Jim was 58, 5 years older than I am now, when he passed.

I have to get my shit together or I could be joining him.

Hello, old friend.

RE: https://tenforward.social/@elight/117520855947164836

Please boost. For science (and my curiosity)

Crypto is...

Encountering this, years ago, for me, was certainly the moment where modern art jumped the shark.
https://www.nga.gov/artworks/127623-die

Chemistry, motherfucker! Do you speak it????

Well I'll be damned. Ol' boring Berkshire Hathaway has been beating the market, including the techie S&P.

My #actuallyaudhd ass *hates* GTD. Yet I don't know a way to "get things done" without GTD. FML.

Why do people fall asleep or go to sleep? Do they trip, stumble fall down, and suddenly sleep? Or they travel to a destination called "sleep"?

I just like down on a bed, close my eyes, and sleep.

Those other people are taking big risks! What if they hurt themselves falling or traveling?

For me, as a Trek nerd, I always saw myself as going full Klingon when it was actually a meltdown. I was never proud of it. It was an apt metaphor.

Everything makes me angry. I trip over a shoe? Fucking thing is about to take a trip across the room. Every undesired noise makes me want to scream and yell. When it happens in public, I'm out of there as fast as I can, finding someplace dark and quiet to wait it out.

I can mostly contain myself. But it hurts.

I've always been this way. I thought I was just immature. No. This is wired into me. I've almost always been able to contain and hide it. Those times when I couldn't, on the outside, I'm sure that looked bad indeed. #actuallyautistic #actuallyaudhd

It's only now, struggling with a meltdown, that it occurs to me:

I wonder how many of those people who were diagnosed with a "nervous meltdowns" in decades past were actually undiagnosed #actuallyautistic #actuallyaudhd people having meltdowns?

Gave my self-hosted Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, running a pi agent, attached to the billion-context's session store and an LLm wiki, a very large project to chew on, a ton of context, some fundamental engineering principles, and let it rip.

It's been 18 hours. I went to check its reasoning.

Right now, it's thinking about the persistence layer. It's been weighing those engineering principles against a few short dialog and nudges **that I gave it last night** in a clear attempt to align well with my engineering philosophy.

It has high level guidance like:
- adhere to SOLID principles
- use TDD
- red, green, refactor
- the best code is the code that you don't have to write

It seemed to begin from a philosophy of minimizing dependencies. On one hand, interesting. On the other, I have remained skeptical that it may be choosing to write code instead of adopt because it is more trained on writing.

When discussing the database seeding code, I encouraged it to look for prior art. That aligns with not having to write code. However, it had just written a 120-line database seeder. On discussion, we agreed that 120 lines of robust enough code is better than introducing the several layers of dependencies that would come from any of the extra tools we would add for seeding.

What fascinated me, 18 hours in, when I checked on it is this: it was noting and weighing the tension between "not writing code" and "prior art" versus "keeping dependencies lightweight".

Having previously fed it an inclination toward PoEAA patterns, particularly the Data Mapper, Table Data Gateway, and Repository patterns, and its recognition hat it is working in a highly normalized RDBMS, it has been consistently turning its nose up at adopting SQLAlchemy. It pattern-matched its way to my taste for non-magical code and a distaste for the Active Record pattern!

The models themselves evidently only need to be just so capable. The tooling they have at their disposal, and how much they are nudged to use them, seems to make an astonishing difference.

I've done some light code review. It's written slightly heavy but not hefty classes. I'm sure I could find some trivial refactors into private methods; it could follow SRP better but it's not bad. It made a few obviously silly choices, like hard coding some not-quite-but-almost static lookup tables. We had a little chat and then it adapted. It learned from me that these tables would occasionally get new data, a little at a time. It realized that changing the code at runtime is undesirable and that changing a hard-codes db schema at runtime is even worse. It then took my advice to extract this data into lookup tables with the understanding that new document types would cause it to grow these tables.

Disclaimer: I'm only a believer in the AR pattern for low complexity databases. I've never seen it scale well. Also, admittedly, I rather suck at SQL. Hell of a combination.

All of this for about $1.25 of electricity (so far) running on hardware I already own less the 64gb to 128gb DDR4 upgrade I made a few days ago.

This is all using a community-developed runtime that lends itself to solid performance despite using GPU, CPU+RAM, and even SSD to a limited extent: https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata.

I'm increasingly tempted to sell some of my still-overpriced (thanks to shortages) former gaming hardware to fund ~2/3 of a slightly janky using older retired data center GPUs. It'd be a helluva thing to go from 24gb to 128gb VRAM with GPUs of an older architecture but a commensurate speed!

You may wonder why.

Strata is amazing but it parallelizes for shit. One request at a time: terrific! Two is not so good. Just forget about 3 or more. That overhead of the bandwidth differences between VRAM, PCIe, RAM, and SSD catch up with you quickly. Any of those mediums gets clogged up and the whole machine slows down fast.

Now, if you get that whole machine into VRAM? LLM goes BBBBBRRRR! Think parallelizing 4 requests (or more) with *better* performance per request than Strata. That would be 4 requests just as capable as my currently sole agent.

It would also be about 3x the electricity. And idle at about 5x the electricity...so there is that.

This is all the while AVOIDING cloud-hosted models that certainly collects my data. Instead, I own the data. And that data goes into the machine to make it more capable (so long as it doesn't poison itself by creating bad examples that would hurt the feedback loop) and more aligned with my perspectives.

DISCLAIMER: if you are inclined to attack or criticize my use of self-hosted AI, please don't bother. You will only serve to aggravate yourself and maybe me. I've reflected deeply on my choices here and their moral implications. I'm not going to argue about them with some rando. However, if you wish to engage in a *civil* philosophical discourse, I am *always* open to this.

After years of disillusionment and depression, I've come back to seeing how technology, wielded responsibly, can still be a force for good. At some point, optimism has to be a choice—not chosen blindly but partly because the alternative is so much more agonizing. I can't live that way anymore.

#ai #LLM #strata #piagent #qwen3_8 #qwen

Why oh why do I have to go deepest into my special interests late at night?

When I'm not utterly exhausted (yet sometimes when I'm damn near), late at night, I get a second wind, I get into hyperfocus, and next I know it's 4am, I'm still not sleepy, and I'm in flow state doing my thing.

fuuuuuuck.

#actuallyaudhd #actuallyautistic

So this whole OpenAI Dot thing: I literally have "Dot" at home: It's called Hermes Agent. It's open source. It's entirely configurable. It can do pretty much anything that a "Dot" can without all of that OpenAI proprietary BS. I self-host my own AI. Personal stuff stays personal.

Granted, I'm riding on the shoulders of some of the biggest thieves in the world who are in the process of upending economies and employment worldwide...

I'll just come out and admit it: I'm fascinated by contemporary AI. It's an #actuallyautistic special interest for me now. I get it.

I'm just starting to get serious about the underlying academics, after not having touched the space seriously since 1995 in UVA's fourth year Artificial Intelligence class. Things have changed just a little since then.

Love this shirt #StarTrek

Cable management #startrekmemes

He is cooking my hand slowly #caturday

I'm in trouble. Send help. #caturday

Lately, I've realized that, once again, I've been pushing myself so hard that I've let slip much of my hard won interroception from these past few years.

For decades, I would get angry. But it wasn't "anger". Yes, it was often an emotional reaction to a violation or injustice. What separates it from what what #neurotypical people experience is this: that anger, that rage,**would not subside, even when the situation was satisfactorily resolved.**

This is a hallmark of what is (infantilizingly) called an "autistic meltdown". For us #actuallyaudhd #actuallyautistic people, when overwhelmed with stimulus, the nervous system dysregulates, often wildly. The reaction is usually either explosive or implosive.

#Neurotypical folks can perhaps relate to this as "fight or freeze". Interestingly, I don't hear about "flight" as a typical reaction. In the face of meltdown/shutdown, flight requires rational thought. Meltdowns/shutdowns leave rational thought mostly unavailable.

When meltdown/shutdown is the baseline, I think our nervous systems deliberately try to tune out the early warnings—the finer grain signals. But, also, I'm fairly sure that, genetically, we're predisposed not to receive those signals. For instance, I seem to have a higher than average pain tolerance. We are both hyper and hypo sensitive but along different and unpredictable axis. "If you've met one autistic person then you've met one autistic person": we each have our own distinct sensitivities.

Cacophony rapidly shoves me toward meltdowns. The more stressed I am, physically or mentally, the more that unpredictable, shrill, and/or irregular noises set me off. For instance, I like coffee shops because I enjoy being *around* people sometimes. I also fucking hate coffee shops; the louder the susurrus, the faster it wears me down until I leave in a near-meltdown/rage. A busy restaurant can be agonizing.

And that's just my hearing!

But I'm especially auditory in my sensitivities. I adapted, years ago, by almost always wearing headphones and cranking up *my* music, sometimes with background brown noise, to drown out the madness around me. Controlled noise is better than cacophony.

I'm sure some #neurotypical people reading this are thinking, "Yeah, I sometimes feel like that." Trust me: not like this—or maybe you're also undiagnosed #autistic.

I was only diagnosed at the youthful age of 51, after all.

So when I push myself hard enough for long enough, I don't feel my nervous system straining: I just get **ANGRY**. I wouldn't realize how I was hurting. I wouldn't realize I was hurting. I would just go straight to **RAGE**.

It's a bad life. I won't live that way any more. It's why I've spent years understanding where my *actual limitations* are, instead of my former "doing my best" that left me psychologically/neurologically (in terms of strain) bleeding almost daily.