u/agiamba

I bought a decent Mac Mini recently M3 4 core 16gb ram. I wanted to play around with hosting my own LLMs and maybe figure out what all the buzz was about Openclaw.

I do work daily with the upper Claude models, but I'm so unimpressed with the 3-4 models I tried out. I don't see any reason I'd ever use them. I tried OpenClaw too and I genuinely don't really see the point.

It's a great machine though, so I'd love to find a good use for it. We have a gaming PC, Chromebooks, a nas and Google TV if that helps. Anyone got good or interesting ideas?

Couple years ago, my wife's MacBook broke and we got her a $220 Acer Chromebook Plus at Costco and it's been terrific. Does everything she needs, battery is great, etc.

I recently decided to get a used Pixelbook even though it looks like they've been discontinued almost 4 years. My work laptop is increasingly immobile, so figured it might be nice to actually take a laptop somewhere. The build quality is impressive, the processor horsepower is great for this kind of computer, and also, great battery life. I already enabled Linux Development Mode, installed VS Code and others

Great great device

Our org is rolling out Claude to all our devs. Your (and my) feelings in AI aside I'm part of the team coordinating the roll out. I discovered this week you can create org wide skills that detect anti patterns, non performant SQL, etc. You can choose to block it outright, allow the code but talk to the dev about it, or just log it.

Love the idea overall. Here's some of the ideas I came up with

*select * instead of explicit columns

*-non-sargable clauses, espwehere where or functions on indexes columns

*loops instead of batch queries /selects / inserts

-cursors where bulk selects or inserts would work (really cursors anywhere)

-implicit data type conversions causing scans instead of indexes

-using functions in where clauses

-using scalar functions in general

-unnecessary left joins and nested subqueries where a cte would be appropriate

 

any other ideas youd add?

I recently got a Pi with an ADS-B tracker that's supplying info to Flightradar24. Are there any good guidelines (other than higher is better) on where to place it? I live in a city about 10 miles from a major airport, and granted it's only been up for 3 hours, but it hasn't picked anything up

Right now it's in a window sill probably 6-7' high, I figured that'd be good enough. Any suggestions or thoughts?

Hi there, we have a US based client that is wanted to onboard a large office in Asia. Initially, they were intending on them using the same apps, DB, etc that are in US East, but they have concerns on latency. We did some testing and the latency isn't too bad, 200ms or so, but I guess enough that they don't want to proceed that way.

We have done replication across regions in the past and frankly, it went very poorly. I just don't think our team has the expertise in that kind of area, so I am heavily discouraging it.

My not-thoroughly-thought-out suggestion is that each region has their own database and apps, we start the Asia one as a clone from .bak from the US one. We would then do a nightly sync (they do not need real-time) pushing from Australia to US. It would not be a significant amount of data, mostly CRM-type stuff.

They do not anticipate pushing data from DC to Australia, but as always, that's certainly a possibility at some point.

My preference would be a read-only secondary in Australia, with writes going to the US database, but our application does not currently support that.

Thoughts? Is this is a decent idea, a horrible idea, or is there a much better idea?

https://preview.redd.it/ik020j97ubah1.png?width=712&format=png&auto=webp&s=5176ba38ac5c7ae94f0e31e9eb8a46459f44ccc0

Bought it a year or two ago. It's easy to manage, unlike the other I had that is still up there and very dead. That one required a ton of maintance. I like the ambient ones, they're nice and easy to use, and part of the reason I picked them was because they have an API.

Built my own little $2 a month Azure jobs to capture the weather (ambient makes you pay for historical...) store it in a free AzureSQL db, and display in two different static vuejs web apps, which are free. https://broadmoor.giambattista.io was my first, this week I decided I wanted to make it a lot better and built https://broadmoorweather.giambattista.io I'm pretty pleased with how it came out! Actually built both sites into native ANdroid apps too.

I'd go with Abathur. I see them silenced by blizzard probably the most of any character

We have an enterprise product almost entirely coded in .net 4.8 on top of SQL server. It's really time for us to move along. We're midway through a lot of cloud adoption and .net 4.8 options are so limited and it's just brittle at this point in general..

I'm sorta spearheading trying to move us away. It's not my job, but I feel like we absolutely have to it...years ago.

Our product is pretty massive, so I'm thinking it makes sense to pick individual products at a time, like our async processor or such.

Wondering if anyone's up to a 30 minutes conversation on the subject get some guidance general thoughts, pitfalls to avoid etc.

Happy to pay. DM me if interested!

Would love some others thoughts on our situation. I posted about this here as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1t0ke0j/migrating_from_net_48_to_modern_versions_of_net/ Part of my issue is being stuck on .NET 4.8 is really limiting our ability to modernize our apps, it costs us more, it gives us less options, etc.

My goal is to get some suggestions on performance optimization as well as cost optimization.

Our product is an enterprise AMS/CMS system is a system that runs off a SQL MI database. There is a .NET 4.8 internal app for staff that runs in an Azure App Service, as well as a frontend member-facing app in an Azure App Service consisting of an React front end, and a .NET 4.8 API. We have a legacy Windows Desktop client still required for some developer functions, but that's rare. We also have an async processor that runs as a Windows Service on a Virtual Machine, as well as an SSRS web portal so the staff applications and member applications can generate reports.

https://preview.redd.it/wg8a4bmzugyg1.png?width=809&format=png&auto=webp&s=56c7e214099987a4a070b36afe1b57ca907182cc

https://preview.redd.it/yawq4x31vgyg1.png?width=804&format=png&auto=webp&s=6b82c0e5b197951c24771e73d84b3b3272806332

https://preview.redd.it/tzl98582vgyg1.png?width=792&format=png&auto=webp&s=1e123512d48b8a010d5e4e90c3ab922416dcd321

These are a few customer Azure costs attached for the month of April, one higher end, one medium end, and one lower end. Each has both a Production and a Test environment, with Test typically having lower resources.

There are two questions here
First, where should we be looking to modernize our platform and applications using Azure or other Cloud technologies, in ways that will either save us money, improve performance, or deliver new capabilities like autoscaling and such

Second, what are some areas we can focus on to reduce our costs? We do not have 1 or 3 year reservations locked in for most clients, and no, I do not get it at all either. It drives me batty. I cannot get an answer why, but that's easily the most impactful.

My thoughts thus far for first steps.

• I recommend combining certain cleint Test App Service plans into a single plan. I think 90% of clients won't notice. For the ones that do, we can just up the new plan back to their original specs, same cost, same specs, etc.
• I'd like to work with our Cloud and Security team to figure out what is going on with the AGs and Azure DNS spend. Bonus here it is todes not involve much client involvmenet. Some major cost savings here especially without a large amount of work. (I think our security team is moving away from Azure AGs to some Cloudflare tool anyways) The AG and Azure DNS costs are bonkers
• I'd like to roll our SQL MI NextGen to our clients and try and right-size the overprovisioned ones. I think a massive boost to IOPS will more than offset any reduction in CPU cores given their usage.
  • We have one client abroad who insisted on 16 CPUs for their busy season, which costs us $4k a month (they also chose premium hardware tier) They are not paying for those 16 CPU cores, and they are never coming close to using them. I think they could easily be comfortable at 8 CPUS and maxed out disk IOPS wwhich would knock about $2700 off their $4k a month bill.

A round two down the line might look at DB Cleanup, moving clients to the more modern App Service plans, and truly getting autoscaling in the member-facing App Service setup across the board, right now we have a handful of clients using it.

Thoughts? Either on modernization strategy, on cost savings, etc? I am all ears.

My company has a product still deeply embedded in the .NET 4.8 framework, and it is increasingly causing us problems. It's a fairly large enterprise product. Being stuck on .NET 4.8 means all sorts of things like
- we cannot take advantage of anything newer in .NET, obviously
- we cannot deploy our apps to Azure Functions, containerization, or Linux-based App Services (we are mostly on Azure)

It is just really limiting what we can do. Our product is pretty big, and we did have an initiative that was a PoC to try and update it, but I get the feeling it did not go well.

Any thoughts? I'm wondering if we should be looking at ways to split off parts of the application so we can update those sections without having to do the full framework. I'm also very open to considering engaging a third party either to help us stategixe how to move, or hell, even perfoming a bunch of the work themselves as our team is absolutly swamped.

Thoughts? It's low on our tech debt priority list, but I feel like each year it goes by ignored, it just really puts us into more and more of a bind.

EDIT

To give you an idea of our tech stack, at the core is a SQL Server database. We have a legacy Desktop application mostly used by developers, it's fine.

We have two apps, for on-prem they are hosted in IIS, in azure, Windows App Services as they both use .NET 4.8. Both have a UI site and an API site separated out. The staff app, geared towards employees of the org, is like a CRM/AMS type thing. The membership/public app is React front end, and a robust (.NET 4.8...) API layer behind it.

On top of that, we still have a Windows Service used for async processing. Works pretty well, but I'd love to use it either in a Function or containerization at some point. We also have some random stuff like SSRS reporting capabiltiies but that's not really important.

Areas I'm frustrated- we cannot deploy either our staff or membership apps into Linux App Services, owing to .NET 4.8. We cannot try deploying our async processor to a Function or a Container, because a again, .NET 4.8. I feel it is limiting us substantially.