Said with tongue firmly planted in cheek:

"The Himalayas are the highest, youngest, and most unstable mountain system on Earth. Let's terraform these bastards to extract energy and incentivise people to live there. They can build these giant, terribly unsafe, concrete buildings right on the bank of a river fed by a an unstable glacier. Let's also have one way in and one way out! The mountains are too steep for meaningful egress upward, so rock crawl your way out there for the bi-seasonal melt floods!!!!"

Dental insurance is an absolute scam. Dental coverage in the USA is beyond abysmal. I am very fortunate (or unfortunate depending on perspective) to live close enough to Mexico to investigate the prices there.

I recently had three, previously crowned, teeth removed and the posts for implants placed. The least expensive I could find in my city of 1 million was $16k out the door. I drove to the Mexico border, walked across and paid $3350 for the implants and they replaced a broken crown. I still need to heal completely before they place the arches (the new teeth) and they are going to charge me $2250 for those.

WTH? Its not like they are using TEMU veneers and implants. Its the same stuff, I could pick between zirconia and porcelain. Same machines, same tools, same training. And as a bonus, the dentists and staff were some of the most caring and thoughtful "dental people" as I suffer from "dental anxiety" like no other.

I think a lot of dental anxiety stems from the cost. Furthermore, the fact that we can't really tell what is going on in our mouths like a strange growth on your face or something, means we have to implicitly trust the dentist. Is a $2000 crown really necessary? We have no real way to actually hold a dentist or their practices accountable. There is just too much friction built into the dental system for a normie to really know what is needed versus the dentist needs to pay off a $15000 bicycle so everyone is getting crowns for a month. lol

At least I am learning to build modular so I can reuse parts like image gen, audio gen (STT/TTS), knowledge management. I have probably built 4 of these systems in the last year, each one gets better and lasts longer until I brick the crap out of it. Super fun.

It has been this way since the beginning, unfortunately. There is certainly no harm in trying on local models on local workloads with modest guardrails.

Like most of these models (Qwen, Gemma, Llama, gpt-oss), finding all the little gotchas like, special tokens and prompt structure, model preference are a PITA right now. The reward are really nice models that run exceptionally well in agentic harnesses tuned with the prompts and parameters you fought so hard to learn.

I have been doing a LOT of work around this with Qwen3.6 and its been super fun. There are some neat benchmarks that help guide, but nothing beats reading the output... and there is a lot of output to read when trying different quants, etc. Which leads me too...

The other thing I have learned is the "harness" is only as good as the model tuning that goes into it. If your prompt(s) are buggered from the beginning, you are going to have a bad time. The prompt structure and special tokens can be a PITA or really help depending on how much you know.

I don't know how agentic harnesses can work without being optimized for the models running within them. This is the biggest insight into working with agents for me. First thing I have always looked at were the prompts and parameters... everything else is orchestration to me.

I am familiar with;

1. https://www.seeedstudio.com/ 2. https://www.tindie.com/ 3. https://www.adafruit.com/ 4. https://www.sparkfun.com/ 5. https://shop.pimoroni.com/en-us

Most people that have a passing interest in "arduino" or "raspberry pi" have heard of these shops or marketplaces... perhaps not.

Either way, I learned of two other companies that have very cool offerings like;

1. https://soldered.com/ 2. https://shop.trmnl.com

There is also JLCPCB and PCBWAY which are not directly "blogs or shops" but more like platforms with manufacturing built in. The projects page: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/ offers people really cool projects to learn and take inspiration from.

I follow the Hobby CNC space so people like Barton Dring (https://www.tindie.com/stores/33366583/ and his elecrow store: https://www.elecrow.com/store/BartDring) are book marked. Odrive (https://odriverobotics.com/) and Esk8news(https://forum.esk8.news/) and Foil.zone (electronics for e-foils) https://foil.zone/ are also places I visit frequently along with endless spere for ebikes....

My "ask hn" is where are the others? Post all the links to independent forums and electronics stores/blogs/resources!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47126195

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

I receive at least 10 python job ads a day from indeed and linkedin. Are any of them legit? I have no reason to apply, so I am curious if they are bullshit or not. Any insight for this poorly constructed question?