I did something similar with an LED display on my computer case. The display required a proprietary UI program from the manufacturer to display GPU/CPU temps which unfortunately only worked on Windows.
Since it needs sensor data, WINE would not work here and I didn't want to do something funky with editing WINE or granting non-typical permissions.
I was able to reverse engineer the software using Claude, some Python, and a few hours of probing sensor data to understand how it worked and what was available.
I wrote most of the code myself (it was dead simple), but Claude was extremely useful in understanding what byte packets were being sent to the USB controller, what they meant, and what the controller was expecting.
I was able to make it into a service so now it Just Works(tm).
Probably the first time I've used it to "hack" something, but now I have a service that works great, I understand it, and I learned a ton about how Linux controls some low-level hardware.
Is that why Anthropic recently gave out free credits for use in off-hours? Possibly an attempt to more evenly distribute their compute load throughout the day?
The advice to work on your own "shed" has really helped with my burnout during this AI age. I got into technology because I liked coding, building, and tinkering with systems. LLMs are great at coding and getting basic pipelines built, and I found myself with more pressures to be agent-first rather than hands on key-board at work. My side projects at home are where I've been able to find the joy for coding again.
I recently wrote a small service to get a temperature LED panel on my computer case working. It required a proprietary program to pipe the sensor temps to the display, which only worked on Windows. Being on Linux (arch btw :P), there wouldn't be a way to get this to work. I had a lot of fun learning about how to reverse engineer the inputs/outputs the other software was doing and replicate it in Python.
Couldn't you technically crawl all these blogs for their "blog's I'm reading" and create a social graph? You could start vetting based on how often other blogs link to that one, sort of like an impact factor in research.
I am also going to call out House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It's a really interesting book that explores a house that is slightly larger on the inside than the outside. It explores a lot of liminal spaces and has a really interesting format in print.
Microslop strikes again! AI implementations have really distilled all the shitty business practices tech companies have been doing into highly visible missteps.
It is interesting watching all these large companies essentially try to "start-up" these new products and absolutely fail.
You need a social hobby. If you like gaming, go find a game night at a game store near you. If you want to feel some purpose, look up some volunteering opportunities at churches and homeless shelters.
It's really important to stay active on things outside yourself and to at least spend some time outside most days.
This is pretty much how every performance review I've had in the past 5 years has gone. Even up to my VP it's considered pretty useless. I'm not sure where it actually gets used by HR, but I'm sure it's selectively applied.
This is interesting. I started teaching myself Polars and used Claude to help me muscle through some documentation in order to meet deadlines on a project.
I found that Claude wasn't too great at first at it and returned a lot of hallucinated methods or methods that existed in Pandas but not Polars. I chalk this up to context blurring and that there's probably a lot less Polars code in the training corpus.
I found it most useful for quickly pointing me to the right documentation, where I'd learn the right implementation and then use it. It was terrible for the code, but helpful as a glorified doc search.
The neurotransmitter model of mental illness is largely incorrect. It's much more complex than just "Depressives have less serotonin, therefore lets give a reuptake-inhibitor to keep serotonin in the brain".
One thing to note too is the game can be beaten in the first 10-15 minutes or so without any glitches. You just need to have figured out the grand puzzle of the game. I found that really unique and interesting, like the solution was always available to me but the block was my knowledge of the world, not mechanics or something like an unlockable skill or level.
I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with drivers?
How much of this is actually due to the recipient of the information being low-intelligence? If we use Communications theory for this (SCMR Model), having an intelligent sender and content won't do much use if the receiver of said information is unable to understand and use it.
I see it with coworkers all the time. They'll ask ChatGPT to do an analysis and it'll output test results for a T-test. They don't know how to interpret it at all, and so it's ultimately meaningless to them. They're just using "stat sig" as a way to make a non-technical VP happy. In situations like this, I don't think a highly intelligent source, model or human, can make the recipient be more intelligent than they actually are.
It doesn't help that it seems like society has been trending to reward individuals with a lack of shame. Fortune favors the bold, that is.
Think of a lot of the inflammatory content on social media, how people have made whole careers and fortunes over outrage, and they have no shame over it.
It really does begin to look like having a good sense of shame isn't rewarded in the same way.
I am not sure how common it is nowadays, but a more recent example of an Anchoress is Nazarena of Jesus. Born in 1907, she joined the Camaldolese in the 40s and lived as a recluse until her death in 1990.