I haven’t had a chance to use it for code yet but now that Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro came out I started throwing side by side queries at both and Gemini has been consistently more accurate and useful. A bit of a shame because I find Gemini’s style to be a bit annoying.

From what I've read and heard Gemini is the superior model but Claude Code is the better tool.

If it was so lucrative, wouldn’t more people set up shop undercutting the current offerings? Why not become an HVAC installer and make millions, if you’re really able to make $15k profit on a job you can turn out in a day.

The truth is probably more that the various money sinks in our society are starting to add up, things like healthcare, legal protection, licensure, compliance, rent (business or personal), even just having appropriate work vehicles, fueling them, compensating people for the time spent sitting in traffic to come across town to your house. Somehow you’re paying for all of that when someone’s livelihood is installing your mini split. A lot of those costs have grown faster than wages, if you try to point to a reason why it’s different today than 20 years ago. More people looking to make a quick buck without doing any work or providing any real value, and more people succeeding.

In my state (OR) it takes 4 years to become licensed to do the work for others but homeowners can do the work themselves.

My experience is that it’s not generally well understood how simple it is to install mini splits. The supply companies won’t sell to you directly outside of d2c web companies like hvacdirect

My state has a program where they give you big rebates but only if you use some one on their list of approved installers and since there aren't many installers it creates a big backlog. Homeowners who could install them themselves miss out on the rebate.

In Seattle, installing AC requires a refrigeration permit, which requires a refrigeration contractor license to pull and a licensed HVAC tech to install, which takes 4+ years of training.

For what it’s worth, the original ESP32 is actually 5V tolerant, semi-officially acknowledged by Espressif. Good enough for hobby projects, anyway

I'm surprised cheap level shifters with the same pin pitch as various dev boards aren't common.

There's DIP-packaged level shifters that are 0.1"

Do you know where you can get one?

Be a little careful on those. It depends on what you're doing. Some of them are not suited to be used with the high data rates for I2C, or I2C only at 100khz. I found out the hard way with some of the SparkFun level shifters, years back.

You need to do a little research. It will usually tell in the spec sheet. Which is why the Arduino is useful. You don't have to buy a level shifter. You don't have to read a level shifter spec sheet.

And a lot of dev boards you will use as a hobbyist even include level shifters on the board, so you will have a 5V pin.

We haven’t been asleep. We’ve been saying no at every turn. But they’re using propaganda, and they will continue until something sticks. It’s an endless fight and we are losing, despite our efforts.

For the same reason people see movies in theaters now, even when there’s day-in-day streaming releases right? It’s a social experience and there’s plenty of demand for that.

It already is- to some extent. I see a ton of TikToks on friends feeds that are scenes from the TV show Friends but they’ve generated video of baby versions of each character to say the lines. I haven’t seen them replace the audio but you could imagine that being a next step whenever they hit copyright trouble. The worst part is that I’ve asked why they like them, they say the babies are cute and they know/love the scenes so it’s all good.

It does feel like it must be the engagement version of junk food, though.

“The algorithm” knows perfectly well what you want to watch. So it seems inevitable to me that eventually “the algorithm” just generates an endless stream of content fine tuned to you.

I believe if you have a financial incentive not to release source / binaries then that’s a good financial incentive to keep the servers up. If such a mandate doesn’t result in actually releasing anything but instead properly incentivizes the right behavior, I’d still say the movement had won.

Yes, I suggest they divulge the intellectual property. Games are an art form similar to paintings or music, and we as a society should be able to experience previous art.

Keep the IP while you run the servers and sell the game, when you are no longer interested in running the servers, drop a tarball of code. It doesn’t need to be simple, it just needs to be possible and complete. The community can take care of it. If the IP is valuable, then you have your incentive to keep the game playable until it isn’t valuable to you.

There can be a lot of interwoven licensing with games. fmod, speedtree, SDK terms, music... you can't just open source it in most cases and call it good.

The more I dig into systemd the more I like how it works. Are there still problems popping up with systemd? Anecdotally, I had a couple user-facing problems that were caused by PulseAudio but never systemd actually being broken.

No I've never had any issues with it. It is so much faster and better for me and my usecases that I don't grasp any of the arguments.

But I also never had any issues with Pulse so I don't ever want to discount other peoples experiences.

SD Express is fundamentally PCIe + NVMe in a different package, so the technology is prepared to hit incredible speeds when the fastest flash gets physically small and efficient enough to fit.

But I assume there is controller, power and heat limitations. You can only fit so many NAND package within an SD Card which limits its speed. Then higher speed SSD also has power / heat issues. And with that limitation I am thinking of reliability compared to M2 SSD.