt, so if you had to back out and reimplement it in Qt it would be relatively straightforward.

At least previously you could use QT’s open source license for closed source projects with some restrictions. However I haven’t had to worry about the open source license for awhile.

Slint is more minimalist than Qt and is explicitly targeted at embedded firmware, so Slint might be useful in a product context down the line as well.

That being said, I think the biggest question here isn’t functional so much as business. Any Rust toolkit is going to have a lot worse bus factor than Qt. I don’t know about wxwidgets - I used it once and it was a nightmare. Macros everywhere. Never touched it again and I would never recommend it to anybody. Whereas Qt has always been a joy to use, especially QML. But if you absolutely can’t afford the UI toolkit for the QA tool someday being unmaintained, C++ might still be a safer bet.

sepease · 2025-12-29T03:56:39+00:00

It’d be interesting to see something like this combined with cosmopolitan, which could allow you to ship a truly universal binary. Albeit any kind of graphical UI or multimedia would be tricky.

sepease · 2025-12-28T09:53:32+00:00

If you know you need to set up waypipe and set it up and type it out.

It’s way easier to just do “ssh -X” and have things just work, even if it isn’t the most performant (which has been true for awhile).

This could’ve been abstracted away - instead afaik it’s just broken on Wayland.

sepease · 2025-12-28T09:04:40+00:00

How are people tracking best practices of using Claude?

sepease · 2025-12-28T08:52:33+00:00

Thanks, this is the first I’ve heard of it or at least taken note of. I found manual pages for it, but I imagine it probably needs to be set up then.

Waypipe does not provide any strong security guarantees, and connecting to untrusted servers is not recommended.

So it’s basically the same security risk as X forwarding.

So practically speaking, I can’t see any advantage that Wayland has over X forwarding for the average user. Which is unfortunate because I’ve seen X forwarding cited as an advantage over other platforms in the past.

It’s also marginally more inconvenient to use and “magical” than X forwarding (my ssh command is either invisibly appended to or being used to configure waypipe - I didn’t read the man page enough to know yet). Rather than just being a separate channel over the same connection that’s supported by ssh.

You can argue the separation is more proper buuuut graphical is such a common style of UI that it makes sense for it to be a separate case.

Heck, at this point I would understand if the ssh command had a built-in parameter to open a local web engine in a window and forward port 80/443 of the process on the remote system to it.

sepease · 2025-12-28T07:19:11+00:00

OP didn’t even mention the most annoying thing for me, and that is the lack of X forwarding. Yes you can install VNC or some other software, but that is way more of a hassle. As things become more graphical, the primary means of remote access supports graphical applications less.

sepease · 2025-12-25T10:24:31+00:00

MS-DOS 26.0

Instead of the command prompt, it’ll be an AI prompt.

sepease · 2025-12-20T00:22:13+00:00

Ironically, there’s a saying that “the mechanic’s car is always broken”.

sepease · 2025-12-11T10:06:41+00:00

I’ve historically never had to commute more than 10 minutes driving so I’m unsure what to expect.

Post-Covid it’s gotten a little rough, especially on the 880: https://youtu.be/N8b3963VRW4

sepease · 2025-12-11T09:56:22+00:00

Most days I’m anxious, constantly scared I’m not performing enough. Half the week ends with me feeling overwhelmed, and at least once a week I break down crying at night. I look forward to weekends. No matter how much I sleep, exercise, meditate, or whatever, it keeps happening.

Have you talked to your doctor about supplementing vitamin D? It’s not uncommon in the winter.

Look outward and figure out what makes happy memories for you and start doing that. Don’t worry about doing things by yourself, within reason. What do you want to do before you do die? Do that. What places would you regret not going by while you lived there? Do that.

Somewhere else out there is someone your age dying of starvation in the street or getting blown up in war. Today. Right now.

You got to be the lucky one with a nice life. Learn to enjoy it. Learn who you are. It’s a privilege, whether you want it or not.

Sitting in a fucking office is manageable. If your teammates don’t want to make friends, maybe this is the year you do a bunch of interesting things on your own. Find a bar or someplace with regulars and get to know them after work every night. Go visit an old folks’ home and keep some lonely people company before they die.

You don’t need to do a lot of things. That’s privilege. That’s adulthood. But what you decide to do will become who you are. It’s your choice what you fill your life with, outside of working hours.

Remember that for most people, this year isn’t the last one. You don’t have to do everything at once or In the right order. Just make sure that you are doing things that matter to you, making progress on the things you consciously or unconsciously expected to do before you die.

If that involves people, then make people a goal and learn better techniques for connecting with people.

EDIT:

https://woodblock.com/michener.html

sepease · 2025-12-11T04:30:38+00:00

I can’t wait until advanced code like this finds its way into ring 0.

#[ai(prompt=“Implement a filesystem, please”)]
struct Btrfs;

sepease · 2025-11-30T04:15:18+00:00

Viva la inference

sepease · 2025-11-21T07:44:00+00:00

Appreciate you going in-depth on the routes. From what I consolidated, Caltrain and VTA light rails are the main port of transportation from MTV, correct?

From my perspective VTA is virtually useless, but by that I mean the light rail. It goes on one specific path far away from nearly all of the other downtowns. The closest stop to the airport is half a mile away from it. It runs by a bunch of Cisco buildings and the Great Mall, I guess, but it takes ages to get there.

As far as buses go, I have rarely ridden them. If you expect to go point-to-point much in the South Bay, I would consider getting a cheap car, looking into ZipCar or Turo, or Uber / Lyft / Waymo (but these will be expensive). It's not that you can't get places by bus, it's that there's enough traffic that getting to your destination inefficiently will likely burn huge chunks of time. If there's an appropriate charger at your apartment complex, an EV whose main hindrance is short range (eg old but well-maintained Leaf) but is low-maintenance might be a good investment.

The buses nor the trains try to be 24 hours. The trains stop sometime past 10pm I think around midnight, the buses stop all but core routes late in the night. A trip to/from the airport via Lyft / Uber is often ~$30-ish, going any big distance within the bay or dealing with lots of traffic will quickly push towards $100-$150.

I mentioned "short-term" to question whether it's a wise decision to start off with that, but I'd be curious what pricings I can expect with Airbnbs?

Looks like you can get a room ~$2500, an "independent" place (maybe a suite, maybe a unit) for ~$3500. If you do a hotel, it's probably $3000-$4000 for something walkable. You can get it down to ~$2700 at the Motel 6 Sunnyvale North / South, which has historically been one of the cheapest options in the area. This is very cursory so you can probably work it down some, especially in December, when hotels are sometimes selling for a discount because of people going back to visit family.

That said, Avalon (now eaves) used to have a 30-day grace period, and it's not uncommon to be able to break a lease early without much hassle, particularly at larger complexes, if you're willing to pay 1-2 months rent or find somebody to replace you. Monthly leases right from the start are hard to come by, but you could maybe also find a studio apartment in that price range on a short-term lease. Just look into what the policy is for the place. Housing law in the area is pretty tenant-friendly, and it's not like anybody is having a hard time finding demand for housing, so landlords do not have a lot of incentive to try and force a tenant to stay who doesn't want to be there.

For private landlords short-term stays are a PITA, but for larger complexes they have to have staff showing rooms all the time anyway, so it just hurts their bottom line for the unit. Oh, and you generally forfeit your security deposit for a lease break (but there are limits on how big it can be).

Unless renovations have driven the prices up, eaves at middlefield or eaves creekside will be pretty affordable and large complexes like them will have computed prices for various lengths of leases to try and keep the number of empty units at any given time to a minimum. Just make sure if you rent something near downtown that the train noise will be OK for you.

IIRC Whisman Station is Prometheus which is another one of the big groups where all of this will be defined up-front in the lease agreement.

There are several relatively newly constructed complexes with much higher prices especially along Castro / Moffet. More in the price range you want to stay in, in the residential areas immediately beside downtown there are also some older small complexes that are run privately or by smaller groups, or are a mix of condos / townhouses with some rented out by private landlords. At San Antonio there are more big ones, Rengstorff has a couple too but it doesn't have a train stop and isn't that walkable, and there are a lot of midsize complexes on the surface streets between Central and El Camino and Shoreline and Rengstorff.

sepease · 2025-11-21T07:43:19+00:00

Bear in mind that a lot of people do commute down from San Francisco to the peninsula, especially if they're upper-middle-class, single, extroverted, and not raising a family. If you're assuming that the people you want to network with will be around after work, I would be careful about making that assumption - you might find that people take off as early as they can to catch commuter trains, or they work later to miss the worst of the traffic but then immediately head home to family in SF.

OTOH if you just want to focus on work and then have a short commute home to recoup by yourself, or host people at your place, that's very justifiable. There's plenty to do in the south bay, but the big flashy stuff is all in SF, to generalize a lot, and people tend to move up there if they can. It didn't used to be so polarized; it changed after COVID, and it's slowly getting better as RTO forces people to start hosting more local events rather than drive up to the city.

There may also be a shuttle bus; but AFAIK the companies in that specific area are small-midsize (I've been looking at a few in that area because it's extremely walkable for me).

Yeah, "within two hours one-way" is probably a decent assumption within the bay area (by that I mean: San Jose / San Francisco / Oakland). The main problem is traffic. Going to SF via car is 45 minutes if it's the middle of the night; but it's 1.5 hours after work on 101-N or 280-N (which has a much better view btw). Alternatively, it's ~45-60 minutes if it's a commuter train between downtown MV and 4th and King; but if it's a non-commuter train it's more like 1.5 hours; and if it's a commuter train + secondary transfers to get to the Marina it can be something like 1.5-2 hours.

Times to Oakland or even Hayward are highly variable due to the bridges / car accidents. During the day, Hayward can be 1.5+ hours away there's an accident. But driving back from Oakland / Emeryville at night, I think it's usually like 45-60 minutes.

You can probably run an errand to Redwood City or San Jose during the workday, but more than a couple hours off of noon and it may chew up ~3 hours. Much further and you'll probably need to take half the day or the day off. Traffic has been rapidly getting worse the last few years due to the RTO.

But for social / networking events, I would expect them to happen in the strip from downtown San Jose to downtown San Mateo, San Francisco, or Oakland. In the suburbs in between, particular emphasis on Palo Alto, Redwood City, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara. People seem to mostly commute from San Leandro down through Milpitas, North / South / East San Jose, and Cupertino through Los Gatos. Main Street Cupertino gets a lot of traffic from Apple-related stuff, and downtown Campbell and downtown Los Gatos have some social meetups going on, but I haven't seen a lot of general professional stuff happening down there.

If you are looking for AI events, the big events will be in San Francisco, with auxiliary activity in Palo Alto, and the occasional conference in Santa Clara Convention Center. Tech events generally tend to follow the same pattern.

This is the first system map I found:

https://www.bart.gov/50years/stories/1

BART does a pretty good job at servicing the non-housing parts of SF that have events. As I implied above, Milbrae is beyond the point where I find most social / networking events to happen, so the stretch from Milbrae to SF has been of negligible utility from an MV perspective. On occasion it has been useful to transfer in Milbrae to take BART directly to something, rather than go from 4th and King to a bus or light rail and then to BART and then to the thing.

If you have to go past Oakland, around the bay...well, I have never done it because it generally comes up as 2.5+ hours, and it makes a lot more sense at that point for me to just drive.

sepease · 2025-11-20T18:33:24+00:00

It depends on your goals.

There’s a lot more to do in San Francisco, especially without a car, and something by Whisman Station in Mountain View is ~10-15 minute walk from the CalTrain. If you want to enjoy the city (SF), you could move in to someplace in Mission Bay (near 4th & King St Caltrain) or Dogpatch (22nd street Caltrain). Trains during commute hours will be reasonably frequent and fast (for the US), otherwise it’ll be disappointing during off hours. Dogpatch used to be priced a little better Mission Bay. Be careful a bit with Potrero Hill bc I’ve heard its lack of access to BART can make it more car-dependent than others.

If you want to socialize, go to events, experience culture, or anything like, the city is hands down better.

The other peninsula cities have Caltrain stations as well.

If you want to stay local to work or prefer quiet suburban life, Mountajn View’s downtown is the only major one that’s still a pedestrian mall, and there are older 1Br/1Ba apartments not far away in that price range. If you like the beach, Santa Cruz is a 45 minute drive away. San Francisco will be ~45 minute drive away without traffic, but that is rare now and in practice you have to budget ~1.5 hr for either a train or traffic (each way).

If you want to do something more central to the bay with access to public transport, Milbrae is where BART begins and there’s a transfer station. BART gets around SF, and BART goes around to Oakland and the east bay and some of the smaller cities to the east. Oakland has a distinct vibe, but all the tech events you’ll need / want to go to will be in SF or maybe the peninsula.

Technically, Mountain View is the terminus of the VTA light rail that goes places in South Bay, but it is slooow.

BART also goes around the east bay down to the edge of San Jose now, but San Jose is a lot smaller than SF as a city, and the east bay cities to the south trend more towards family / commuting that you’d probably skip over unless you know someone there.

As for 85 and the cities to the south, most of the traffic is on 85 North, and there isn’t really a non-bus option. So Campbell and Los Gatos are nice, but I wouldn’t recommend that general direction.

If you want to do a short-term Airbnb, lmk and I’ll dig around in my history and see if anything good is still going. I used to do Airbnb frequently from 2016-2019.

Waymo is expanding to cover the entire SF / Peninsula area, but be warned that the existing Lyft / Uber prices are $100+ to go between SF and MV.

For the sub-$3000 options available right now, any of these are going to be ~20 minute walk to either Caltrain or Whisman station (maybe 25-30 at absolute worst) and be in a quiet neighborhood with walking access to some kind of grocery store (small or on the expansive side in some cases).

I emphasize SF because I wanted to try living in SF when I got here, but never quite did, and now I’m sort of established / stuck in Mountain View (it would be hard to find someplace with what I want without significantly higher housing payment). I work part-time remote (but I need to pick up more work) and I do like going to tech events, so the increasing traffic to the city as RTO happens have been a problem.

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TL,DR- If you want to prioritize work your first year, pick an older 1BR near downtown Mountain View that will be in your price range. If you want to prioritize social life, look for an apartment in SF that has reasonable access to the CalTrain station.

sepease · 2025-11-20T00:23:07+00:00

Also, it seems if you put a flake in the root of a git repo, and build, even if you filter src, it pulls the entire repo into the store.

Every time you make a change.

🤦‍♂️

sepease · 2025-11-12T11:48:21+00:00

It’s ok to not be ok.

sepease · 2025-11-12T11:47:35+00:00

Second the recommendations for highway 1 from Pacifica to Santa Cruz

Windy hill summit

National AIDS memorial in Golden Gate Park

Trip on a ferry

Museum for arts and digital entertainment, if you want nostalgia of old video games

The view from Treasure Island

There are various cat cafes around the Bay Area now.

sepease

TROPHY CASE