@Nwallins's banner p

Nwallins

Finally updated my bookmark

0 followers   follows 3 users  
joined 2022 September 04 23:17:52 UTC 

				
User ID: 265


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Nwallins


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Finally updated my bookmark

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 3 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 23:17:52 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 265


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is an incisive and insightful point.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I never really cared for the guy but had some kind of lasting respect for him.  I desperately want to watch the CK documentary or be involved in its production.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.




This depresses me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for September 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have read that Claude and/or Claude Code has gotten dumber lately, due to "quantization", which I think makes a lower resolution model that is cheaper to operate.  So that may be why I feel like Sonnet has a case of the dumbs.  I rarely interact with Opus or Gemini Pro these days, on the CLI.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for September 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I got interested in the ESP32 stuff just from learning a little about the language, Espressif?  It might have been something else, and you can see I never got into it.  But one day!  I will be a hardware guy doing a lot with cheap chips.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for September 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
EDIT: I realize that I am not quite following the instructions for this forum.  I thought of this is as more of a technical discussion forum and did not want to post this in the CW thread.


Coding agents.


I use Gemini and Claude.  I pay $20 for Anthropic Pro, so I am not using API tokens for Claude.  With Gemini, you can do a lot with just a google account, or at least you definitely could on day 1.


I am hating Gemini lately.  If I load the Pro model (default), I get mostly nothing but 503 errors.  This was not the case roughly a month ago, when Google was promising a Pro response every 60 seconds and "you won't run out of tokens" or whatever.  Fine, it's free, I get it.  So now I use gemini-2.5-flash mostly.  But this motherfucker is constantly undermining me.  If I can get flash into a groove, we do fine, but I fight this guy a lot.  I also get a vibe of "petulant laborer".  It kind of cracks me up.


Claude is great, super friendly and helpful.  I almost exclusively use Sonnet, and Sonnet has a case of the dumbs.  It's extremely manageable, and I get more work done with Claude than Gemini.  I can switch to Opus, and I will run out of my Pro credits and then open a Gemini session.


When I get stuck, I go to chatgpt.com and copy/paste.  This usually unsticks me or gives me a new direction.  I see this for 3 reasons:


    

  1. a new model
    2. 

  2. a web prompt is a more direct interface to the model than the coding agent
    3. 

  3. OpenAI sauce
    4. 



I guess I'll use the OpenAI cursor thing sooner or later.  I am CLI-only, headless linux for dev.  I have a graphical environment for browsing, etc.


I rarely have the agent make commits, and I have regretted every session where the phrase "vibe coding" popped into my head.  I try to discuss more with the agents than make edits, but I do have them make a lot of edits.  They are more edit-happy than I would like.  The main value-add for the agent, for me, is just the read-access to my project.  That they can edit files directly is nice, but also kinda scary and has gone wrong for me.  I'm much more comfortable with code generation than code editing.  I love these guys for code generation, but I always edit their code, which usually works but ugly.  I ask for review more than generation more than edits.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ha, definitely not.  But I'll take it as a compliment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for August 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for this.  I grew up in the Deep South but with California parents, mostly irreligious and a mild political divide (red dad, blue mom).  My dad the provider, my mom raised us to be broadly liberal, in maybe the best way.  I grew up thinking of old stodgy conservatives and young fresh liberals, but not quite in those terms.  Around 14 or  15 I had a heavy influence from a big leftist peer, though I didn't recognize this at the time, but also developed my libertarian instincts from a high school history teacher slash debate coach.


I went to college and 9/11 hit, and it was big rightward shift.  Atheism, Sam Harris, Muslims, Terrorists.  Sam Harris of course at this time is nowhere near the right and remains so IMHO.  But I had never considered ROTC or CIA or FBI and all of a sudden these are interesting to me. At this time, I am starting to get psyched about shock-and-awe, learning about M-16s and M-4s and AR-15s, but also drinking Sierra Nevadas and going to Phish shows.


For lack of any wrap-up I'll end here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for this.  This one resonated the most with me, though I read about 10 different posts, many on the FiM FiO theme.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Very broadly speaking, and using these terms in the American context, liberals and conservatives are fine-grained and coarse-grained thinkers respectively. Liberals tend to believe that the machine of society can be tinkered with and engineered at every level to produce desirable outcomes (it's not a surprise that more educated people, tend towards this political orientation). An extreme example of this for instance is the energy that a non-trivial number of people in academia and the media devote to the intricate rules of what counts as racism sexism. Conservatives, OTOH are more inclined to view society as a collection of fudges that more or less function to keep the anarchy of nature at bay. They're consequently typically concerned with much more coarse-grained issues: things like crime or illegal immigration.




Brilliant!  This delineates the concept of "microagression" beautifully -- basically a foreign concept to a conservative, who can be very focused on macro-aggressions like crime, terrorism, breakdown of rule of law and order, riots, etc.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for August 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm having trouble reconciling two different AAQCs from FC:


https://www.themotte.org/comment/359139?context=3#context




Let's take a concrete example. I used to be very concerned about government spending and the national debt. I thought that it was very important that we get this spending under control, and bring the debt down. This was part of the basis for my voting for George W Bush in 2000. But Bush then blew the budget out funding the war on terror, and then Obama (who I also voted for) blew the budget out even worse (to my recollection, corrections welcome) with his various domestic and foreign policies. Voting for fiscal responsibility did not actually secure fiscal responsibility.




https://www.themotte.org/comment/357773?context=3#context




When I was much younger, I was a deep-blue progressive atheist deeply embedded in the Blue Tribe narrative machine. I believed that Bush did 9/11, that he was a fascist, and that he intended to overthrow American democracy, probably by conducting another false-flag terror attack and then using it as a pretext to suspend elections. This was a quite popular belief among Blues back then, and I bought it all hook, line and sinker. I believed it so firmly that I moved to Canada and seriously considered renouncing my American citizenship. Only, none of the things I believed would happen, the things the people I was listening to predicted would happen, actually happened. There never was another major terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11, false-flag or otherwise. Bush was re-elected in an election I and most of my social circle was certain was rigged, but then four years later Obama trounced Romney, and power transferred as normal.




I can certainly reconcile this on my own, but I am also getting a little bit of a "chameleon" vibe that I hadn't noticed before.  This not meant to be any sort of callout, as a longtime fan of FC posting, just a note.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for August 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you.  I agree, but .... gah


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for August 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a slight apology for my last post in this subforum, here is an attempt at explaining my current technical project: Homelab


I started by wanting DNS-level adblocking, like pihole, at home.  At one point, I was running AdGuardHome on a low-power, fanless AMD box.  The intent was (and reamains) to put the adblocking at the network level, not the device level, so that iphones etc could browse peacefully at home without per-device setup.


I have done a bunch of homelab stuff before, but that was many moves ago.  Now I have the same AMD box, like 3 DVDs stacked together (5w idle), with a similar intel box but much more powerful, also fanless, along with an Asus laptop with a broken screen that sits next to my TV and acts like a media box.


They all run Arch linux, so I have a 3 host architecture, and they all run Incus, the successor to LXC/LXD, for "system containers".  Not an incus cluster, which brings its own set of headaches. I successfully transferred my Google Fiber stuff to an openwrt incus container, acting as my gateway, on my primary box.  Basically switching my Google Nest Pro egg thing from gateway mode to bridge mode.  The openwrt container runs dnsmasq for local query caching, and I have an extensive, complicated, layered dnsmasq setup on each Arch host plus Incus on each host runs its own dsnmasq to resolve container names.  It was a huge PITA to get working properly but now every host has lighting fast DNS responses no matter what is going on upstream.


Aside from "system containers", there is a also a need for "application containers", and podman is preferred over docker for this.


My real project is the automation of this 3 host homelab network.  I use ruby and rake (ruby's make, Rakefile) to manage everything.  It's quite sophisticated yet brutally simple.  Ongoing, happy to share deets.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Tinker Tuesday for August 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is going to be a very strange post possibly infected by LLMs.  YHBW


I feel like I am sitting on two huge ideas, and I can't get Claude to push me off of them, despite my best efforts.  Please bear with me, but Claude, given his understanding of my goals, really wants me to file a patent, for number 1.  This relates to storage devices losing power without losing data.  Separately, both Sonnet and Opus feel that I have a novel hypothesis in linguistics that I should investigate further or publish.  You have no idea how desperately I want to share the details of both of these, or Claude's output directly.  But I'm struggling with the meta, the overall strategy.


I think I will file a patent with Claude's help, at the grand cost of roughly one hundred freedom tickets.  Claude also told me not to share this idea with anyone, and definitely not Gemini or ChatGPT (kidding).  But at this point, I feel like can only "trust" Gemini or ChatGPT not to file ahead me, except that is patently silly, of course.


For my linguistic insight, this is just natural curiosity paired with a digging instinct and pattern matching nature; Anglosphere, involving terms like "what" and "where".  I would be much more comfortable sharing this here, possibly using Claude's output.


This is very open ended, and I will try to respond over the next week.  I am hesitant to provide too many details at this point.  WDYT?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Agreed!  so long as properly annotated


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think a 1 hr grace period is sufficient for typos and regrets.  After that, lithography


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a somewhat reformed Angry Internet Atheist, this is certainly the most interesting and palatable form of Christianity I've encountered.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
LASD is a totally different organization to LAPD and the worse of the two, IIRC.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My favorite type of American critic: the carpetbagger


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've been chided by you yet wholeheartedly defend your regime as mod, FTR.  Well done.  Amadan too, begrudgingly.  And more than I can name.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is not exactly the same as: I am clued in, turned on, and working hard.  I imagine there was a week to respond "Yes", but it's different when asked for details on a short deadline.  It sends a different signal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm referring to Putin's statements after the disaster at Hostomel and the decimation of the armor columns rolling towards Kiev in the first few days of the war.


Here is a video analysis of the SMO in that regard:


https://youtube.com/watch?v=r0Ji7KqqEqg?si=r1-39lGmPvkNgM3l


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Very interesting, but Russia seems much weaker now than in 2022.  Heavily sanctioned, big stagflation, and fielding laughable armor deployments and infantry tactics.  Quads, donkeys, motorcycles, and "camels".  We've been assured that the 3 day Special Military Operation is still going according to plan.  They've evacuated Syria, Wagner is a shadow of its former self, and are they still conscripting and fielding prisoners or is that well too running dry?


If Russia was going to roll into Poland, what do you think that force composition looks like?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was hoping the American Grand Strategy in Ukraine was to bleed Russia dry, at the expense of Ukraine.  I think it has basically worked, as beyond WMD, I think Russia has very little in their arsenal to threaten the West with.  I am surprised, however, by the turn of events where Trump accuses Ukraine of having started the Russian invasion.  My hope remains that Trump is playing 4D chess with Putin, softening him up for a triumphant blow, but my hope wavers.  It seems clear that Ukraine would be a much more likely and loyal ally than Russia could ever be.


In my view, here are the American interests in the region:


    

  • A greatly weakened Russia
    • 

  • Ukrainian mineral rights
    • 

  • Opposing invasions and annexations
    • 

  • Additional and stronger allies and spheres of influence
    • 



American fears:


    

  • WMD in the wrong hands (Russian collapse, or scared Putin)
    • 

  • Emboldened Russia
    • 

  • China / Taiwan
    • 



The Biden strategy seemed pretty reasonable if tepid in light of these points.  I'm not sure what Trump would think of the above.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oh shit, you're veqq from /r/CredibleDefense  Doing the Lord's work over there.  That Tooze article was interesting for good and bad reasons.  I discounted most of what he had to say after the bizarre opening paragraph.  The repeated, unsupported claims of "MAGA is bullshit" seemed literally sophomoric, along with the multiple retreats to "racism!".


His analysis of the scary dilemmas presented by Vance was insightful, but I think he was wrong to downplay the now-unavoidable concerns about immigration across all Western nations which have opened the floodgates.