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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2024

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  • I worked in a callcentre for many years and had changing shifts every two weeks. Having to come in at 6am and then getting that switched to 4pm wreaked havoc on my body and after doing this for quite a while, I just crashed and got burnout.

    Recovery took me two years, where I basically just slept. Five days a week are just too much, it’s a system designed to squeeze the last bit of labor value out of you and I fucking hated it. Nowadays, I’m not able to physically work for more than four days, or else I’ll crash again.

    I had a lot of luck, so I can now work entirely from home. No commute, Fridays are off. Sounds super cozy and amazing, but the thing is: I need that Friday for myself. A lot of times I’ll just sleep so I can have some energy on the actual weekend. 🫩

    When it comes to doctor’s appointments, I just tell my boss I have one and that’s it. As it should be. We are humans, not machines.








  • it’s only a matter if time til hardware gets really good at it and it becomes very viable to run open source models at home that make theirs irrelevant.

    I have a small netbook with 64GB of RAM and a Radeon 780M. I can use 55GB of the RAM for running local models (since it’s shared VRAM I can put all of that into the GPU and even combine it with an external one). So I’ve tried qwen3.6 and it’s just as useable (and often shitty) as Gemini or ChatGPT, but without the instant response. Depending on the task, I have to wait from thirty seconds to five minutes for the reply.

    That was pretty eye-opening for me. If the big players didn’t buy up all of the RAM and make GPUs with high VRAM extremely expensive, all of us would already be able to run these models by ourselves.

    I’m really waiting for the falllout after the crash, when those Blackwell GPUs will land on eBay for fifty bucks and we can get adapters on Aliexpress to use them at home. It will bring computing back into our own hands and out of the corporations emptying our pockets with subscriptions. And hopefully, it will open up discussions about the actual capabilities of LLMs, because what we’re having to endure right now in the media is not based in reality at all.








  • From a lot of posts here I get that working as a dev in the US is now a total shitshow. But to give you my European perspective (I work in Germany): AI adoption hasn’t been as rapid here. People and companies are more skeptical about it, compared to the US.

    I work as a web developer for an employer that is cautious about AI. I can use it, but I am not forced to. Tried it excessively for a few months (agents writing my code, playing a glorified manager and all of that jazz), but I noticed my own skills atrophying and me losing the general grasp of what my code actually does. And even though everyone and their dog claim that the models get better with each new release, I still run into hallucinations way too often. If you are very experienced in a field and you’ve been doing it for over a decade, you notice all of the small inconsistencies and bullshit answers - much quicker than a junior dev who didn’t have that experience yet.

    So nowadays I only use Gemini for tool and library research or really simple boilerplate code. For everything else my own brain is the better solution. I am not actively against AI as a technology, but extremely opposed to paying a subscription to some techbro billionaire’s company to keep doing my job. Fuck Altman, Elon, Jensen and the Zuck.

    If Ed Zitron is correct in all of his calculations, the frontier models will get so expensive they’ll become unprofitable for a lot of companies, so it would be a stupid decision to rely on them. I am looking forward to one day host good models on my own machine - though that day is not today, when capable GPU’s still cost thousands of dollars.


  • Thinkpad L390 Yoga. They crammed a 4.6 GHz CPU into a cooling system that was not designed for it, so the machine ran hot and throttled all of the time. The keyboard keys rubbed off after a few months of use. The Thinkpad logo was just a sticker that one day decided to stick to my hand because Lenovo used really cheap glue. It had a MicroEthernet port with a passive adapter that did nothing but break it out to a regular ethernet jack. The adapter cost 30€ and its cable turned into oil after a year.

    I was able to undervolt the CPU and make it barely passable, then Microsoft released a Windows update that prevented undervolting. Gave it to a friend afterwards and got myself a GPD Win Max 2.