a-saleh

Subscriptions: Personal: Claude Pro 20$/mo Work: we have access to some Anthropic and OpenAI models and open-weight models, like GLM

Outside: I have some open weight locally on my 64G ram M5 macbook, mostly for personal stuff that I don't want to send to cloud (or claude). Mostly using Gemma through oMLX, because it feels more street-smart than the more coding focused models, experimenting with Qwen-flash-next through Strata, because the streaming of experts really pushes what size of model I can run

Harness: Claude code, mostly, I trust anthropic, and like the remote integration with their mobile app. Being able to say "prototype me this and that ui" for personal project and seeing it and testing it on my phone is awesome.

At work for the api-provided llms, I am trialing opencode and pi harness, but don't have much to say, we mostly used claude-code up til now.

For local I mostly use Hermes, not for any of the big features, just because I want a nice chat interface (I am mostly talking through my health problems and trying to get my appointments in order) that already has basic tooling integrations out of the box. I.e. getting OpenWebUI have search tool was pain. Adding i.e. mcp for my todolist or calendar to Hermes was smooth.

I would say, if you can afford it, and have some reasonable reason to continue with masters, stay at uni.

As far as I know, Amazon is not that good of an employer. If you would manage to stick wit them for those two years, it still would be what, ~100k in lost income? And no job on the CV for those two years? But those can be mitigated and are way less certain than achieving a degree in 2 years

I thought Totyota is still one of the EV leaders. Alongside Kia and Hyundai?

I am from former ost-block (weird it still has weight even 35+ years later) and my grandpa was Palestinian. The overal feeling is, that this was always the case. Sometimes we win some, sometimes there is prosperity and oasis of stability but in general, it is mostly chaos, even if it seems stable.

People in protesting in 1988 thought communist politburo is here to stay forever and maybe we get concessions, iron curtain fell year or so later.

It does feel more stressful as I have a kid and a house and a mortgage.

And maybe it works out and I remember my greatgrandma who built her her with her husband in late 1920's and the hous survived a world war and two occuppations and her daughter inherited it could sell it and lived off of it for decade in her pension.

And maybe it works out differently and I remember my grandpa where he had to run from his home country and would never see the house his grew up in but died in a nice flat with big family that cared about him.

Everything apart from global termonuclear war or literal paperclip-scenario level AI take-over feels survivable. And those are real risks. Like, that is the reason I celebrate Stanislav Petrov day!

Apart from that ... I am lucky I live in the city where musicians still play live and tickets to small venues are under 10 Eur and people still dance. So I dance. It helped me through my divorce, it helps me keep my current relationship alive, it helped me find community both local and across europe. It was nice to go to a small gig of an unknown bluesband in London and commending the guy who organized that for nice event and he went "Oh, where are you from? Ha, I have friends from there, we danced in Vienna!".

I think there will be a sort of ~meeting in the middle. I.e. when friend was furnishing his appt. he chose specifically the sort of furniture that will make it easier for his robotic vacuum to work. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be some extra allowance for autonomous vehicles comming in next ~5 years. Stuff like that.

On one hand, you are clearly exaggerating.

On the other hand, the actual conversations I hear my friends having about business-trips to US are more stressed than conversation my dad used to have with my mom when he was traveling to do business for banks in India, Pakistan or Russia decade or two ago.

From what I have seen successful ~vibe-coders in my cirle are really bullish on type-safety and testing. Up to a point I have seen a guy porting his favourite property-based testing framework to TypeScript :D

So, vibecoding in C feels like playing with loaded gun.

I have been wondering if this is one of those things you could solve with a ~case. Like - clicks keyboard might be overdoing it, but getting a scroll-wheel or a trackball under my thumb on the side, could be nice and doable! :D

First, mint-mobile is specific in some way? That part shouldn't be a problem.

Second, you mostly get to choose one.

Small enough? Yeah, Unihertz Jelly Star is tiny. Maybe you try one of the foldable flip-phones, Razr 2025 allows you to mostly live in the outside screen.

Custom os? Is there anybody else than Fairphone these days?

Buttons? Unihertz Titan emulates old blackberry passports, so it might be too big for you.

I recently bought Galaxy Fold 6 and live inside of the Nixdroid terminal :D

I think I mostly liked those type-systems that lean towards dependent, but not go all the way.

Purescript might be favourite? Even by default you get more power than i.e. vanilla Haskell, with row-types. But then you can get type-level list, typelevel string, even typelevel regex! And you use these through type-classes in a kind of logic-programming way.

Ok, I didn't expect such a high praise for rust. I am not joking.

Find some thing you enjoy creating digitally and just do that and publish.

Straight ort is probably toughest to sell, but ... if you enjoy it, one day there might be enough fans to sign up to patreon, buy your prints, book, e.t.c.

Like, you are probably choosing the Brandon Sanderson route, "Even if I never publish any of these novels, and I will die with 20 books worth of written stories that almost nobody knows about, it was still worth it!" As late sit pterry said, "Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself." You probably won't become next Sanderson or next Weir (Martian was self-published as a web-series) ... I would think that if you find your audience, you could become someone like qntm?

Also, books that teach about stuff have easier time finding an audience.

Especially if you already have a hobby that you can write about. This is the thing, you need something you are excited about or at least persistent about doing. My partner has been training dogs for over a decade, and writing training plans is not as lucrative to have as the main income, but it scales better than training in person, right ;)

Simmilarily, you could make games, publish them on itch and probably won't become next Maddy Thorne (of Celleste fame) but you could become new Brozef (look up Felvidek, it started as his university ...thesis? I think? And now it is like a game on steam and people even bought it!)

Boardgames/tabletop can be a thing - itch can work there too, but there might be a local game jam where you could cobble something together and then somebody might print&play it?

People still like to get ~human made assets. 2d art. 3d models. I used to faf around in blender a decade ago and even I heeded the siren call of a well rigged character for 10$ :D

Yeah ... reading this after myself - you are thinking the wrong way around. You need something you are excited about or at least persistent about doing. If you have several, yeah thinking about which one is more commercially viable can be good. If you have something concrete in mind, that is like a project that is good too, but you should be honest with yourself if you really need the money, or if this is a "eh, could be nice if something comes out of it, but it was time well spent even if not"

Recently I have been writing more stings in jsonnet. If I were with more haskell-friendly team, might even try dhall. In general, I feel like writing the yaml in something else than yaml is the way to go, and as long as you get imports and way to do templating that is not just string interpolation, you are good.

Why just simple?

T.b.h. if I were to write a manifest generator, I would still probably commit the thing into a repo and let argo do the rest. Maybe even fiddled around to make the generator into a config-management-plugin ... but that feels like over-doing it.

Fedora is good. Ubuntu is still good. Weirdly - if he has steam-deck and a desktop setup, fiddling around with steam-os in desktop mode can be a good enough entry-point.