ipsi's comments

ipsi | 2 months ago | on: I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

Even then - I have a reasonably nice Brother Printer/Scanner/etc device, and I could never get AirPrint to reliably work until I switched over to using Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. Something to do with it going to sleep and not broadcasting the necessary mDNS stuff, IIRC. I couldn't find any combination of settings in the printer to make it happy, and since it's now right next to a switch, it's not really worth the effort of digging any further.

ipsi | 3 months ago | on: Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust

The Java one can actually be quite helpful, for a couple of reasons:

1. It tells you which variable is null. While I think modern Java will include that detail in the exception, that's fairly new. So if you had `a.foo(b.getBar(), c.getBaz())`, was a, b, or c null? Who knows!

2. Putting it in the constructor meant you'd get a stack trace telling you where the null value came from, while waiting until it was used made it a lot harder to track down the source.

Not applicable to all situations, but it could be genuinely helpful, and has been to me.

ipsi | 4 months ago | on: EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

They really are very, very different. Knowledge of one helps with the other, but it's far more than just "a couple of weeks to adjust to the accent", for example.

EDIT: It's worth noting that this is mostly a spoken thing, AIUI - most formal/semi-formal writing would be in Hochdetusch rather than a local dialect.

ipsi | 10 months ago | on: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

And yet that's not enough, even when someone very definitely knows better: https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mail...

Turns out that under certain conditions, such as severe exhaustion, that "sus filter" just... doesn't turn on quickly enough. The aim of passkeys is to ensure that it _cannot_ happen, no matter how exhausted/stressed/etc someone is. I'm not familiar enough with passkeys to pass judgement on them, but I do think there's a real problem they're trying to solve.

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: BYD has already produced its first solid-state cells

That matches my experience, in an admittedly slightly older car. Note that you'll rarely be charging over 80% because it's just too slow, and going under 5-10% is a bit too stressful, so practical range is probably 70-75% of maximum on longer trips. Less if it's winter and/or the AC is running.

If I could rely on every Rasthof having multiple functional EV chargers, I think range anxiety would be far, far less of an issue for me, but as of now it's something that I do think about for longer trips, and do have to plan for.

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Ask HN: Where are the part-time remote coding jobs?

Yes, for one of two reasons, I'd say:

* In the big cities, increased rents will almost immediately eat up the extra income from the UBI, and there won't be any meaningful change in the status quo for anyone who rents — which I imagine includes the majority of the people who do the important but undesirable jobs.

* Anywhere that the people doing these jobs either can afford houses (smaller American towns, e.g.), or where there's enough rental supply that rent won't immediately go up by the same amount as the UBI, will have to start paying people more to do these jobs. As far as I understand it, jobs like trash collection are already relatively well-paid given the training and qualifications required, so they might not even have to pay that much more.

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text

Most people who prefer DW would say that D&D sometimes has clear rules for something, but often has no rules, boring rules, or rules that aren't necessarily "fun". Combat, while tactical, tends to be slow and can frequently consume a lot of time in a session, plus the majority of rules and character powers are focused on combat.

If you're playing sessions with a lot of RP, DW will have a much better balance of rules:session-time, it's much easier to prep for, and given how rules-lite D&D really is outside combat, will probably have about the same amount of narrative input. Note that it's not necessarily the "group debating if the player survived", but typically the GM giving the player a choice when they fail to climb the wall, like "you fall and take a little damage, or you slip a little, cursing loudly and alerting the enemies at the top to you".

Done well, it gives the players a lot more agency, and much better buy-in for the story as they're now shaping it, instead of just being along for the ride. I would also say that pre-written narratives aren't really a thing for DW (at least, as far as I know!), so it's really down to what the DM sees as an appropriate penalty or choice, often phrased as "you succeed, but <thing>".

It's not really better or worse than D&D overall, I'd just say that it's much better suited for certain play-styles. If you enjoy tactical gameplay and using miniatures, then D&D (or maybe Pathfinder) are much better options. If the thought of yet another fight makes you want to gouge your eyes out, I'd recommend giving DW a try.

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists

Yeah, that's about what I'd expected (and WoD books would be a priority for me to index). Another commentator mentioned that Knowledge Graphs might be useful for dealing with the limitations imposed by RAG (e.g., have to limit results because context window is relatively small), which might be worth looking into as well. That said, properly preparing this data for a KG, ontologies and all, might be too much work.

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists

From a quick search, it seems like Knowledge Graphs are particularly new, even by AI standards, so it's harder to get one up off the ground if you haven't been following AI extremely closely. Is that accurate, or is it just the integration points with AI that are new?

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists

Ah, that's very helpful, thanks! I'll have a dig into this at some point relatively soon.

An example of how I might provide references with page numbers or chapter names would be great (even if this means a more complex text-extraction pipeline). As would examples showing anything I can do to indicate differences that are obvious to me but that an LLM would be unlikely to pick up, such as the previously mentioned in-character vs out-of-character distinction. This is mostly relevant for asking questions about the setting, where in-character information might be suspect ("unreliable narrator"), while out-of-character information is generally fully accurate.

Tangentially, is this something that I could reasonably experiment with without a GPU? While I do have a 4090, it's in my Windows gaming machine, which isn't really set up for AI/LLM/etc development.

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: Txtai: Open-source vector search and RAG for minimalists

So here's something I've been wanting to do for a while, but have kinda been struggling to figure out _how_ to do it. txtai looks like it has all the tools necessary to do the job, I'm just not sure which tool(s), and how I'd use them.

Basically, I'd like to be able to take PDFs of, say, D&D books, extract that data (this step is, at least, something I can already do), and load it into an LLM to be able to ask questions like:

* What does the feat "Sentinel" do?

* Who is Elminster?

* Which God(s) do Elves worship in Faerûn?

* Where I can I find the spell "Crusader's Mantle"?

And so on. Given this data is all under copyright, I'd probably have to stick to using a local LLM to avoid problems. And, while I wouldn't expect it to have good answers to all (or possibly any!) of those questions, I'd nevertheless love to be able to give it a try.

I'm just not sure where to start - I think I'd want to fine-tune an existing model since this is all natural language content, but I get a bit lost after that. Do I need to pre-process the content to add extra information that I can't fetch relatively automatically. e.g., page numbers are simple to add in, but would I need to mark out things like chapter/section headings, or in-character vs out-of-character text? Do I need to add all the content in as a series of questions and answers, like "What information is on page 52 of the Player's Handbook? => <text of page>"?

ipsi | 1 year ago | on: A dev's thoughts on developer productivity (2022)

From my limited experience, Staff+ seems to have a lot of the same responsibilities as a manager, but without the direct reports—they're both “leadership” positions and focus on long(er)-term planning, business needs, cross-team communication, and enabling others rather than doing the work themselves. Though in lieu of people management, Staff+ engineers do get to spend some time coding, but it's pretty rarely the majority of their job.

So to that extent, I think there's quite a lot in common between engineering and management tracks after a certain point, both because there's a genuine need for that, and because direct code contributions just don't scale in the same way that helping others does.

ipsi | 2 years ago | on: A 2024 plea for lean software

That... pretty much already exists, in the form of Home Assistant + Zigbee and/or Thread? Though that's still wireless, and I haven't seen any focus on trying to connect everything with wires (not something I'd be keen on, personally, I'm quite happy with the wireless protocols).

ipsi | 2 years ago | on: LinguaCafe: Self-hosted software for language learners to read foreign languages

Well, part of it is being on Hacker News, which will definitely skew towards "self-host everything!", and on top of that Jellyfin is genuinely free and open-source while the more popular alternative (Plex) isn't, so probably more popular here again, and not necessarily reflective of the popularity amongst self-hosters in general!

I definitely wouldn't expect it to be high on the list of priorities, but I do appreciate that it's under consideration at the very least.

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