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For a real trip down memory lane, here's how "mods" were installed for phpBB: https://github.com/MapBBCode/mapbb-phpbb2/blob/master/1_0_to...

You'd download a mod that contained installation instructions like the above, fire up your code editor of choice and then would manually change the source code of phpBB.

Later on, automated mod installers started being somewhat reliable, but especially if you had multiple mods touching similar parts of the codebase you had to learn how to adjust the instructions.

I don't really miss these times, but I did learn a lot about PHP through it.


That's sort of similar to how modding in the Witcher 3 works. The scripting is distributed with the game itself and compiled during launch, which is great in terms of how much stuff is easily moddable, but a complete nightmare in terms of how the mods have to deal with conflicts. I had a double take when I saw that one of the common tools people use to deal with it literally bundles in kdiff3 and opens it up with merge conflicts to solve.

Don't pick the wrong side of the merge or your save game might be completely broken 40 hours from now!

This was literally my first experience of programming. Applying phpBB mods. We have lost the ancient texts.

While not my technical first, it was the first of real consequence for me as well.

And then I got so frustrated that I went to write my own forum software! And showed it to my friend, who promptly showed me how badly I understood security by posting as me.


I used to spend hours just adding mods to random boards that i would just delete later on.

No no, not "mods". The phpbb people were always weirdly militant about calling them them MODS, uppercase.

Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.


At the discounted rates, upgrading from 3 Flash to 3.7 Flash is finally reasonable.

In my evals 3.6 Flash (pre price change) was usually a bit more token efficient than 3 Flash, so I‘m expecting same or even lower cost-per-task on 3.7.

Maybe a play by Google to deprecate 3 Flash soon.


The timeline OpenAI wants to present looks like this to me:

- Leaving employee (LE) needs a USB stick to copy data off their Mac to give to their Manager (MA) so someone at Apple still has access

- After LE left, MA has access to LE Mac and iCloud to still access some data

- At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account on that Mac as they suspect they'll get OpenAI-related messages soon and don't want Apple/MA to see them

- Eventually, MA deletes the Apple files in LE's iCloud


Granted, Apple does do this weird thing where you're invited to use your personal iCloud (/Apple) account for work-related things (I suspect because they're just bad at supporting multiple accounts simultaneously). As part of the deal, your iCloud account gets upgraded during your employment.

But they're also quite explicit and repeat the directive (including during the exit interview) about removing Apple files from your account when you leave, and logging out of iCloud from the Apple devices you leave behind.

Also:

> At some point, LE asks MA to sign out off LE's iMessage account

You can sign out remotely, so this would've been stupid of everyone involved.

Then again, this whole situation demonstrates a level of stupidity from supposedly competent people that I wish I could say was unbelievable. Add "Making a public post about a topic under litigation" under that category too.


That's not just weird, that's completely ridiculous for the most valuable public US company.

And it gets more ridiculous when you realise Apple makes the software, the hardware, the OS, and the cloud services.

I... really question the rationale here.


Nit-but Apple has fallen to Nvidia and Alphabet, which is a sign of the times.


From what I saw, it's been leapfrogging for the past few weeks. Even if Apple is currently behind them, I don't think it's particularly fair to say it's "fallen to" them.


> I... really question the rationale here.

occam's razor...


Do you mean hanlon’s razor?


They did recently add the iCloud@Work compartment (right before I left), and it seemed like an OK compromise and kosher policy-wise.


Funny to hear that even Apple themself struggle with that. In the past it's been such a PITA for us to decide whether employees can use private account or shall use company apple ids. As we have a pretty lax policy, most of them use their private accounts to have iCloud sync or to simply access purchased apps but having a simple way for dual account usage would be too easy i guess.


Apple's always been ambivalent about big-E enterprise support.

Probably a Jobs-era vibe about work-life unification.


I am actually confused why creating an email john.doe@apple.com and separated employees work only iCloud on the email is such a problem and they want people to use personal iCloud? Not even corporate stuck in 90s does that.


If you remotely sign out, then when you delete the Apple IP files on the device, they aren't deleted off iCloud.

So it's plausible they wanted MA to check for and delete the files first, then sign out.


I wonder how deep this integration goes. I’d never want to use my personal accounts for proprietary work items. Just seems like a recipe for disaster. Also, removing a latop from iCloud doesn’t delete the imessage data already on the device.


Wait until you want to convert the UG to a GmbH and realize that it's not simple or cheap at all.

It's not enough to have had properly filed tax returns every year, have a large enough profit-collection-line item in your books (25k EUR+) and then fill out a form.

No, if you want to use the profit your UG was required to accrue to raise your capital stock to 25k and rename it to a GmbH you need to get your annual accounts audited.

Or alternatively, you can pay in the difference between your current capital stock (e.g. 2k) and the 25k minimum for the UG and then rename the company and "just" have to pay for the notary, publishing to public records, court, ...


Yes indeed.

We converted Freshflow into a GmbH and needless to say it was expensive.


I'm enjoying tracking the local wildlife with my bird listening station.

There's also an excellent alternative to BirdNet-Pi that runs well on non-Raspberry-Pi machines: https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go


Birdnet-go is really good and actively maintained. Shout out to tphakala.


Even in the commercial space, there’s a lack of production grade ASR APIs that support diarization and word level timestamps.

My experiences with Google’s Chirp have been horrendous, with it sometimes skipping sections of speech entirely, hallucinating speech where the audio contains noise, and unreliable word level timestamps. And this all is even with using their new audio prefiltering feature.

AWS works slightly better, but also has trouble with keeping word level timestamps in sync.

Whisper is nice but hallucinates regularly.

OpenAI’s new transcription models are delivering accurate output but do not support word level timestamps…

A lot of this could be worked around by sending the resulting transcripts through a few layers of post processing, but… I just want to pay for an API that is reliable and saves me from doing all that work.


I wonder if you could run multiple models and average out the timestamps, kind of like how atomic clocks are used together and not separately


Isn't Elevenlabs the best in this?


They can have issues with the timestamps: https://github.com/elevenlabs/elevenlabs-python/issues/707


I've not tested their speech-to-text yet, but based on the docs it looks promising. Thanks for the suggestion!


It's fantastic, and their diarization is spot on as well.


I’ve found CIS Controls v8.1 to be good and sane, with actual benefits to security. Level 1 is a solid base, and Level 2 is good for picking from depending on where risks exist in your business.

CIS Benchmarks are worth a look too: They’re best practices for securing typical cloud platforms, SaaS and OS.


Can you write a bit more about your workflow? I've been thinking about doing the same, but since I'm very non-interior-design minded have struggled to ask the right things.

Like... What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos? Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?

Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?


I started with sketchup to make basic floor plans and house shapes. I had a rough idea of the style of the home. I picked "Transitional English Estate" since the build site is out on a farm that sorta looks like the Cotswolds. I used AI in this process to get rough renders and feedback on the floorplan. I then took that basic floorplan and house dimensions to a Draftsman who did a lot of tweaking to get it up to code and fix issues. I got his plans and took it to a Sketchup Pro on Fivver . They made a detailed sketchup model. I then took that model and took screenshots from different perspectives and tweaked the prompt to get renders I liked. These changes were reencorprated into the blueprints. I did the same thing with the interior. Took screenshots from sketchup and put them into AI and tweaked the prompt. https://imgur.com/a/lSIYTYr


super interesting - can you share some of the other elements. screenshots of the sketchup model, the AI image output, etc?

would you recommend this workflow to others, or just noting that it is what you did? any regrets, road blocks, frustrations?

a ball park price would also be interesting: total cost of sketchup license + ai token cost + fivver modeler + draftsman etc. I assume under $1k?


$20k for permit-ready building docs.


Mine was far more lightweight, but u just uploaded pics of my yard and prompted manually a bunch of times. Sometimes id find reference images to give as context, draw on the image to call out specific areas, etc.

It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.


Have you by any chance tried this with GPT 4.1 too (also 1M context)?


We had intense aurora in Berlin, Germany. Green clouds dancing in the sky levels. Started around 22:10 local time or a bit earlier, and at this point there's only a faint red/green glow remaining.


Yeah, there were auroras even as far south as Munich. Maybe not as intense, but it's the first aurora I ever saw, so I can't really judge...


I am south-west of Munich and with a perfect clear sky I could only see stars, one meteor, and that's it.


It was visible in the 22:00-23:00 time window. Here in the south west, the sky started turning green around 22:30.


We also had them in Grenoble, south of France.


Can confirm, I've seen pink/green glow over Berlin Sky (and pictures as well)


Just spend an hour outsite (Northern Germany, 01:00 MET). Unfortunately nothing to report, neither visual nor on camera. Maybe I just went to late and missed the show. I hope you habe more luck in Canada and the US!


I'm Berlin was around 22-23 o'clock visible


It's pretty subtle right now here in NL but I can still see it with the naked eye. Mostly greenish haze that fades in and out.


ahh I just went outside (south of Utrecht) and saw nothing. Maybe too much light pollution.


I'm lucky in that I was close to the IJsselmeer.


I was just out at a dog park and saw nothing! We have clear skies. I can't believe I missed this.


Next time take a long exposure picture with your phone. You might be able to see it that way.


Also seen in the Netherlands!


I tought I was seeing aurora borealis here at 4 am local time in the neighboring Grand Duchy of Luxemburg but it was just visual pollution due to lights from a city.


Could you see it from the inner city or only closer to the edges?


Friends who live in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain could see it pretty well. I'm a bit further south within Berlin where skies are minimally darker, but between 10pm and 11pm it was so bright that light pollution didn't matter.

Funnily enough, despite having lots of alerts set up it was my mom who texted me from northern Brandenburg as she spotted it after getting an alert from RegenRadar, of all apps...


It's amazing to hear it's visible in such a big city. I don't have a good intuition for all the metrics that describe how strong this storm was/is, but when put like this it hits home.

Nice to hear earth weather apps also work great in space haha. I'll keep that in mind when I set up my own notifications. Hopefully I have time to look into it before the next storm hits.


Saw it in Fhain as well over Ostkreuz station


Oh really? Oh no I missed it! Is it going to happen again today?


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