Had to read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” for an environmental science class, which is what initially got me interested in gardening. That prompted me to read “Gaia’s Garden,” which is a permaculture book. I like a lot of the basic principles of permaculture, but a lot of stuff isn’t science or evidence based, and a lot of stuff is taken from indigenous practices without acknowledging it.

I think it’s satire, channeling Trump’s style of “truthing.” At least I hope so.

I used Swappa to buy my last phone. Not certified, but much cheaper. The condition of phones is “graded,” and the sellers have an incentive to keep their reputation on the platform high. I had good luck, the one time I used it, at least.

Curious about what time you were referring to when Democrats were better. I suppose they were OK during Obama (ACA was a corporate-friendly solution, there was a huge wealth transfer from the government to financial institutions and corporations, there were tons of drone strikes, and anti-immigration ramped up though). During Clinton they cut social programs significantly, and implemented the draconian three-strikes law.

I’ve filled out many job applications that require you to paste a link to your LinkedIn profile.

Yes, but large amount of resources are put into controlling and influencing the population. It’s a fight, and we aren’t fighting back enough. It’s my opinion the problem is systemic, and merely trying to be more mindful of consumption isn’t going to improve things much (it will improve things some, and people should do it). For instance, there’s a good chance those cage-free eggs involved some sort of very low-paid and abused workers. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

GPU acceleration, true-color, image display, etc.

Yeah, I used aircrack to gain access to one of my neighbors wifi and used it for about a month when I moved into my first apartment. After I got my own connection, I set up a guest network/SSID that was open,

I don’t think Harris was progressive at all. She seemed disingenuous, media-trained to be as uncontroversial as possible, and every talking point focus tested. Her major economic policy was to give more money to business owners. I think Waltz is somewhat progressive, and they did put a leash on him. I agree she would’ve won if she was more progressive, especially if she focused on policies benefiting labor.

Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

Available jobs are below the worse time during COVID, and I’m pretty sure the number of CS grads has greatly increased (but couldn’t find a good chart).

With infinite popups.

Liberal three-percenter lore?

I mean, I do think non-violent disobedience can be effective, but the state usually makes it violent. State sanctioned protests where most obey most of the rules isn’t disobedience. Is a good start though, and I hope things progress (in a good way).

So much more than an init system though, which I think is why people don’t like it. Personally, the only annoyance I have is I preferred log files over journald.

Israel, Iran, or the US?

Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.

I think there’s a massive oversupply of software engineers world-wide, and investors and executives are heavily pushing offshoring to countries where there are even more engineers that are even more desperate to find work. The ideology or focus of the entire US investor/executive class seems to have shifted as soon as Musk gutted Twitter. I fear this may be another, “these jobs aren’t coming back,” kind of thing the manufacturing industry went through. Perhaps we’ll see a boom of bootstrapped start-ups ran by engineers (or preferably worker-cooperatives), but that’s extremely hard to do.

I think tool calling is just a form of structured output, where the LLM outputs something like json that describes the function to call and the arguments, then you parse that and run the function with the arguments, then feed the output back to the LLM in a new message, if you want. IDK the specific details, I’m guessing there are some special tokens some LLMs produce for tool calling, and I’m also guessing there is “controlled generation” (masking the logits/tokens, and only choosing to generate the tokens that would be valid). Ollama apparently doesn’t support the special tool-calling tokens or output structure that some models use.

This is how it looks when using OpenAI compatible APIs: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling?api-mode=responses.

I’ve never heard of TabbyAPI (I’m new to using local models, in general). I’m also not sure what TabbyAPI brings over Ollama, llama.cpp, or vLLM. So would be curious as well.

Edit: For my little toy project I’m working on, I’m switching to not using tool-calling at all, and building a LangGraph and using structured output, which should be more reliable with my use-case. I.e. just always call the tool manually, feed the output back to the LLM to have the LLM evaluate if the output was correct, retry calling the tool with different arguments if not, and just fail after 5 calls.

I like watching Yannic Kilcher, to keep up with some of the newer developments, and read various papers. I do have a background in ML (mostly the more traditional, non-generative, supervised learning and reinforcement learning) though.

He absolutely believes in those things, and has shown multiple times he’s willing to light his money on fire to support his ideals. He’s idealistic (adjacent to the neo-fascist Dark Enlightenment movement), and not just simply motivated by wealth.

I think this is only a small part. Interest rates are kinda high. VCs only want to invest in companies with AI exposure because of all the hype. From companies I’ve interviewed with, offshoring seems to have accelerated dramatically (companies only had or wanted a few US devs to manage larger Indian teams). I’ve visited career pages of companies working in the business domain I have the most experience with, and all open software positions are exclusively in India.