Can't decide if I'm nostalgic or a hoarder.

Apparently I'm old, regardless.

About to delete ~2TB of data.

I need a fresh start. I'm a data hoarder.

About to wipe my drives and start over. I've had this piticular instance since I was 17 (I'm 21)

I'm sticking with windows though, because my games wont run on linux.

So someone asked me to destroy his hard-drive...

Probably the most rage inducing data loss story...
When it comes to my cellphone I'm a data hoarder, I store each relevant meme, conversation, video, contact, nudes, etc. Had to replace my phone? Easy, change the SD.

I did this for about 4 years, had over 11GB of almost everything and anything in a 36GB SD, one afternoon my buddies and I went to a small tech convention and on our way to my car we got mugged by 5 armed men.

They took my brand new phone along with my wallet and all my cash, luckily I had GPS tracking enabled and we were able to pinpoint the exact location of my phone within 30min.

So far so good...

We called the cops and went with them, we found the car with illegal plates and weapons inside (knives, a bat, gun) so I tell the robbers were in there inside a closed cyber cafe and showed him the point on the map confirming this.

Cop: oh we can't do that we don't have an order...
Me: are you kidding me, here's the GPS, there's the car, there's the weapons, doesnt that count as at least probable cause or some shit?
Cop: we don't have that in this country, you can file a report and after 3 business days we can come here to inquire.
Me: (fucking lost it) do you fucking think they'll be here in 3 days?! I'll give you 500 bucks if you go bust their ass now.
Cop: (thinks about it) but what if they are armed? [4 patrols, 8 cops, 4 rifles and at least 6 guns plus vests] Maybe if you had contacts within the bureau we could have an order now...

(┛✧Д✧))┛彡┻━┻

I lost a lot that day, including respect to this fucked up system.

t(ಠ益ಠt) FUCK THE POLICE go eat a dick.

I feel like a e-hoarder, I keep tabs and sublime windows open and worry about closing them as they might contain important code...
FML

So... the US Govt. just released a shit ton of files on JFK assasination, and being the data hoarder that I am, I promptly requested a bulk download link...
Apparently I underestimated the "shit ton" part, coz each of these files is around 2.4GBs... and I dont have the data to download them :-D :-D
FML

So there was that paranoid schizophrenic person, a blonde girl with a buzz cut, and somehow she was a friend of mine. She used a Linux distro called “!!!!!!!!____!!!!!”, and convinced me it was the best distro out there. But the way she used it was… very specific.

She called me. She told me the new distro was out, this time it was called “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, and _this_ was the best one. It finally allowed her to observe the area around her neighbourhood right from her PC, through some app, and make pits in the ground. It was done with a touchscreen of a Nintendo DSi connected to her PC with something that looked like an IDE cable. You touch the area of the screen, and the pit will appear outside IRL. This was needed to trap swine-looking creatures in those pits, as they infested the land and were attacking people in packs, turning them into dirty, greyish, half-transparent lumps of gel.

I went to see her, and somehow I knew exactly how it's going to end, as if I decided to replay a game level. She lived in a rotten, mouldy, dark, half-abandoned condo building. She was also a terrible hoarder. I approach the old wooden door of her flat. It was painted over 1000 times and was barely closing. She knew I would come. She rushed outside, looked at me with her moon-sized eyes, grabbed my arm and told me:
“We have to run.”

I felt a sudden crippling rush of anxiety. I woke up. My heart was absolutely racing. My sight became darker and darker. The chest pain was consuming me, and I could barely move. I almost vomited.

That was quite a night.

Current Job Title:
Hoarder Bug Exterminator
Details:
Fixing code for projects that have not been refactored ever in 20+ years.

I deleted over a petabyte worth of snapshots from AWS today.

As a data hoarder this feels like genocide.

*revving chainsaw noises*

Today I started nuking leftover project code.

At the end, some projects shrunk by roughly up to 40 % .

Can anyone explain to me why programmers have such an awful hoarding syndrome?

Why do you keep shit that might unleash complete havoc cause it hasn't been touched since years and noone knows id it still works?

It's like having a leg with gangrene and keeping it cause "it doesn't look that bad".

For fucks sake. Clean up and remove shit when it's not necessary anymore.

Reason why I did a bloody gore massacre in nearly a dozen projects... After all the rework of networking, it's finally evident which projects have a bad / nasty behaviour of "fucked up" connection handling (HTTP 1.1).

And when my gory massacre removal goes life, I think 25-35 % of persistent connections on the loadbalancers will vanish. Maybe even more, since some very nasty stuff was in some projects.

Like "let's implement monitoring without having any clue about how monitoring works and even less clues about how TCP/ HTTP works."

*Bangs devs heads on table*

Stop. Doing. Stupid. Things.

For fucks sake.

:@ :@

The next step for improving large language models (if not diffusion) is hot-encoding.

The idea is pretty straightforward:
Generate many prompts, or take many prompts as a training and validation set. Do partial inference, and find the intersection of best overall performance with least computation.

Then save the state of the network during partial inference, and use that for all subsequent inferences. Sort of like LoRa, but for inference, instead of fine-tuning.

Inference, after-all, is what matters. And there has to be some subset of prompt-based initializations of a network, that perform, regardless of the prompt, (generally) as well as a full inference step.

Likewise with diffusion, there likely exists some priors (based on the training data) that speed up reconstruction or lower the network loss, allowing us to substitute a 'snapshot' that has the correct distribution, without necessarily performing a full generation.

Another idea I had was 'semantic centering' instead of regional image labelling. The idea is to find some patch of an object within an image, and ask, for all such patches that belong to an object, what best describes the object? if it were a dog, what patch of the image is "most dog-like" etc. I could see it as being much closer to how the human brain quickly identifies objects by short-cuts. The size of such patches could be adjusted to minimize the cross-entropy of classification relative to the tested size of each patch (pixel-sized patches for example might lead to too high a training loss). Of course it might allow us to do a scattershot 'at a glance' type lookup of potential image contents, even if you get multiple categories for a single pixel, it greatly narrows the total span of categories you need to do subsequent searches for.

In other news I'm starting a new ML blackbook for various ideas. Old one is mostly outdated now, and I think I scanned it (and since buried it somewhere amongst my ten thousand other files like a digital hoarder) and lost it.

I have some other 'low-hanging fruit' type ideas for improving existing and emerging models but I'll save those for another time.

What was your nickname given to you by others? Just please, no cheating and no making things up.
I had two:
1. “Chalk” at school, because I was _very_ pale.
2. “Wonderful librarian”, given by my wife's uni friends when my wife had a class on zoom during covid, I forgot about it, casually walked into frame and kissed her. She was at my place, and my room looked like a library with all those bookshelves I had. I was a book hoarder before depression.

I regret downloading too many Photoshop brushes, gradients, actions, patterns & etc.

Purging files at the moment.

Always fun when you leave 7-zip to run overnight then you check in the morning and it says not enough disk space. Now I need to spend most of the morning getting stuff to external drives. 7-zip why couldn't you give me that error last night so I didn't become angry when I looked.

this could be the start of a short series - special moments of finding a domain

fyip.net leads to a cosmetic company website whereas i think of this being an acronym for "fuck you in particular"

iOS 14, two thoughts.

1. It manipulates people. They added app gallery and now when you try to delete app it asks you if it should rather hide it into the app gallery, exploiting your hoarder bias so you have more apps and thus more notifications if you haven't disabled them. That's a no from me.

2. It fixed a LOT of bugs and annoyances. I quit next js because of the exact same thing being important to me — they were busy doing only the new features to constantly pitch and lure investors, they never responded to issues and never fixed anything. I'm happy that Apple realizes that it's important to fix bugs.

Overall I'm happy. My iPhone X is pretty old already (87% battery capacity remaining) but it's much faster with iOS 14 than with iOS 13. The main thing is reduced latency pretty much everywhere. Especially the screenshots, I'm barely detecting the click and the screenshot is already done. No perceivable latency if you ask me. New refreshed look is amazing, backside tap actions are cool, new music app is amazing.

People tell me that apple is forcing you to buy new gadgets with updates but explain to me then WHY my old iphone X got much faster with new iOS? That's a contradiction. If I buy a new iPhone it'll be because of dead battery (that's physics and not exclusively Apple issue) or just because I want 120hz and lidar bokeh.

I can't delete stuff!

I am currently sorting through my harddrive(s) and realized I have over 800 gigabytes of raw audio and video from four of our theatre productions lying around. The films have long been edited and there is no use for the source material anymore.
But just in case, I'm keeping it. You never know...

I finally have some motivation to write some personal code... on an existing project.

(Work has been too hectic the last few months so don't want to do anymore at home...)

Anyway... I noticed that my Prime Video Tracker app doesn't pick up some of the new Movies now available on Prime, so I did some fixing.

Good News (GN): The search URL is actually static so can goto the same URL for the same search results
GN: The program can filter the movies by a Minimum # of Ratings they have (currently set to 100... use to be 10)

Bad News (BN): The number of movies in the search results is over 5000 (used to be 100-200) so even with this filter, a lot get returned.

GN: the traversal is fully automated

BN: Need to manually look at the descriptions of each and add them the Watchlist

BN: I now have 200 movies on my Watchlist and still going...

So now I have another "Infinite list". Existing ones:
-TED Talks
-NLegs
-Blinkist Read List
-Comics (sort of, I have a huge backlog for Cyanide and Happiness)
-Photos that need "post-processing"

I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting some others...