> I was fighting deadlocks in some Java code this week

Why? You have java.util.concurrent; you should never see a deadlock. You might see a performance degradation or maybe even livelock, but that's very, very, very rare.

What abjectly idiotic thing is in your Java codebase such that you have deadlocks?

> The models are nondeterministic, and therefore it's pretty normal for different runs to give different results.

And how is that an excuse?

I don't care about how good a model could be. I care about how good a model was on my run.

Consequently, my opinion on a model is going to be based around its worst performance, not its best.

As such, this qualifies as strong evidence that Opus 4.6 has gotten worse.

> I really wish AMD and Intel boards get replaced by competent people.

Intel? Agreed. But AMD is making money hand over fist with enterprise AI stuff.

Right now, any effort that AMD or NVIDIA expend on the consumer sector is a waste of money that they could be spending making 10x more at the enterprise level on AI.

How is the cleanup with DrinkMate? Washing everything was my primary problem with SodaStream.

> The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.

This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?

Electric heating does reduce the risk of fire, yes, and some of us do it. (It’s also just a lot easier than a turkey fryer.) I rigged a water heater element up for this purpose.

(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)

The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.

But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.

> Like tenish gallons (~40L).

Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon.

Thanks for the info.

Yeah, the thing is as you distill you’re saving it bit by bit as you go along. You toss out the very first stuff (called foreshots) because it contains a number of chemicals with lower boiling points you don’t want (methanol, acetone, etc.) in higher concentration.

Then you get the heads, hearts, and tails and blend them together according to taste. You just wouldn’t get much separation if you distilled a small amount unless you were collecting in really tiny quantities.

So it just becomes harder to do a good job with a small amount.

> Will RISC-V end up with the same (or even worse) platform fragmentation as ARM?

Sadly, yes. RISC-V vendors are repeating literally every single mistake that the ARM ecosystem made and then making even dumber ones.

Please elaborate.

> In any build system, I think the distinction between “cross” and “non-cross” compilation is an anti-pattern.

This is one of the huge wins of Zig. Any Zig host compiler can produce output for any supported target. Cross compiling becomes straightforward.

> I just couldn’t gamble my vision on the outcome of LASIK.

Perfectly reasonable. However, do know that modern versions of the procedure are way better at identifying the people who are likely to have problems.

However, even if the odds are 1 in 10,000, there is always a "1".

Apple does the same thing with iCloud. I had to go through a lot of hoops to get my wife's photos back down locally on the computer.

Apple also by default backs up your apps to the cloud.

But it backs up the WHOLE package / folder / whatever terminology they use, including cached and redownloadable data. So if you have a game that has 10GB of cached data, it WILL upload that. Edge for me was >3GB.

And then they have the following user-hostile 'features':

    1. They offer a paltry 5GB. Hasn't changed since inception, but app sizes have ... tripped? I have 2GB of health data now. 
    2. They don't tell you that you're backing up data that can be retrieved elsewhere.
    3. The popup when storage is full shows only 'buy more' or ignore (no link/mention to disable individual app like described above)
    4. No way to backup to a NAS
    5. No way to backup to a computer automatically. You have to provide you passcode every time.

The Apple backup strategy is purposefully broken. I’m already paying for 50GB of iCloud and it often claims that it cannot backup my iPhone despite having multiple gigabytes free. It turns that that during the backup process it operates on a file level, so if you happen to have a large file it will require both copies of the file to fit within your storage limit before the backup can complete. And guess what, several third party apps I use store all their data in a single multi-gigabyte SQLite database that’s written to every day.

As for cached and downloadable data, I have long ago turned off backups for many apps where the data is stored on a server anyways. Backing up these apps never makes any sense.

That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.

> That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.

While it's the app developers that need to make the change, it should be enforced by Apple. After all, that's why there is a walled garden, and that is the premium we pay for when using Apple.

But for Apple to enforce this means less popups on screens telling people that storage is full, which means less sales.

And again, we get to Goodhart's law.

> maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also.

If they're on Office 365, they could be on Linux.

The browser version of excel is vastly inferior for power users

Or winapps/cassowary/<latest tool>

I try to use libreoffice when possible but sometimes the performance takes a nosedive for opaque reasons when excel is ok

Every time I try to edit my cv containing many disconnected tables I want to scream from the frustration.

In Ms Office it's always the breeze and 2 minute job. In Libre office it's 15 at least, multiple fights with pages suddenly breaking, cells and rows refusing to stick to my dimensions or something perfectly fine in the print preview lose edges of the cells (ie missing letter, etc) when actually on paper/pdf.

Infuriating.

And I didn't even started about printing in Linux. What works in android ootb didn't consistently work for me across two distributions, several years and many versions. Papercut is the worst but cups is close second.