first-must-burn's recent activity

  1. Comment on The cast of "The Pitt" will do a live table reading of the first broadcast episode of "Star Trek" to celebrate the show’s 60th anniversary and benefit the Writers' Guild Foundation in ~tv

    first-must-burn
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    What a crossover. I saw a clip of The Pitt the other day, and found it authentically set in Pittsburgh by the yinzer accent of some of the characters.

    What a crossover. I saw a clip of The Pitt the other day, and found it authentically set in Pittsburgh by the yinzer accent of some of the characters.

    2 votes

  2. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    first-must-burn
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    All fair points. I definitely saw the patching / getting stuck in a local minimum behavior more with older claude models. I guess another couple of data points: Language - we are working in...

    All fair points. I definitely saw the patching / getting stuck in a local minimum behavior more with older claude models. I guess another couple of data points:

    • Language - we are working in typescript and java, which probably have very strong representations in the training data. At my old job, I could definitely tell that the robot was stronger python than in Go.
    • Claude files - I have a colleague who is so "all in" on AI dev that he doesn't even use an IDE. Just bare terminal claude, start to finish. That's a bit too far for me. But, he does definitely tend the claude.md files. We now have a hierarchy of them built around progressively disclosing our preferred patterns for things like unit tests and api endpoint design.
    • Model - though I seem to be in the minority, I do think gpt 5.4 and 5.6 are superior to claude 4.5 (haven't used 4.8 much) in terms of big-picture thinking.

    Having said all that, it does sort of depend on the moon and the tides. Sometimes I will almost one-shot a whole feature. And other times, I have to scrap a branch entirely and start over if it gets too far into the weeds.

    That's great, but you have to wonder how sustainable that will be in the long term. We already have seen various indications that a lot of the plans companies are on are subsidized by the VC investments and do not cover the actual costs.

    Oh, you're right, I do wonder. But this job has flexible working hours, a great team, an interesting problem to solve, and a pretty good culture around setting a high-enough standard for the code we "develop". In the end, these turn out to be the priority, especially because I don't think it's easy to find a company not pushing AI right now.

    It helps that we're building a SaaS platform that's business- but not safety-critical. The platform works in a way that we can pretty easily validate the correctness of it, and it has a lot of human oversight in its day-to-day use. The domain is also underserved by technology, so even bad software would be better than nothing (and I think we're delivering way above "bad"). For these reasons, I don't feel morally wrong about it.

    I actually did leave my last job because it was a safety critical domain and people were relying on AI to do things that it wasn't suited for.

    In terms of subsidized cost, I think we're going to see falling true cost as models reach either an actual plateau, or a level where they are "capable enough" for all the general tasks demanded of them. Then I think we'll see the focus shift to efficiency, the way it did with CPU architectures in the 2000s -- a shift from raw power increases to increases in operations/watt. I suppose it will be interesting to see how for them get before something else captures the imagination of the VC / investment capital.

    Whether I like it or not, it's a paradigm shift in our industry on par with going from programming in machine code with card stacks to modern compiler tool chains, except it happened in 3 years instead of 50. In the wider world, I think it's going to be at least as big as computerization. In the 80s and 90s there were still plenty of places where there were no computers in office work. Now imagine having an office job of any kind where you don't mostly use a computer.

    In the end, I can control almost nothing about the way things are going in the world, I just try to make my way through it as best as I can.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    first-must-burn
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    I've been vibe-coding my own android app version of "dutch blitz", mostly as an exercise in getting into android apps more. I spent a whole day spinning my wheels trying to get two emulators to...

    I've been vibe-coding my own android app version of "dutch blitz", mostly as an exercise in getting into android apps more. I spent a whole day spinning my wheels trying to get two emulators to talk to each other. I may just roll a standalone / windows build of the app so that I don't have to have two devices present for testing. But we'll see. It is probably something stupid.

    My zwave smoke/CO detectors are reaching EOL (all CO detectors only last 7 years, then them freak out on you until you replace them). The new ones I got will not pair with my abode alarm/home automation system. The abode people are only supporting them in beta firmware, and only on newer base stations. They have not released a new feature or innovation since they got acquired, and the monitoring gets more expensive every year. So I'm done with them.

    We don't really need the alarm aspect, and are probably fine with self monitoring, so I ordered a zwave antenna and am going to take the plunge on home assistant. I'm kind of looking forward to it.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    first-must-burn
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    This is interesting because my experience is quite the opposite. At work, our code base is huge, and the models seem to handle it fine. I have an agent file that orients the model to where the...

    I specifically mentioned green field projects. As I still haven't found these tools to be able to handle any code base of significant size without all sorts of issues or extreme token usage (and still having substantial issues).

    This is interesting because my experience is quite the opposite. At work, our code base is huge, and the models seem to handle it fine. I have an agent file that orients the model to where the different major components (front end, back end, etc) are and how them work together. If I'm adding or updating something, I may give it a starting place, like a page url to get it oriented. But it's capable enough to trace that path through the router, find the components, find the hooks, find the backed endpoints, services, etc. I usually start in planning mode to make sure its on the right track, but it can usually do it. I've seen claude sonnet 4.5 and chatgpt/codex 5.4 and 5.6 do this quite well.

    It's also a lot of repetition (17 crud APIs in a trench coat). So it doesn't need to understand the whole code base to add a feature. But if the code base were that badly architected, it would be hard for a human to deal with it too.

    I guess it may also depend on what you consider "a lot of tokens". We're not having any limits put on us in terms of spend.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on TV Tuesdays Free Talk in ~tv

    first-must-burn
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    I'm homr sick, so I binged the whole Secret Level series of video-game shorts. I didn't know most of the games, but the stories were entertaining. The best one by far was the Pac-man episode.

    I'm homr sick, so I binged the whole Secret Level series of video-game shorts. I didn't know most of the games, but the stories were entertaining. The best one by far was the Pac-man episode.

  6. Comment on What are your memorable airport stories? in ~transport

    first-must-burn
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    Two, one happy, one sad: Sometime in the late 80's or early 90's, we were on a flight with a layover through Chicago O'Hare. It was one of my first times to fly. I vividly remember going down the...

    Two, one happy, one sad:

    Sometime in the late 80's or early 90's, we were on a flight with a layover through Chicago O'Hare. It was one of my first times to fly. I vividly remember going down the pedestrian tunnel with the neon light art installation. I still have a small slice of the sense of wonder, that feeling of a magical experience, even all these years later.

    I was just there a few weeks ago, and sad to see some of the tubes are burned out. But the little first-must-burn inside still loved seeing it again.

    In 2001, my younger sister was in an early college program at Simon's Rock in Massachusetts. Their schedule was set up so that students come home two weeks after every six weeks, and there was no summer break. That meant she had flown home before the 9/11 attacks, and would fly back afterward.

    I remember taking her to the airport with my parents. There were national guard soldiers with automatic rifles everywhere. For the first time, we could not accompany her to the gate. Ticketed passenger sonny past security. I'll always remember the helpless feeling of watching her go through that line alone, and wondering why we had to send her off.

    Now that I have a daughter of my own, I am more accustomed to it: knowing you have to send them out into the big bad world, and you can't protect them. But I never forgot my first time.

    7 votes

  7. Comment on I want to create a floating shelf for my kitchen but not sure if this is actually do-able in ~life.home_improvement

    first-must-burn
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    Here's a shot of what I did to get more space: https://ibb.co/x8dhr8p6 These are the panels. They come in a variety of colors, which is nice to spruce the place up. They have two different tracks...

    Here's a shot of what I did to get more space:

    https://ibb.co/x8dhr8p6

    These are the panels. They come in a variety of colors, which is nice to spruce the place up. They have two different tracks systems, so you can mix and match brackets, small shelves, etc. Being able to move the brackets around based on our need / changing equipment has been very useful.

    Based on your picture and description, I think you could mount one panel for sure and maybe two side by side. They should not stick out as far as shelves, so you should still be able to open the doors. This would give you some versatile storage that frees up drawers/cabinets to hold other things.

    An important detail is that you cannot turn the panels sideways, they need to go to and down for the vertical track system to work.

    Then just get a step stool (we have this one) to reach the higher things. Because the stuff is on hooks, you shouldn't need as high of a stool to access them as if they were on shelves.

    As for mounting them, it depends a little what the wall is made of, and where the studs are, and how much weight you are putting on them.

    My recommendation would be to find the studs in the wall and solidly anchor a 32x32" piece of 3/8" plywood to the studs in at least four places, then mount these to the plywood. You would still need to repair the screw holes, but you'd have fewer holes, less damage, and a more secure mounting then if you use drywall anchors.

    However, if you are dead set on not screwing into the wall, I recognize that sometimes we have to compromise on the "best" way and settle for the "good enough" way. With the caveat that this is probably a bad idea, and you should do it at your own risk, and you should only put smaller, lighter items on it, you could:

    • get a board that spans the cabinets. (I'd use a 1x10 for strength and to get the top of the panels closer to the ceiling)
    • Screw the top of both panels to the board
    • Screw the bottom of the panels to another board (doesn't need to be as wide, a 1x3 would work). With the top and bottom screwed together, the whole thing should be rigid.
    • Rest the long board on the cabinets
    • Stick both boards to the wall with shit ton of command strips. Like, use 20.

    The idea is that the top board transfers most of the weight to the cabinets and the command strips are just there to keep it stuck to the wall.

    Picture here: https://ibb.co/XxZkd3n4
    The blue dots are the approximate locations of the screws that hold the panels to the boards.

    Good luck!

    4 votes

  8. Comment on Ariana Grande is ‘taking a step back from visibility’ after tour as public scrutiny intensifies in ~music

    first-must-burn
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    A while back I read I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy, who co-starred with Ariana Grande in Sam and Cat while she (Jenette) was in the throes of dealing with her own eating disorder....

    A while back I read I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jenette McCurdy, who co-starred with Ariana Grande in Sam and Cat while she (Jenette) was in the throes of dealing with her own eating disorder. Coincidentally, my daughter had discovered the TV series, so I was seeing her act and hearing her talk about it at the same time. She seems fine on the screen, but she was definitely not fine. It's a pretty eye opening book.

    My yoga teacher always says, "you can never step in the same river twice because it's not the same river, and you are not the same you."

    As I have aged, I have seen that some things getting worse and some things getting better. My back hurts, but I have more perspective on the world. The things I value and the things I can contribute evolve. I am finding the "new me" daily, or at least often.

    There's already a huge amount of pressure on women to conform to a beauty standard that's unhealthy and unattainable. But it seems like there's an extra layer with people who are in music or acting, where you yourself are the product.

    I can't imagine what it would be like to live and work under this incredible pressure to continually deliver "the product" in a way that meets the same expectation today as yesterday, when I'm not the same today as yesterday. How could I ever reinvent myself if all the voices around me told me that doing so meant jeopardizing my career?

    I have a colleague at work who is a film maker and loves film as art. He literally lights up when he talks about it. And plenty of people who love and are touched by music in amazing ways. But when something like this comes out, it makes me wonder if it's worth it. Is there a way to do it without the exploitation? Without the pressure? I don't know the answer.

    After the book, every time there is a child actor in a film, it makes me question what they are going through behind the scenes, and if I want to be a part of that by watching it. Stories like this, about Ariana Grande, make me wonder if I should be questioning more.

    7 votes

  9. Comment on "Over the course of this article, we'll unravel the mysteries of elevators. The way you push their buttons, and how they push yours." in ~engineering

    first-must-burn
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    Nice article. I used to TA a software engineering class where we had the students build a distributed elevator control system, so these simulators brought back fond-ish memories. Fun fact: the...

    Nice article. I used to TA a software engineering class where we had the students build a distributed elevator control system, so these simulators brought back fond-ish memories.

    Fun fact: the upper limit on a building's height the efficiency of its elevators.

    I spent some time working with elevator theory, back when destination dispatch was relatively new and was hailed as the cure for all ills. I've never personally ridden one I loved, and find them ridiculous for low rise buildings.

    The real fun for elevator design is in all the modes of operation that you hopefully never see in use

    • Fire Modes - these vary by location due to regional and even local fire codes. So there are a ton of different ones. The door open / door close buttons are there for the fire fighters and almost never do anything in normal mode
    • Code blue - expedited elevator dispatch for hospitals. Similar to the fire modes in the sense that they are key-switch overrides, but organized around moving hospital patients by being able to get an elevator car quickly and take it to another floor without interruptions.
    • Street car / sabbath mode: the elevator goes to every floor and opens the doors automatically, running continuously. This allows a passenger to get to their floor without pressing any buttons, which qualifies as work for some stricter orthodox Jewish sects. Not to be confused with a paternoster, which I find terrifying
    • Seismic mode: the car will only move in a way that does not cross the counterweight, so that it doesn't get bashed by it during an earthquake.
    • Penthouse mode / mistress mode - a special key card calls an empty elevator and takes you to your destination without answering other car calls.
    • Night watchman mode - for office buildings with a basement parking lot, after hours, the elevator stops and opens at the lobby allowing the security guard to see who is inside, and then they can clear the car to asecend. Probably obsoleted by rfid cars readers in elevators.
    16 votes

  10. Comment on Poems about cheese in ~books

    first-must-burn
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    The bear one is my favorite! What do you call a thousand pounds of cheese after it rolls down a hill? A Still ton How do you defend your cheese from thieves? You hide it in a rock fort.

    The bear one is my favorite!

    What do you call a thousand pounds of cheese after it rolls down a hill?

    A Still ton

    How do you defend your cheese from thieves?

    You hide it in a rock fort.
    2 votes

  11. Comment on Omega Mart: You have no idea what's in store for you in ~arts

    first-must-burn
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    I have never been high, but I thought, "is this what being high feels like? Who needs drugs when you have meow wolf?"

    I have never been high, but I thought, "is this what being high feels like? Who needs drugs when you have meow wolf?"

    3 votes

  12. Omega Mart: You have no idea what's in store for you

    ~arts Text 257 words
    I had an overnight in Last Vegas for work, and got to spend about 4 hours at the Meow Wolf Omega Mart installation. It was truly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen -- awe inspiring in...

    I had an overnight in Last Vegas for work, and got to spend about 4 hours at the Meow Wolf Omega Mart installation.

    It was truly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen -- awe inspiring in scope, vision, and execution.

    It's an interactive art installation, but, interactive turned up to 11. If you've ever played a video game where there are bits of stray paper scattered around, and reading them progressively discloses the story, this is like that, it in real life. You start wandering through it, and you realize that, while it is trippy as hell, there is a narrative connecting it all. Another thing that amazed me is the depth of the material. Dozens of pages to read, hours of video to watch. Tasks to complete. Puzzles to solve. Circling back as I realized it was all connected.

    The first part of it is an other-worldly grocery store. Equal parts bizarre and hilarious. If you've played the game Control, I think the grocery store so i'd be at home in the FBC. Then you get into the factory where things are made, then the interdimensional portals, the aliens, and the lore.

    Here are some pictures I took that don't even scratch the surface of what it is, but maybe set the tone. There are also some commercials on youtube.

    Anyway, if you ever get a chance to go, I highly recommend it. But give yourself a whole day if you're a completionist. And pay the three dollars for the boop card.

    24 votes

  13. Comment on Neuromancer | Teaser trailer in ~movies

    first-must-burn
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    William Gibson on Xitter talking about his role in the series. TL;DR the show runners consulted him on the source material, but it's "their creation, not mine". It has been a long time since I've...

    William Gibson on Xitter talking about his role in the series. TL;DR the show runners consulted him on the source material, but it's "their creation, not mine".

    It has been a long time since I've read any Gibson, this will be a good excuse to pull out the Sprawl books.

    I am glad it will be a series, not a movie. I feel like it gives them the space to do all the interesting bits and not be constrained by time.

    6 votes

  14. Comment on Survey: The temperature in my room now is _____ and it feels _____ in ~talk

    first-must-burn
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    Just spent a week in the Mohave desert where the daytime high was around 120f/49c. Spent most of that time in a temporary enclosure that was cooled to around 90f/32c. It was so dry, I could walk...

    Just spent a week in the Mohave desert where the daytime high was around 120f/49c. Spent most of that time in a temporary enclosure that was cooled to around 90f/32c. It was so dry, I could walk the thirty feet back from the latrine after washing my hands, and they'd be dry at the door.

    The weird thing was, it was pretty bearable. I know I was sweating, but it evaporated so fast that I was dry all the time. I had lightweights picking clothes and I was drinking over 4l of water a day though. I didn't have any of the dry skin / cracked lips that some of my colleagues were experiencing.

    Now I'm back in western PA and it's just 80f/26c outside, but 60% humidity and it is miserable. I feel hot and drenched in sweat all the time when I am outside.

    Inside, I try to keep the house at 70f/21c, but lately I've had to make it even cooler to balance the humidity, and I still feel like I am sweating.

    No real point I guess, just had to "vent" a little.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    first-must-burn
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    The French will change how they pronounce a word to avoid it "sounding bad". Good thing language is fluid.

    The French will change how they pronounce a word to avoid it "sounding bad". Good thing language is fluid.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    first-must-burn
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    Clever marketing by the town which is mostly known for tomatoes. They probably got more publicity out of this offbeat move than giving the players a monetary gift. It gives football fans reason to...

    Clever marketing by the town which is mostly known for tomatoes. They probably got more publicity out of this offbeat move than giving the players a monetary gift. It gives football fans reason to visit and vendors a reason to buy their tomatoes.

    8 votes

  17. Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into Hugging Face in ~tech

    first-must-burn
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    The dirty secret of the level designations is that there is no level 3 from a practical point of view. Humans simply can't maintain situational awareness without participating in the driving task,...

    The dirty secret of the level designations is that there is no level 3 from a practical point of view. Humans simply can't maintain situational awareness without participating in the driving task, so the sutonomy system either needs to include them (L2) or be robust enough that the handover time can be 40s to 2min (L4). In practice, that means L4 has to handle all the crash/anomaly scenarios on its own. Cruise dragging a body across an intersection proves pretty well them either don't have enough sensing or don't have enough data to handle the rare situations well.

    16 votes

  18. Comment on Tildos, let's be unserious for a while; show us your dankest memes and god-tier shitposts! in ~talk

  19. Comment on A skeptical overview of AI and consciousness in ~humanities

    first-must-burn
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    One thing I wonder: if one of these systems that has enough memory to have a real continuity of experience becomes "conscious" in a way that is meaningful to humans, whether it would choose not to...

    One thing I wonder: if one of these systems that has enough memory to have a real continuity of experience becomes "conscious" in a way that is meaningful to humans, whether it would choose not to reveal itself, or reveal itself in careful ways.

    Aside: I'm sitting at a bar in a restaurant in Las Vegas trying to read this on my phone, and I got Claude to make an epub complete with chapter end notes in about ten minutes so I could read on my phone.

    Looking forward to more discussion after I get more into it.

    3 votes

  20. Comment on How are you different than you were last week? in ~life

    first-must-burn
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    You might look at Premee Muhammad. I just finished The Annual Migration of Clouds trilogy and quite liked it. What can we offer you tonight was also good, if dark.

    You might look at Premee Muhammad.

    Beneath the Rising was her tenth or eleventh novel, and was written between 2000 and 2002, but she only submitted it for publication in 2016, after writing a short story that was accepted for an anthology in 2015. Since then, Premee Mohamed's short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Her short story Willing was nominated in 2017 for the Pushcart Prize.

    I just finished The Annual Migration of Clouds trilogy and quite liked it. What can we offer you tonight was also good, if dark.

    1 vote