Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8hr ago
So basically it's mostly a fresh new aesthetic after a decade plus of living in various Ubuntu-based distros, with all of their advantages and annoyances and thus far, I'm finding that I like it much more than I expected I would. As I said in my previous post, just NOT having a half-baked desktop experience is actually a big win after waiting (and waiting) for Cosmic to mature. The juice has been worth the squeeze.
IMO local LLMs are a 100% waste of time compared to Fable, if you have access to Fable. Thing is freakishly smart, and solves problems Opus routinely struggles with. Which is wild because 2 months ago I was impressed with Opus, and now I'm so goddamn bummed if I run out of Fable credits and have to use Opus.
I hear you, I don't doubt you, and while there's a decent chance that I'll end up wanting to play with the big boys, eventually. It's really just that hearing so much of this sort of talk here made it easy for a local LLM to exceed my basement-level expectations of it.
Bazzite Redux
How it's going:
The good:
- BTRFS seems... fine. Only occasionally does it feel slowish and while I'm sure BTRFS itself certainly doesn't help in that department, neither does it help that my NVME drive is generic.
- HFS is it a relief to have a working goddamn desktop. Get your shit together, System 76! All of your shit! So it's together!
- Calling all AI boosters, I've had the ChatGPT moment. All of the running down of the local LLMs set some pretty low expectations for me, so I was surprised when I found lots of utility there. Yes, I'm sure it hallucinates way more often than the better online stuff, and buddy, does it like to hallucinate here and there, but it's usually blatantly obvious that it's off the reservation anyway. Yes, mode collapse can be a Thing, especially in certain situations, as can verbose mode, and yes, there are only so many tokens that can be processed locally, and yes, the token limit really sucks, comparatively speaking. But with all that said, this ain't ELIZA with extra steps, and running llms on an RTX 5080 seems to be thoroughly... mid? And I'm still more than a little shocked that I can get half-decent images out of a local instance of Stable-diffusion. I was not expecting that.
- In fact, once I got back into playing around with AI, which took a back seat both because the wife went in her own direction on her work needs and because Cyberpunk 2077, I had the most fun playing with tech that I've had this decade.
- I'm so used to Ubuntu that I keep stubbing my toes on Bazzite's immutability. This is a Good Thing because as much of a PITA as it is for me to have to set up containers so that I can run shit that demands older versions of Python (don't get me started on fucking Python) or what have you, the payoff is that I shouldn't ever run into my old normal of pretty much expecting to need a fresh OS install every time the new LTS Ubuntu drops, not to mention smegging up the OS over time with All Of The Things.
- I can run the GOG version of Cyberpunk 2077 on Bazzite/Lutris and it... just works. Score one for killing Windoze as the dominant gaming platform.
- AppImages have, thus far, also Just Worked. /me nervously knocks wood.
- I haven't succumbed to Steam's siren call.
- The learning curve wasn't anywhere near what I thought it was going to be, container conversation above notwithstanding. Did I mention fuck you, Python? I did, didn't I?
- I am (theoretically) not training anyone else's models for free.
The Bad:
- The glazing. The sycophancy. The loops of glazing>sycophancy>glazing>sycophancy ad nauseum. Not the worst thing in the world, but that's like >1 week of my life that I'll never get back at this point, not to say that it isn't occasionally fun and/or hilarious, but still.
- I should have
wasted more moneySplurged on the full 5090.
The Ugly:
- Odin help me, but I'm actually entertaining the idea of saving my shekels for a 5090 and the power supply to run it in tandem with the existing 5080. Not seriously enough to check prices just yet, mind you, but I could see it happening.
So that's my update on my original post. How are you doing, South... wait, no, that's not my line...
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21hr ago
/Me salutes you with your trenta cold foam cold brew no sprinkles with my own short whole milk cortado.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
3d ago
I'm glad you undeleted your post! In exploring my own issues with severe burnout, I stumbled upon some good information about autistic burnout myself, and I believe the criteria for autistic burnout is significant exhaustion and increased social withdrawal along with either reduction in functioning, increased executive challenges, and reduced capacity to mask/camouflage. I had all five of those symptoms in spades, and it sounds like you meet the criteria as well. I'm a lot better than I was when I was at my worst but my executive functioning still isn't what it was before, and my ability to mask/camouflage is still reduced as well. So yeah, you're not alone in experiencing this. In fact, when you talk about swinging back and forth between being more normie and being more radical socio-culturally-politically, that sounds a lot to me like reduced masking.
FWIW, and because you asked, my life is significantly different now than it was before burnout really set its teeth into me, and that's kind of the Thing. The answer to the question of, "what do you do to hold onto things," for me, is as simple as it is difficult: I literally can't hold onto All The Things anymore, and though I think that's more from burnout proper as opposed to autistic burnout specifically, the two were closely intertwined and interrelated in my case. In Showstopper!, the book about Dave Cutler and the development of Windows NT at Microsoft, there was a coder named Walt Moore who was so burned out that he spent the bulk of his time at work developing and playing pai gow poker simulations instead of doing his actual work. I identify a lot with his story, having been barely functional myself for about two and a half years, starting around October of 2021, and the long hard road back from burnout has involved a ton of learning how to really take care of myself, which in turn meant admitting my needs to myself and prioritizing giving myself the time and space to meet those needs instead of just doing without and soldiering on. At the beginning of my digging out, I was not even aware that I qualified for the spectrum, just that I was not normal, and strongly identified with being a geek/nerd and had cultivated an unconscious habit of developing assimilation behaviors, the go-along, get-along normifying stuff, at least to the extent that I didn't get myself duct taped to the flagpole. It turns out that assimilation habits/behaviors take the most out of those of us on the spectrum and are the least adaptive of our coping strategies in the long run. These in particular are things that I've had to re-examine and re-work in my life, as well as the masking/camouflaging behaviors, simply because they take too much out of me and they leave me too drained. Likewise, I've had to adopt a lot of behaviors like walking outside and journaling that help me to process my emotions because not only is that a Thing wrt ASD, but I took the possibly-traditional route of stuffing them into a closet and identifying with my executive brain instead of actually taking the time to deal with them until I hit my absolute limit and crashed and burned. My family connections have changed dramatically, my marriage may well be beyond salvageable, and being given a more focused position at work that allows me to see my progress much more clearly has, along with a growing team of fellow spectrum folk in our IT department, has been a saving grace that has kept me employed, but I could have easily lost or left my job as well. I say all this in the hopes that I've made the gravity of my own situation clear, and to hopefully encourage you to keep listening to what your instincts and intuition are telling you that you need, and to keep doing things for yourself that truly help you and sustain you in life, instead of merely surviving to face another day. That seems to be the only real antidote to burnout in the long run.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
Oof, I feel that. My wife actually ragequit our couples' counseling a few times in, and both that experience and subsequent work has reminded me that I'm not the problem. That said, I'm codependent autistically loyal and stubborn as hell so we've persisted, though during our second separation, I actually started letting go and moving on, though perhaps not so coincidentally, my wife ultimately reconsidered. In the meantime, I'm trying to build my own identity up outside of my job and my marriage so that I have enough of my own life to be balanced, with or without her.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
9d ago
I mean, I work in the mental health field, and I'll just say that when it comes to the therapeutic types, I've seen some real doozies myself, so when it comes to the part about finding a good therapist, that's a hard agree. I probably should have said that the quote in question was specifically about going to couples' counseling. And for bonus points, my wife is a therapist and that hasn't prevented or ameliorated deep fissures in our marriage, either, and when we went to couples' counseling, she honestly expected that it was going to be all about me and got resistant as soon as the therapist started looking at her side of the street. Turns out we're all subject to the funhouse mirror effect when looking at ourselves through the prism of our own minds, regardless of how objective we try to be.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
9d ago
The quote that sticks in my mind is this one: if both partners in the relationship want it to work, then nothing can stop them. If they don't, then nothing can save them.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10d ago
MyAbandonware.org has the game available for download, though there are a host of issues actually running it in modern Windows. This thread at Civ Fanatics explains how to iron out the problems and achieve a playable game.
Have fun trying to conquer that one last Civ in the endgame!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
11d ago
Still playing, and enjoying, Cyberpunk 2077, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
12d ago
In my case, I went VLC with my mother about nine years ago. I, too, felt a lot of anger and guilt over that decision, but I know that my decision was best for me. She made her feelings of unhappiness clear to me, promptly turned to my other brothers for support, and we rarely spoke outside of family gatherings afterwards. I have come to accept that my relationship with her could only ever be complicated and so, too, would my feelings towards her only ever be complicated.
I have to wonder what percentage of people with Down's Syndrome would be worried that putting too much stuff on an island would tip it over?
Edit: rephrased.
I listened to @cjet79 and @urquan and went ahead and started playing Cyberpunk 2077. It's been a compelling enough game that my own tinkering has taken a backseat (and subsequently, the initial "productive" interests that drove my tinkering desires have been rendered unnecessary, so future fun will be strictly for my own nefarious purposes) and now most of my free time has been devoted to playing it. I've finished the first act and
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
22d ago
I swear I answered this yesterday, but it appears my post never made it. Anyway, it's The Minority Council: Matthew Swift Book 4 by Kate Griffin. For those interested, I greatly enjoyed Cured and would recommend it to any fan.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
Ghost Story is, thus far, my favorite Dresden Files novel. Together with Changes, they're a hell of a one-two punch!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
Aww hell, I was mixed up, the book I was thinking about was Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist--sorry about that! I'm actually not familiar with the Neapolitan series.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
Ooh, I've thought about checking that one out, but I keep telling myself to read at least the really interesting parts of my backlog first.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
26d ago
The government is also looking to borrow to keep programmes going, instead of socking away the surplus for a rainy day as had originally been the plan, as well as the usual budget over-runs (the health service is a constant black hole of sucking up money and running out and needing more):
In other news, Captain Renault is shocked-shocked!-to find that gambling is going on in here!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
26d ago
Wow, thanks! Talk about ask and ye shall receive!
ETA: link says the post is deleted, suspect that a mod needs to approve it, cough cough. Pretty please?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
26d ago
UPDATE: I've been advised that the good folks over at rDrama are brigading the survey, so I've closed it. I'll have to see if there's any way to exclude the troll responses from my analysis.
Rats. I was looking forward to the results and the ensuing discussion, too!
Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook a relatively obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration, but if you can accept that the story's good fun.
I was not a particular fan of that book, and you've amply described the reasons why, though I'll add that I'm not generally a fan of using present tense for fiction, either. There are special circumstances where it's just fine to do so, of course, but for me, it didn't work in Recursion and ended up being One More Thing that annoyed me about the novel.
I feel you. I'm not there yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time...
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