Stonking is British slang for large/huge/etc. For example, "Labour won by a stonking majority."

Some of the things that annoy me re: snaps are:

1. the update process is separate from the main system update -- "close this program to update, or will forceably update in X days" notifications;

2. breaking desktop file links where an update can create a duplicate file and after the old snap is removed it removes your pins to the taskbar;

3. possibly breaking other things due to the way the snap directory for the app is not stable.

Just like with L Ron Hubbard's work being a foundation for Scientology.

My Immortal?

No, Brockton's Celestial Forge for example, a true masterpiece in excessive verbosity and meandering writing which makes The Silmarillion look like a riveting and concise short novel.

Yeah, it also suffers from the over-powered protagonist trope found in a lot of fanfics. It has good elements (of what I've read thus far). I think the story could have been better if it focused on a few crossovers and technologies instead of going "here's a completely unrelated power/ability from a new setting", but the premise (earning rewards for writing that result in random abilities from different franchises) doesn't really lend itself to that.

Like, you could still have the different members of the forge and lean into a single source of the tech. Warhammer 40K could fit, given Tetra and some of the initial abilities/power. So you could keep most/a lot of the summit meeting events.

To the author credit I remember the 40k words climax sequence of confronting March was really good and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time.

The Silmarillion is riveting and concise! I will grant that it's not a novel.

A fanfiction where the author gives the main character good boy points for writing more words is kind of the extreme end of this, though. Web serials and fanfiction tend to be overly verbose and meandering, and the Methods of Rationality is very much on the less verbose side of them, but by the standards of traditionally published fantasy and sci-fi it is wordslop.

If you're looking for a job without a stable source of income every expenditure matters. You need to cover essentials -- rent/mortgage, clothing, food, utilities, etc. Those give you a baseline burnthough rate: how long you can survive on just your savings. Any additional expense decreases that and makes it harder to build back up if doing things like saving for a house.

Exactly, I canceled my $20/mo Emby subscription the morning after I lost my job.

The Cask of Amontillado is great for that. And the classic poem The Raven describes existential dread so well.

I found with King the scarier aspects were the more mundane and psychological parts of his writing. I also found in some cases the adaptations to be better in some ways -- The Shawshank Redemption adaptation is great. And the poem in the TV adaptation of The Tommy Knockers felt more impactful than the one in the book.

Over time I've come to find a balance between something like tailwind/FCSS (one class per CSS style) and Bootstrap (classes reflect components).

Specifically:

1. provide a baseline of default styling on the HTML elements/attributes;

2. provide a set of classes for different layouts: grid, flex, masonry, etc.;

3. provide combinations of styles on the different elements: ol.flex/ul.flex removing the list type and padding, dl.grid providing a grid-style display list, etc.;

4. provide helpers to combine with the base classes or elements: flex.vertical to control orientation; flex.wrap/grid.wrap to wrap the layouts; *.centered for centered text; etc.

For local projects I'm using a repo per module/package, creating tagged releases, and pushing them to a local package hosting server. I can then reference those artifacts as dependencies in the projects that need/use them. No need for complex CI pulls, just coordinated releases.

I also have a template repository I use to help with common setup for different project types so I don't need to repeat that every time I create a new project.

For Python it's easy to create an artifact server as the artifacts are just wheel files in a directory with the server listing the directories (packages), files (releases), and downloading the files.

I'm not sure about other artifact servers for other projects.

The current approach of the big companies is to keep increasing the number of parameters (there was a report that recent Claude models are on the 4T parameter scale). Even recent SOTA open weight models are in the 1T-2T range.

This is partly due to the multiplicative scaling factor -- the number of tokens; the number of transformer layers; the number of features; etc.

I suspect that for models to have a step upgrade either/both of 1) a new/improved architecture model; and 2) better training of smaller parameter models are needed. I say the latter as I think that with the larger weights there is a lot of unused/redundant parameters.

There are also several issues at play here:

1. a model that works for one person/task may not work for another;

2. there are many models (DeepSeek, Qwen, GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) that are released every 6 months or so;

3. it takes time to use, test, and evaluate the suitability of a new model and not everyone has an automated evaluation process for their use cases.

Thus, if you find a model that works for you then you are not going to spend more time evaluating a model that may not work, or may only do so when time permits.

I'm pretty happy with claude $20/mo for personal, and $200/mo at work. It does everything I need it to, at a price that I can aaccept. If they raise the price, then I'll start looking around at the other options. I do not like Altman or Musk, and I don't want to get involved with China, so I'd rather avoid those products. But I do know that prices will have to increase at some point, so I'm still hand-coding a few projects to keep my skill level up should LLMs just not be affordable in the future.