Biochar is good stuff, if you’ve got a renewable supply.

Back in the day it was CompSci, or Electrical Engineering. I don’t know if they’ve really started teaching actual software engineering yet or not, back in the day it was a bunch of theory that’s mostly just foundational stuff that you don’t really interact with day to day anymore. In other words: academia was 10+ years behind industry, which is pretty typical, but not such a problem in a field like Irish Literature as it is in software engineering.

The problem with carbon based fuels is that we’re unburying them and releasing carbon into the atmosphere which was sequestered under the ground for millions of years, a LOT of it.

If he’s taking solar power + CO2 from the air to make his fuel, then when he burns it it’s just a closed cycle system, at least no new harm done, just returning the carbon previously captured from the air in the process.

I forget what the latest I ran the numbers on was, but $100K up front and $20K per year running costs seemed like it had a decent chance of being useful to our department of 10 software engineers, which isn’t bad, but it’s an LLM on par with 6 months ago’s frontier models.

If I could get those prices for a local instance of Fable 5, I’d be pushing the paperwork to make it happen.

I don’t know what tokens really cost, but so far even burning them without care for efficiency, they’re costing about one day of my salary per month to six weeks.

Thing is, if they would give Mick and Jane enough time with Claude, they could make it look like Bob’s work again, but it would still take time - and tokens too.

A lot of people are really bad at typing, especially now that they’re all growing up on swipe-screen tablets and phones.

I had this for about 6 years running, eventually we marked the bottom 90% of the heap “won’t do.”

This was in the early 90s, I kept track of the items on “sticky note” software on my Windows 3.1.1 desktop. At the top of the sticky note I placed a gothic font “The Creeping Feature Creature” label. Two or three times a week my boss would stop in on his jog (he lived a mile away) with a new idea, and we’d prioritize it into the stack - most new ideas went just below whatever I was still working on. Every few months we’d reshuffle the list. It was a workable arrangement because I was the only programmer and he was the company owner.

When we started working on bigger contracts for outside customers, he shut the hell up and let me get the contracted work done.

Regardless of how effective it is at managing expectations, my reality is:

Mgt: We need A within Y days.

Stf: A will take X (>>Y) days, A/2 can be ready in Y days.

Mgt: O.K., give us A/2 in Y days.

Y/2 days elapses.

Mgt: In addition to A/2, please add B, C and D to the deliverable.

Stf: You realize, that’s going to take an extra 2X days to deliver.

Mgt: yes, but we absolutely need B. C and D, whatever it takes, as soon as possible, don’t waste time releasing A/2, bundle them all together for efficiency.

Stf: Coming up.

3X/2 days elapse.

Mgt: you know B, C, and D that we asked for? Actually, what we need are D, E and F.

Stf: well, we’ve finished A/2, B and half of C. When do you need D, E and F.

Mgt: ASAP, put C on the shelf.

X more days elapse.

Stf: here’s A/2, B and D, how do they look?

Mgt: You know, the full A would be better… but E and G are our absolute top priorities…

Not silent, the passwordless sudo calls are logged and available for review. I do trust that after several months in a sandbox without calling sudo, it’s unlikely that a sleeper agent will awaken and call sudo out of the blue - more likely that my apps that have been calling sudo will do something nefarious on the 1000th access…

Somebody (possibly an AI agent…) could/should automate the process of transcribing the sudo logs to the NOPASSWD setup, just leave sudo unlocked for those things that show up as needing it during validation test runs and turn the sudo lock back on for everything else.

enabling passwordless sudo

This is the way. Physical security FTW.

Do you know the cost to change the color on a box? Just the color, not the text, not the information, just the color?

Not just in implantables, though implantables have that whole additional surgical risk aspect, but all medical devices have painful piles of paperwork required for each revision. They’re trying to lighten the load for “security patches” but so far it’s still a major pain. I suspect it’s the much the same in avionics and any other industry that requires documented validation against traceable requirements and all that jazz.

And the real thing, in our industry, once it is verified and validated and shipped - you don’t touch it unless absolutely necessary.

Every time I look back at old stuff, I have to remind myself of the relative importance of getting it done, vs getting it perfect, at the time.

Inevitably, there were no clear requirements at the outset, or if there were they were vastly outnumbered by additional requirements that scope-crept their way into the project. The project was “due” before I was asked to help / landed with the whole thing to do myself. The project was under-estimated and is now “on the critical path” for a larger initiative. Other interested parties are too busy to meet during definition time, but all too willing to point out missing scope after a “finished solution” is presented.

Yeah, me from the past… not a fair reflection.

Compacting…

I don’t know why I have any confidence in “my fellow countrymen.” I went to a public high school for 4 years, I “met the masses” there, and 90% of them were idiots, 60% of them were mean spirited, racist, bigoted idiots. And now they vote.

Before 2024, I honestly thought “there’s no way they’d ever put that clown back in.” And here we are, orange face paint and all.

When this is all over, the world will need to throw a thank-you party for the US electing Trump and waking up the voters of the world, shaking them out of their complacency to clean up their own houses.

Got his own Pope installed and alienated him too.

Say what you will, Turbo C++ in 1991 was dysfunctional for anything over 5 pages of code, a lot like LLMs a year ago.