One of the easiest ways to get paid for something is to to offer commercial support once something shifts to 'end of life' for community support. Can't get off of an old busted version - write a check for continued support! This sort of thing is reasonably easy to get through the accounting process.

Leaving a tip, paying for something free, trying to send money to a group that our infrastructure absolutely relies on - stupid hard. Commercial support, on the other hand, is very understandable to the bean counters.

Ironically, this is a fantastic time to use Firefox with UBO. I made the switch back when Chrome first threatened to block UBO and it was clear they were just kicking the can. What I've come to find is most of the things with ads won't take the time to 'block' UBO on Firefox. Perhaps it is not a big enough segment to justify anti adblocking coding. Youtube seems to have given up trying to fight it. Most things just work. It has been a long time since I've needed to fire up Chrome for anything.

My grandfather used to say 'any power tool can be a sander, if you use it wrong'.

Similar experience with firefox and ublock origin. I make the cut early, when chrome was threatening to make the change originally and have had a really good experience. Many, many things just work with the ads stripped out. Youtube and other streaming services - I don't know how people can even use them without proper filtering.

The issue is so many god damn meetings. There can be days in a row where I won't see 15 minutes of uninterrupted time during core work hours. Early, late... that ends up being quiet time to do the things I have in my queue. I'll agree that most of the meetings would be a real struggle to call it something productive.

Minneapolis is about 190nm south of the fires going on in the BWCA - with help of the Canadian fires just North of Ely. Smoke had visibility at our local (KFCM) airfield at 1 mile this morning from the smoke. IFR. I got to wonder if this is going to impact the Oshkosh airshow next week... as what we would travel up is not up for that type of visibility.

Agree. The i9 went full fans as soon as I fired up docker. The arm based macs are an entirely different beast.

One of the double edge swords I see is devs/evangelists pushing agentic coding are playing the 'good enough' statement. If that is true and those asking for software can live with good enough AI code, the moment the free local models hit that level the party is over in the continual push to the premium tip of the spear models.

We might already be there. I've been running Qwen-3.6-27B with 8-bit quantization locally with llama.cpp (~100k context window), and to be honest for my use case, 40-50% of the time it is more usable than claude-code. I only have the $20/mo plan, so I often hit rate limits after 2-3 prompts. And while the local model is slower, it just keeps chugging, is practically free, and more often than not produces code similar to claude. I wouldn't be surprised if in 6-12 months we have local models which are comparable to opus 4.6...which I personally consider as a tipping point where agentic coding became practical.

Man, such a difference between a human whoops and an AI. Had a junior dev hork all environments, when the script they thought worked in nonprod... did not modify an index like they expected, they were quickly able to wipe out everything else in every environment and every data center. It was such a teachable moment. She was my very first hire when I was asked to build a team. Crazy careful with trust, but verify on things that have blast radius.

The AI? Nothing learned, I suspect. Not in a meaningful way anyhow.

And it’s not the junior’s fault when they do it either.

Have some controls in place. Don’t rely on nobody being dumb enough to do X. And that includes LLMs.

This is something I really hope can be solved.

I long for a “copilot” that can learn from me continuously such that it actually helps if I teach it what I like somehow.

And what will your role be, then?

I’m not sure what you mean? I have goals that I want to achieve; lil ai buddy comes along and helps me, over time buddy becomes better able to help me do stuff.

What do you mean role? Person who does stuff I guess, same as it is now.

Teacher.

Why you, of all the other possible teachers? Models don't need individual teachers.

Because I'm the one employing it? A model which makes a "delete production database" mistake clearly needs to be taught not to do that, and the person whose production database was deleted ought to be able to teach them not to do that. This seems quite reasonable to me.

So everyone will need to teach their models again and again not make the same mistakes? ;)

Everyone has different mistakes that are important to them, and not everyone agrees on what is a mistake. Witness how employees from FAANG often don't do well at startups, because they've been taught the wrong lessons.

I mean - you don't want to keep the unlucky people, right?