Yodeller

Privacy is big thing these days when it feels like every other service is just trying to harvest your data instead of just serving you. Their product is just a tool to get you hand over that data and the real product is you.

This has led to some people being extremely conscious of their privacy, even with the services that don't necessary collect their data. Or at least intend to sell it. Of course there is also the "traditional" privacy of being concerned who can access your data in the first place. Especially for the more personal and sensitive things.

In our company we try to respect the privacy of our employees. But this often leads to conflicts especially with the security related matters. People don't like to be monitored, but ensuring security there needs to be certain level of monitoring still in place.

Company provided tools and services can't be assumed to be private in the same level as privately used ones. After all they are company provided and intended for people to be able to do their jobs. We don't have strict policies against using company provided tools for private things as long as certain caution is being taken care of. But that freedom comes with the price of privacy.

While deploying our internal A.I. service I have been looking for GPU options to speed up the local models I want to enable as an option along the premium services. There are definitely no shortage of options, but they all come with quite hefty price tag.

There are turnkey solutions where tou can just select a model and deploy it to the cloud without worrying the underlying infrastructure. The ease sure comes with a price. These were the first options I ruled out. There are also middle ground options where you still need to take care of some of the infrastructure that are somewhat cheaper.

Going with the cheapest option does require quite a lot of work getting the setup right, but the benefit will be the savings from the running costs. It also enables running more models when you can actually run those on the same instance instead of having an individual instance for each model.

Setting such custom solution takes it's own time. So to not to delay the release of the service the local models feature have to be postponed, or launces with much slower CPU interference.

As foretold the new Dune prequel series' first episode was just released. Even though the episodes will be released one at the time a week apart I couldn't resist watching the first episode right away.

It's too early to judge the series based on just one episode. The first one in a series is always a bit slow start. Setting the background, introducing the characters and setting the foundations of the main plot(s) takes time.

The series is loosely based on (one of) the prequel trilogies written by Frank Herberts son Brian. After reading the two sequels written by him to the original series I haven't read any of those prequels so I can't really say how well this series complies with the source materials.

The one thing I did notice is that they didn't once reference the war against the sentient machines by it's name. Maybe it's one of those copyright things when the producers don't own rights to all the materials, or maybe it's just to save the viewers from some additional obscure names which there are already enough now. It could also be due to the current trend of trying to avoid certain sensitive words, like the jihad in the Butlerian Jihad which apparently has ended up in the banned words list.

Since I have been cooking mostly for myself I tend to plan my weekly menu at once. That way I don't have to do groceries so often. Cooking for one means there is usually food for several days at once, so it's not really that many dishes I need to come up.

The problem is sometimes a food lasts for two days, other times three. That combined with the short expiry dates of some products can lead to situations where I still have food left, but need to already prepare the next one so the ingredients don't expire.

For example today I still had food from Friday left that would have been enough for the day. But the meat I had reserved for the next one had to be used today.

Couple of days ago there was an ad hoc inquiry whether anyone would be interested playing some boardgames today in our playgroups chat. There were few interested (as usual) and a couple of games suggested as well. I also suggested a game I just recently got, given that I have enough time to get familiar with the rules.

My suggestion got some interest, so I had to start going through the rules. The game isn't the most simplest, especially with it's extensive campaign mode rules. Luckily it also has a single scenario mode which skips a lot of those rules and I only had ro focus on actual gameplay rules and how to setup such single scenario play.

Having played a lot of boardgames it wasn't that impossible task. Many of the mechanisms were quite familiar from other games. But the challenge comes when the rules are quite, but not exactly like in some other game. For example the quote common ruling in these type of games is how to determine the line of sight (LoS). It's usually rather simple, but there are however differences how to determine the LoS. In this particular game an interesting detail was that it matters which way the enemies are facing. They do have different sight range depending whether it's to the direction they are facing, to the back or to the sides.

Anyway, after a rigorous study I only had to double check a few rules details during our playthrough.

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