Remote

Ian Littman

@ian@phpc.social

mastodon 4.7.3

I write software. Mod/infra @ phpc.social, co-organizer @longhorn@phpc.social and @merge@phpc.social, co-maintainer at Joind.in, 🤎 @Tylae@phpc.social

954 Followers

672 Following

45 Posts

Joined August 14, 2018

GitHub:

https://github.com/iansltx

Location:

Austin, TX

searchable via:

https://tootfinder.ch/

Alt Account:

https://defcon.social/@iansltx

Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 2w ago

Of the various usages of digital storage, I wholeheartedly endorse cat photos and videos. Because eventually, for a given cat, there will be a final one. That time was today for Ricky. Attached photo from a little over a year ago. @Tylae@phpc.social has a lot more from more than just the past two weeks. The yodeling, the trills when food was on offer, the grooming of our other cat, the chill demeanor, the near constant purring that was basically every breath until recently...will be missed.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

@derak@phpc.social Other anecdote is when @Tylae@phpc.social moved in Ricky went from living on one floor to three. He temporarily got less overweight due to the stair climbing, then adjusted his caloric intake to compensate, almost certainly taking some of that out of our other cat's (Lucy, two years older, still with us) ration. For the longest time, as the automatic feeder motor on the second floor spooled up, if he was on the third floor he would very nearly trip over himself zooming down the stairs for food.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 1w ago

Last night I queued up a rather difficult email to the @longhorn@phpc.social list (https://longhornphp.com/2026-future-email) tl;dr: attendance is tracking down year-over-year, and last year was far from where we wanted to be. Ticket sales are telling us that the event has run its course. I disagree with this...IMO learning from other humans in community has actually never been more important...but the proof's in the attendance. I'd love to keep running Longhorn, so if you can make it out this year, I'd appreciate it <3

longhornphp.com

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

@derak@phpc.social @Tylae@phpc.social Sometimes he would anticipate feeding time and be within a few feet of the feeder when it went off. He was a...lengthy...cat. Fully outstretched he could reach from the floor to the edge of our (normal height, Ikea from when I moved to Austin in 2012) kitchen table.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

@asgrim@phpc.social Yeah, European scene seems to be in a bit better shape than the US one for various reasons. I'll absolutely be submitting to Benelux once Longhorn this year is done and dusted; I enjoyed speaking there in 2019/2020.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 2mo ago

Earlier it was Tencent. Now it's Baidu (202.46.48.0/20) getting an iptables block from phpc.social because I like having decentralized social media reachable more than I like them scraping it for Qwen or whatever. #mastoadmin

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 2mo ago

phpc.social is now running on Mastodon 4.6.5, released about 5 hours ago. #mastoadmin

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 2mo ago

phpc.social is now running Mastodon 4.6.4, released a couple hours ago. #MastoAdmin

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

My #Pebble Time 2 has arrived.

PHP Community on Mastodon

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@Skoop@phpc.social If I was building a git forge, I absolutely would for meme value. "AI powered" is actually worse because all of the non-Bitcoin blockchain powered stuff is more energy-efficient than LLM inference, and once the immutable ledger is written to it's deterministic rather than hand-wavey.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

External HDD seems to be failing so I had to order a new one.

Prices have gone up massively since November.

To the point that the 8TB HDD I'm buying is 25% more expensive than the 8TB one I originally bought...ten years ago.

AI bubble can't pop soon enough.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

So, Tuesday was my last day at Fleet, and I'm in full swing of both catching up on a few contract client things that had been left hanging for an extended period and also going through the process of interviewing for a full-time role at a few different places.

If you want me as part of your team, drop me a DM. I'm four interviews in at one place, an interview plus (as of a few minutes ago) a take-home in at another, and one interview in at a third so fingers crossed I'll have something soon.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@mfrost503@phpc.social We really really need to stop having the "PHP is/isn't dead" argument. Pointing at discrete pieces of software where someone *recently* decided to build it in PHP and are doing well with it serves the community better. Whether fascists use Perl, Rust, Go, JS, TS, PHP, or port from one to the other every other week isn't relevant to this particular conversation.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jrf_nl@phpc.social @heiglandreas@phpc.social I appear to have missed some drama.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@skc@scottodon.com @sarah@phpc.social @longhorn@phpc.social Longhorn isn't...and me saying "but it's in Austin" isn't going to convince people outside Texas vs. the argument of "but it's in Texas." Tek is in Chicago, and I encourage folks who can't make it to Longhorn to go there. If there's a reason that Tek isn't viable, I'm happy to work with folks to figure out how to expand the US PHP conference circuit in a way that's financially sustainable. From where I sit, I can't take on organizing a conference where I don't live.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@skc@scottodon.com @sarah@phpc.social Happy to have this conversation either here or more privately, as this isn't the first time (nor will it be the last) that this convo is had. Given that "well you can just attend/speak online" isn't a satisfactory answer for an event that's primarily in-person.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ericsfraga@fediscience.org Ian BT. I wanted something with seconds displayed.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@t_var_s@phpc.social Phones, not so much. Apple being unable to keep machines in stock because they're powerful enough to run local LLMs decently, more so.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@heiglandreas@phpc.social @pollita@phpc.social Thinking that "list of user groups" isn't quite enough here. You basically need "here's the list of *events* near you, plus maybe some online ones, and here are the topics, and here are links to RSVP" because otherwise you just get stale ghost town data.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@heiglandreas@phpc.social @jrf_nl@phpc.social Anything this changes for the tentative plan to use PHP.ug as the source of truth going forward (and ripping out the old groups list)?

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@croyle@wandering.shop @outofcontrol@phpc.social Yeah, this is for NAS things where I don't need high IOPS. The box I'm hanging the drive off of has a 512GB SSD built in, so if I want something with low latency I can put it there.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@ramsey It will be interesting to see how model capabilities evolve. Opus 4.5/4.6 landed a slew of vuln reports but things seem to have levelled off a bit. I think that part of this is right now the labs and various LLM-backed security apps have something to prove, so they're throwing tokens at the long tail that wouldn't be worth the effort otherwise. As people have to find a business model this too shall pass.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bobmagicii@phpc.social @JosephLeedy@phpc.social I've mentioned contract to hire in a case or two because I know how to make that pencil out, but I've yet to have anyone with a FTE role ask about that further. Even though "the meter for my time isn't on while the computer is doing toil, which will more than offset token costs" seems like a compelling pitch.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bobmagicii@phpc.social @JosephLeedy@phpc.social Easy answer: amortized against the difference between "zero dollars of salary" and "a salary at market rates for a Staff level dev" I'll put in time to take the latter. Also, all three take-homes that I've either done or are on my plate to do wouldn't be usable for the company in their own operation, so there isn't a work-stealing dynamic at play here.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bobmagicii@phpc.social @JosephLeedy@phpc.social One thing with a take home right now is that there's a follow up asking you to explain what you did and why. This is super important right now because "I just told the LLM to build it" is a viable answer for building a thing but not for being worth a salary. Because, due to the fact that people can just look crap up in ChatGPT, it's harder to prove competence now.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 11mo ago

Got plenty of slots left for the #longhornphp uncon

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 12mo ago

After a talk through @almalinux@fosstodon.org mirroring by @jonathanspw@fosstodon.org interesting enough that I didn't take any pictures, I'm now learning about the NYCMesh journey with @will@www.librepunk.club, building an ISP with duct tape, bailing wire, and a mix of open source software among other things.

This @TexasLinuxFest@fosstodon.org has been quite informative/fun.

AlmaLinux (@almalinux@fosstodon.org) - Fosstodon

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 7mo ago

Yep, tap to pay now works on CapMetro. So, so long in coming but it's finally here.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 12mo ago

Replying to

@will@www.librepunk.club Solid presentation BTW. Hopefully will see you at the after-party once I'm done grabbing grub, sponsor notwithstanding.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 23mo ago

Replying to

@syntaxseed@phpc.social I'm planning on presenting somewhere about Golang, and will make sure that that presentation winds up online as well.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@ssemicolons@phpc.social One part of this is I use my email inbox as a todo list and keep reasonably close to inbox zero by default, so if there's an unreviewed thing it's there. And if CI is red when I look at it I kick the thing back and archive the email; they can re-request when it's actually ready (again, this is rare).

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@linc@phpc.social where to?

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@Crell@phpc.social Over the years I've tended to take on (full time or otherwise) work that was distinct enough from what I'd work on as a hobby that there's a clean delineation on work-for-hire. I also haven't had a corporate laptop in years so there's no temptation to use company gear for that part. Would be nice to get precedent set in stone on copyleft as I'd prefer there to be zero lines of copyleft in LLM training sets.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@ssemicolons@phpc.social For where I am and the last place I was, the understanding is that you can request a reviewer iff CI is green. If CI is red (very rare, because we respect each other) it gets sent back immediately. If there's no reviewer set, we catch it in a daily PR sweep at standup, and the submitter can't complain about review velocity if they didn't specify a reviewer (reviewer can swap workload to another person if needed). Seems to work okay.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@osteel@phpc.social Which models are you trying? My work accounts are OpenAI/Cursor/Claude but personally I have Ollama Cloud and OpenCode Go accounts, both of which are pretty reliable at this point now that they've scaled up to handle the GLM 5.2 rush. Another option, if you're paying API rates anyway (OpenCode Go and Ollama Cloud are subsidized), would be GitHub Copilot. Smaller cheap model selection, but at this point inference on them is pretty reliable.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@Crell@phpc.social

Commercial terms (API and enterprise): Anthropic assigns outputs to you and will defend you against copyright infringement claims arising from your authorized use of the service and its outputs.

The above, and Microsoft's equivalent, are the important bits here IMO. Basically "we will pay lawyers like our survival depends on it if this comes up in court."

Re: work-for-hire, no clue why people forgot about that just because they're using different tools.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bobmagicii@phpc.social Thinking that there's still enough deals that folks *haven't* backed out of that there's still supply side pressure. But yeah, if people pay the prices then they'll stick.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@Skoop@phpc.social @david@social.piconet.work I regret to inform you that the hamsters have died and have been converted to natural gas

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@outofcontrol@phpc.social @croyle@wandering.shop 12/16 seemed to still be more. Basically nothing below 3¢/GB

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@peach@phpc.social For what it's worth, Junie is one of the crappier harnesses out there, so your experience tracks. What's interesting is that, for one project I'm on, thanks to a *lot* of guard rails we're shipping code with better performance and better test coverage than we'd have time to do otherwise, and it's happening quickly enough to make up for process issues/dropping the ball earlier that put the project deadline in jeopardy. 1/2

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@david@social.piconet.work @Skoop@phpc.social tbf if it recited the exact same script that would be copyright infringement clear as day, vs. the plausible deniability we get now. I would say "would be nice if it just pulled from GitHub" but now you have the supply chain compromise/slopsquatting angle :(

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@derickr@phpc.social Sorry, missed your reply here. If the massive subsidy injected into OpenAI and Anthropic vanished, such that they had to pay for infrastructure with real dollars earned from customers, that would be enough to rebalance markets back to sanity. It wouldn't even take Thanos-snapling LLMs out of existence. Which won't happen anyway because you can just download stuff that's equivalent to state of the art a year (or less!) ago.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 1w ago

Replying to

@derak@phpc.social More later, but I just wrote this up. Apologies for the crappy cursive. Tiffany has 14 years of stories to my four and change.

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@peach@phpc.social LLM viability for dev would *absolutely* survive the implosion of Anthropic and OpenAI at this point if the reasons for the implosion are "burning too much money." There'd have to be some catastrophe from another direction (which I'm not ruling out) to kill viability, and the legal avenue would require Microsoft to decide that throwing their legal team at the issue wouldn't be worthwhile. Which...TBD if we get to that point. 3/3

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Ian Littman @ian@phpc.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@peach@phpc.social The explosion in token costs that everyone is expecting flat-out won't happen because too much money is being dumped into making inference more efficient (because the hardware is so expensive and the profit margins on inference are so good). IIRC Junie runs at "API rates" which is as expensive as tokens will get, and e.g. OpenAI's newer stuff is cheaper than their older stuff for the same performance. 2/3

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