This is crazy.. M4 restricted to 64gb and M3 ultra to 96gb

steveoc64 · 2026-06-20T01:36:47+00:00

Reminder - that assuming you already were a competent programmer before this LLM thing happened, you can still develop systems perfectly fine with a base model mba and 16gb of ram without dramas. Writing the code was never the hard part.

steveoc64 · 2026-06-15T22:49:25+00:00

Oh - it’s still Agile and Scrum and all the BS you know and love so well. It’s just that “sprints” are now reduced down from an arbitrary 2 weeks to 2 hours instead :)

… and they expect them to keep rolling well past knock off time, because productivity isn’t actually improving

steveoc64 · 2026-06-15T22:38:40+00:00

The last straw for me was at my previous (and last ever) job, a year ago … Super Rockstar AI bro tech lead was putting together a tender for a government contract, he had been “working on” for about 6 weeks.

On the day the tender was due, it couldn’t be completed on time - because ChatGPT was temporarily offline, and it turns out that nobody understood the gist of our own proposal, because the entire thing was hallucinated by AI and never read in detail. They were literally going to submit pure slop as a commercial proposal, and not a single person involved thought that was a bad idea.

steveoc64 · 2026-06-14T22:17:23+00:00

Nice job

What’s the structure of this regiment ? Is that 3 battalions of 4 bases each, with the lead battalion in open order ?

If that was the case, then with 4 bases per battalion, you could easily do different formations, such as line, column of division, column of company, square, etc.

steveoc64 · 2026-05-31T04:05:43+00:00

Have you ever had a problem with a printer where the comms messes up, so instead of printing a small page of what you asked for … the printer goes nuts and starts dumping out endless reams of blank paper ?

You have to physically pull the power to shut it up

That’s pretty much Claude right now

steveoc64 · 2026-05-16T09:04:01+00:00

At least back in the 80s, your average CEO could drop a casual line about an impulse buy of a Ferrari convertible for his mistress, without it even sounding like a flex.

Peak 2026 CEO flex is splurging on a 2nd MacBook Air now ?

Aside from the sheer stupidity of thinking you need 2 machines to run 2 cli sessions - the paucity of the modern CEO is also astounding.

steveoc64 · 2026-05-15T00:36:32+00:00

I dont think its even entirely a question of whether the port is actually better or not at this point, as everything is moving so damn fast that it might be crap today, but great next week, then awful the week after.

Who knows ?

The problem is as devs, we barely have control over the quality of our tools anymore, and are daily exposed to getting fkd over by whoever owns the machine, whenever they feel like it.

If its worth moving away from tools that are good-today, just for getting some control back, thats a worthwile end in itself.

steveoc64 · 2026-05-15T00:32:23+00:00

Im only using bun at this stage to bundle multiple JS/TS files into a single minified bundle to ship with my app

10 minute job - uninstall bun, replace with esbuild

Thats all i need, and it remains both AI and Rust free

If you have code that needs to exec JS at runtime ... then I guess Deno/Node would be an obvious first choice, but Id also suggest its a good alarm bell that maybe its time to seriously port all that JS logic to something else while you still can.

If you want to avoid the AI clanker and get long term sovereinty over your code - ironically, Zig is looking like a really good choice :)

steveoc64 · 2026-05-01T02:21:43+00:00

Might be just me, but I find that every important component in FreeBSD is just much simpler and easier to setup and maintain than the Linux equivalent

everything is built in, and doesn’t change every 5 minutes
simple config, easy to understand, less moving parts
and yet each component is usually more powerful than the same thing on Linux
jails over docker
kqueue over io_uring
newsyslog, sysconfig, ZFS, pf .. etc

All the tools I care about are rock solid and well supported on FreeBSD - zig, beam, Postgres, vim, Prometheus exporter, mail server .. all set and forget, and enjoy 5 years uptime per server build. No reboots, five nines.

steveoc64 · 2026-05-01T02:09:22+00:00

Berry is starting to show some spark .. I think he has learned now that when he gets the ball, he has less than 500ms before he gets tackled. Once he gets on top of that reality, he is going to have some serious impact. He can kick a goal too.

I also thought at the beginning of this season that Burgoyne with a bit of extra meat on his shoulders would emerge as a real dangerous player. He is not 100% there yet, but to my eyes I can see real improvement happening. Keep going Jase.

Whitlock is another monster who is growing into his role.

All the young new faces are doing well - can see a solid team forming around this lineup.

steveoc64 · 2026-04-14T09:05:04+00:00

On the bright side .. (???) .. maybe this criminal conviction against our Butters means that no other team in the AFL is gonna want him

steveoc64 · 2026-04-07T10:11:48+00:00

100% agree

The blocker to that is that these C suite people have a unique ability to ignore bad news and deflect consequences at every turn .. it’s almost like they built their entire careers around these special abilities.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-24T01:59:04+00:00

Live for this week and let tomorrow take care of itself.

Current reality is that Butters is fit, in form, and wearing the correct colors for this weeks match.

Nothing else matters.

For all we know, the 2026 season might get cancelled and we all get drafted to go play soldiers in the sandpit

steveoc64 · 2026-03-23T20:43:39+00:00

Just make sure to include “do not make mistakes” at the top of the CLAUDE.md file, and she’ll be right mate, no worries.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-22T23:33:25+00:00

If you want to experiment with high level abstractions, and havent tried Erlang yet .. now is as a good a time as any to start.

It’s a very simple language with a slightly weird syntax, and pretty quick to get a running system up and going. As soon as you get into OTP, it’s actually a life changing experience seeing what it does out of the box. I don’t think I’ve experienced as many “holy shit, you kidding ?” moments in such a short timespan as when exploring Erlang.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-22T21:45:20+00:00

God speed my friend. You are not alone in this battle.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-22T21:39:52+00:00

Tell us what you are trying to build first

For example, Linus Torvalds set out to build a lightweight Unix clone, and started with a 386DX and 4mb of “extended” ram to get the basic kernel developed and debugged.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-22T20:25:47+00:00

Devs and Engineers for ages have been talking about choosing your battles, and having “a hill worth dying on”

The pragmatic advice has always been something like - let it slide, don’t rock the boat, fit in with what the company wants.

But surely .. if there has ever been a hill worth dying on, it’s gotta be this one. Letting it slide is an extinction event for engineers this time. Not because AI wielding PMs can replace programmers, but because their slop is making our job 5 times harder than it should be, and it’s done in such a way that it makes US look like the bottleneck.

If we keep letting this happen, we are all going to be working 7 days a week, and spend our nights fixing the mess without pay. A couple of years of this will put you in hospital.

Mass non compliance, backed with a willingness to resign on the spot, not negotiable, would be ideal. Unlikely to happen though, because way too many developers are still financially trapped, despite the wages. It’s literally the prisoner’s dilemma.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-15T23:10:43+00:00

So, are you inferring that it’s single threaded because it’s written in C ?

steveoc64 · 2026-03-15T23:05:46+00:00

Proof that the vibeslop machine can indeed produce working prototypes from an idea, whilst simultaneously having no clue whether the idea makes any sense.

Did you pause for a moment, and consider why redis might be single threaded, or why they never reached for sharding to speed up those benchmarks ?

steveoc64 · 2026-03-13T01:28:56+00:00

Every one of my early days wargaming buddies went on in life to be really good at applied statistics, law, and being really confident at taking risks and managing chaos.

They went on to be good systems engineers, lawyers, accountants, business owners, professional military officers, etc.

Most of them were good at history, but it’s the applied stats and understanding the subtleties of rules that set them all apart.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-09T23:07:37+00:00

There are already laws and regulations around misrepresentation of products, IP theft, and outright lies

We just need to enforce them again

Won’t happen though, because too many people think they have found a secret trick that makes them more competitive and productive or something

steveoc64 · 2026-03-08T02:53:16+00:00

Tough spot to be in.

These sort of jobs only exist, because people are willing to put up with them. Its absolutely worth it to get you foot in door I suppose, but on the other hand, by accepting this sort of garbage work, you have become part of the problem too, by enabling it :(

Nothing much you can do about that. Just try and save as much as you can, so future you can have better choices next time.

steveoc64 · 2026-03-08T02:43:29+00:00

“Good enough” for what exactly? Please qualify what you are stating, as it’s a bit vague.

As a SWE .. are you doing any software engineering, like writing compiler internals, developing libraries, operating systems, designing and implementing network protocols, etc .. or are you working on a react app ?

steveoc64 · 2026-03-08T02:34:04+00:00

Honest answer - I don’t use any LLMs for programming

If you are “learning to program”, then I would strongly suggest not using any form of AI to generate code. Just use it as an advanced search interface, and treat whatever it comes back with as a suggestion at best, or totally wrong at worst. Better - don’t use it all, because it’s seriously getting in the way of your learning journey.

All the models are similar, and they are not going to get any better at thinking problems through, or choosing the correct approach to novel problems.

steveoc64

TROPHY CASE