🔊 IT Guru @StrangeMusicInc | Dialing up the decibels, debugging the beats for @TechN9ne & crew | Rhythm’s secret tech whisperer 🎵🎧💻
Kansas City, MO
Joined June 2009
- Tweets51.1K
- Following818
- Followers13.9K
- Likes95.4K
Pinned Tweet
The Old Man and the Hammer
A retelling of the traditional “knowing where to tap” parable, which circulates in several versions. Quote Investigator
A large ship’s engine had broken down, leaving it stranded at the dock.
The owner brought in one expert after another. They inspected the machinery, checked the connections, replaced parts, and tried everything they could think of. Still, the engine would not start.
Every day the ship sat idle, the owner lost money. The cargo was ready. The crew was waiting. But nothing could move until someone solved the problem.
Finally, someone recommended an old engineer who had spent his life repairing ships’ engines.
He arrived carrying a worn tool bag.
The owner led him into the engine room and explained everything the other specialists had tried. The old man listened carefully, then began his inspection.
He examined the engine from top to bottom. He leaned close to certain parts, checked others with his hands, and asked the crew a few questions. The owner watched as he worked quietly, without rushing.
At last, the old man opened his bag and took out a small hammer.
He reached toward one particular spot on the engine and gave it a single, gentle tap.
Then he stepped back.
“Try it now.”
The crew started the engine. This time, it caught, settled into a steady rhythm, and kept running.
The owner was delighted. He shook the old man’s hand, thanked him, and hurried away to arrange the ship’s departure.
A few days later, the engineer’s invoice arrived.
Ten thousand dollars.
The owner stared at it.
“Ten thousand dollars?” he exclaimed. “He was barely here! All he did was tap the engine with a hammer.”
He sent the engineer a message requesting an itemized bill.
The old man sent back the following:
Tapping the engine with a hammer: $2
Knowing where to tap: $9,998
Total: $10,000
The owner read it twice.
He had watched the old man make one small movement. What he had not seen were the years of work that allowed him to choose that exact spot—and leave every other part of the engine alone.
The owner paid the bill.
The value wasn’t in swinging the hammer. It was in knowing where to strike.
nick retweeted
RIGGED: ESPN announcer calls out SEC refs for ANOTHER missed call favoring Texas.
"I can't believe I'm saying this."
Texas needs a win to avoid being eliminated from CFP contention.
nick retweeted
Dennis Gates is an objectively good recruiter and objectively bad coach. He’s hardly even a coach. Keep standing there with a serious look on your face. You’re a joke of a coach.
Lemme just say i am done officially with Dennis Gates. You can give this guy any amount of money or recruits and still gets outcoached at every test. We will be a 6-11 seed this season. Lose our first game and thats it.
Ive seen enough.
Mizzou? As far as Im concerned in basketball fucked up about 25 years ago. They hired Quinn Snyder instead of Bill Self. Self was in Columbia, he drove down i70 and won 2 championships and hundreds of wins.
We are the epitome of failure sports organization.
nick retweeted
Introducing Arete-27B: Qwen3.8-27B, post-trained to reinforce Western values.
Chinese open models are currently the strongest available, but they ship with state-aligned behavior in the weights. We built an 803-prompt eval across seven value categories, including freedom of expression, democracy, and privacy, and measured how often a model adopts China’s party line.
After fine-tuning on roughly 53 million tokens, Arete-27B's propaganda rate fell from 22% to 1%, in line with the Western models we tested. Its Hermes Bench score shows no significant performance tradeoffs.
The values in an open model are one fine-tune away.
Our eval, weights, and training data are available now along with the full blog post: nousresearch.com/arete
nick retweeted
Sources: Missouri has re-signed quarterback Austin Simmons for the 2027 season, which would bring back a player who projects as one of the faces of the sport. By signing now, Simmons’ return allows the staff at Missouri to retain and recruit a top roster.
nick retweeted
people asked how I turn a single svg path into a 3D volume
here is a visual explanation 👨🎨
yooooo
🚨 Claude Opus 5.6 is reportedly dropping soon.
A new leak claims Anthropic's next model could bring:
> 90% on SWE
> 81% on RiemannBench
> 61 on the AA Index
> 20% lower cost
> Higher usage limits and a bankable reset
There's also talk of a Fable 5.5 release later.
None of this is confirmed, so take it with a grain of salt.
If even half of this is real, the AI coding race is about to get crazy.
nick retweeted
Catastrophically stupid. Reid delivered three Super Bowls and turned decades of mediocrity into sustained excellence. The Hunts extended him through 2029 and still call him a Hall of Fame coach after last year's 6-11. Fans demanding his firing after a 5-2 start and two tough losses are the textbook definition of spoiled and short-sighted.
I bought one of these 4 years ago for like $55 lmfaoooooooo
No chance in HELL I'm EVER buying one ever again.
The Raspberry Pi 5 16GB now costs $385.
Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton announced today that the 16GB Pi 5 goes up by $80, and the 16GB Compute Module 5 variants go up by $40. The reason is the same memory crunch that has pushed DRAM prices up across the industry for two years. Upton wrote that "a lack of alternative supply for 16GB DRAM, compounded by other ongoing component shortages" left them no choice.
This is the board that started as a $35 computer for classrooms and tinkerers. Raspberry Pi is avoiding blanket increases: the 16GB Raspberry Pi 500+ keyboard computer keeps its price, and Upton is nudging people to buy only the memory they need. He also warned about resellers using the shortage to sell at inflated prices and pointed buyers to Approved Resellers.
The company says it looks "forward to rolling back our price increases when memory costs fall once again."
