I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • Back in the day, I worked in the corporate office for a retail clothing chain (IT department, so not down in the weeds), and I can’t speak for H&M like you gave as an example, but for the one I worked for we didn’t design anything.

    We had a department of people called “buyers” who would work with various clothing vendors directly and wholesale bulk-purchase items for the stores. Their job was to basically figure out what was in style, what would sell, in which of our markets it would sell, and order them to stock in the stores. Not all stores carried the same styles/designs/whatever. e.g. We stocked college sports apparel only in markets near those colleges, our stores in warmer regions rarely carried winter apparel that we normally stocked in colder regions, etc.






  • I suppose I’m afraid that having a dog myself would be like a magnet for other dogs while on walks that I might be uncomfortable with or that my being nervous could make a normal meet and greet go poorly.

    Yes. Also, your dog will pick up on your nervousness and either get nervous themselves or become defensive, neither of which are ideal and could make for a bad situation if you’re ever at a park or out for a walk. Dogs are little copycats when it comes to mirroring their owner’s anxieties and behaviors, and even if you deal with your anxiety, the dog may have adopted it in the mean time and you’d have to work to repair that damage.

    Basically, you’re smart to be asking these questions before taking on the responsibility of adoption. I’d recommend waiting until you’ve worked out your issues before potentially passing them on to your four-legged friend.


  • I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

    Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

    Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.






  • That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

    These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.




  • Disclaimer: : All of my LLM experience is with local models in Ollama on extremely modest hardware (an old laptop with NVidia graphics) , so I can’t speak for the technical reasons the context window isn’t infinite or at least larger on the big player’s models. My understanding is that the context window is basically its short term memory. In humans, short term memory is also fairly limited in capacity. But unlike humans, the LLM can’t really see (or hold) the big picture in its mind.

    But yeah, all you said is correct. Expanding on that, if you try to get it to generate something long-form, such as a novel, it’s basically just generating infinite chapters using the previous chapter (or as much of the history fits into its context window) as reference for the next. This means, at minimum, it’s going to be full of plot holes and will never reach a conclusion unless explicitly directed to wrap things up. And, again, given the limited context window, the ending will be full of plot holes and essentially based only on the previous chapter or two.

    It’s funny because I recently found an old backup drive from high school with some half-written Jurassic Park fan fiction on it, so I tasked an LLM with fleshing it out, mostly for shits and giggles. The result is pure slop that seems like it’s building to something and ultimately goes nowhere. The other funny thing is that it reads almost exactly like a season of Camp Cretaceous / Chaos Theory (the animated kids JP series) and I now fully believe those are also LLM-generated.