If you want a high-end, architectural look for your home or shop front, check out "Dichroic" films. These are the trendy "colour-shift" films you see on modern buildings in London, and Tintfit stocks them here: The "Blaze" and "Chill" films change colour depending on the angle you look at them and the lighting conditions. It’s a fantastic way to create a unique, eye-catching feature window that looks incredibly expensive but is actually just a DIY film application.

Code tells a story.

It is usually not especially interesting. It is not captivating. But it is a story.

The story often goes like this: Instead of using the class directly, an interface was used. Someone expects this implementation to change a lot. Or they want to break the logic of the code apart. Speed up compilation times. Maybe they plan on having multiple different implementations.

That's, well... no, it is not exciting. But sometimes you look at it and wonder why. And you muse to yourself, what could be the reason for this curious choice. Is the whole project written like that? Maybe two developer developed the feature together and they agreed at the very beginning to write the interface in order to be able to cleanly work in parallel. I did this with a colleague. We worked on a common feature. We decided to write an interface first, then we worked separately and in parallel on the two sides of the interface. In the end we left it in and we were asked why we decided to use an interface.

Code tells a story. But so very often now, the story I hear when I ask why is "copilot did it." Fuck you. And fuck your "hey, copilot says you could do something better" in merge reviews.

I don't care if you want to use AI. I don't think it is good. You dull your skills. But hey, I don't really care about it. I don't care if you decide to use a plastic fork to remove your left eye. I mean, I would have recommended a sharper instrument, but fuck, if you want to mutilate yourself. Go for it. But when git blame tells me it was you who wrote the code, then don't fucking excuse any decision with "copilot did it." And when copilot tells you there is an improvement in my merge request, you don't need to tell me that it came from copilot. That is no authority. If you think copilot is right, you argue for it, and you give me arguments and reasons. But if you don't even understand yourself why it is supposedly better, just fuck off.

https://careers.altar.io/jobs/...

look at this shit. 40k was what I was making 8 years ago as a junior.

game developers surprisingly suck at basic logic / programming in a way that makes any sense and is not horribly redundant, where they actually read what the methods they're calling do... instead of daisy chaining other tutorials they saw with no understanding of why it works and why they had to patch something 7 times because of weird edge case bugs

drives me nuts. but I have to keep their bugs because I don't know the engine and I'm committed to following along so I can understand the features and standards / workflows

I thought programming was a very good training ground for wisdom, because of the frustration traps, but this seems to be similar where you have to follow people who just make such horrible crap and you have to swallow your urge to perfect things and judge people

Got refused from another job.

The reason was that even do my test had "some features" (no more nor less than the ones they asked for), I didn't bring up some stuff that they like to hear or I didn't show the right kind of enthousiasm.

Aka it's based on vibe man there was a mismatch on the astroplane or something

The more I go the more hate is consuming me. I can take criticism, not arbitrary decision

I'm finetuning llama 3.1 8b locally on a 32gb 5090. It took weeks to learn enough to know where to start, hours to get my environment sane, and it's going to take 5.5 hours to finish training.

I started on my own model but the lack of data and acres of server farms led me down the finetuning path.

I honestly don't have any idea if any of it's going to be worth the time or CONSIDERABLE financial investment I made building my computer, but I refuse to stay ignorant.

guess who's back?!

soooo... long story short... i got super ill... like so ill i dont wanna give many details cuz
1. rather not bum you entertaining weirdos out... that'd make this bittersweet.
2. i dont wanna get a bunch of emo comments of best wishes etc

it's fixed, enough, now.

just to be clear, "ill" is not some paraphrasing for mentally ill/unstable/depressed/whatever else may pop into your heads... nor is it code for something like substance abuse/rehab or incarceration, etc... there was definitely entropy at play so it doesnt need more =P

Anyone on Ubuntu 22.04 jammy?
it's really good.

Yesterday legions of vlaams and germans cops were in luttich to oppress the protests. We aren't vlams or germans.

I swear this country is full of traitors.

So I started typing "// putain de bor..." in a comment because it's one of those sort of mornings.

The autocomplete suggested "putain de bordel de merde ce que c'est con javascript a la con".

I don't know much French but on the face of it that sounds like a reasonable assessment.

Besides keeping your computer unlocked for long-running tasks, Caffeine can also be used to fool MS Teams' activity monitor.

I just learned that my distry (cachyos) has enabled and setup for https://waydro.id/ :D

Fuck, I had an initial screening on Tuesday. Recruiter said they would send me an email so I can look over some stuff this weekend. No email. I tried messaging them on Indeed where they contacted me about sending them a targeted CV. Nothing. I found them on linkedin and requested a connect. Nothing. I am trying to be relaxed about this, but I will be pissed if they are ghosting me. They need someone before January. Bitch, I am right here!

Another small win and a first world problem:

I got another onsite for another company, but now I need to figure out how to line these interviews up. I am doing one next week on Thursday, and trying to do the new onsite the coming Monday.

Is that too far apart? I was tempted to have it on Friday, but two days of interviews back to back seems super tiring. I also need to brush up a bit more on system design (I am not amazing at it coming from a mostly frontend background).

Currently working on:

Conversion of existing models to full closed form fusion representations. Built a toy example with just the dense layers, got it up to 65m parameters with minimal accuracy loss and almost 80% reduction in memory requirements.

Figured out how to also handle convolution layers in this new representation, and am figuring out skip connections this week so I can implement an example of the full closed form variety. All the math checks out.

Full CFF should let me reduce memory requirements anywhere from ten times to fifty times whats typical, as well as similar improvements in inference times and compute.

The partial implementation also still allows for training.

I'm working toward a demonstration of GPT-2 training and running on a consumer desktop, without quantization.

Whether it will work out, who knows¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

But if it does, we're greenlight on the research lab being launched in late 2026. And when it does, I'll have to steal a couple of you as 'entourage'/VIP hires because devranters are really the only group of people I like to hang out and do things with anymore.

Oh dang you guys have been busy enough that there are new rants all the way at the end of the recents list

We need a definition for when something is AI slop or not because people just throwing the word around when something is AI generated while there still is often much work behind it. And with much work, i do not mean just entering thousand prompts to get something right. That's actually AI abuse imho.

So, proposals, when is something AI slop? What is the definition?

New Google Account layout.
Better.

Not possible to flood the site with rants anymore,
they say it's for your own good...

explorer.autoReveal false
Very important for the free men.