Baffin make some of the best cold weather boots. We use them in Antarctica, though you probably don't want the chonky -70C rated ones. I have some lighter boots rated for about -40 and they're great. Really any good gore tex mid-ankle hiking boot is probably fine. Whether you need cold rated boots is going to depend on where you're walking.
Your main concern is to stay dry and minimize snow incursion. Either wear ski pants that act as gaiters, use gaiters or use boots and socks that are high enough that you won't get snow down the sides.
If you buy boots with insulation, try not to compress it. Otherwise be aware that if you don't keep moving, your boots will eventually cool to ambient and it's pretty hard to get that temperature back up.
Check grip? Hard to test but warm doesn't necessarily mean any good on slick ice. Spikes work well if you're going on a hike and there's a lot of packed snow mixed with ice.
Don't forget good socks. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, but wool is by far the best material (not necessarily merino as it tends to be too thin). You may need to size up because of the extra padding.
Also luxury, but fan assisted boot drying/warming stations are great. They make quite a big difference if you go out a lot because moisture build-up takes ages to dry otherwise.
My gut feeling is that performance is more heavily affected by harnesses which get updated frequently. This would explain why people feel that Claude is sometimes more stupid - that's actually accurate phrasing, because Sonnet is probably unchanged. Unless Anthropic also makes small A/B adjustments to weights and technically claims they don't do dynamic degradation/quantization based on load. Either way, both affect the quality of your responses.
It's worth checking different versions of Claude Code, and updating your tools if you don't do it automatically. Also run the same prompts through VS Code, Cursor, Claude Code in terminal, etc. You can get very different model responses based on the system prompt, what context is passed via the harness, how the rules are loaded and all sorts of minor tweaks.
If you make raw API calls and see behavioural changes over time, that would be another concern.
Reference managers have existed for decades now and they work deterministically. I paid for one when writing my doctoral thesis because it would have been horrific to do by hand. Any of the major tools like Zotero or Mendeley (I used Papers) will export a bibtex file for you, and they will accept a RIS or similar format that most journals export.
> I am vaguely aware of stuff like Gaussian blur on Photoshop. But I never really knew what it does.
Blurring is a convolution or filter operation. You take a small patch of image (5x5 pixels) and you convolve it with another fixed matrix, called a kernel. Convolution says multiply element-wise and sum. You replace the center pixel with the result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_blur is the simplest kernel - all ones, and divide by the kernel size. Every pixel becomes the average of itself and its neighbors, which looks blurry. Gaussian blur is calculated in an identical way, but the matrix elements follow the "height" of a 2D Gaussian with some amplitude. It results in a bit more smoothing as farther pixels have less influence. Bigger the kernel, more blurrier the result.There are a lot of these basic operations:
My home server doesn't need to be high availability, and the BIOS is set to whatever state prior to power loss. I don't have a UPS. However, we were recently hit with a telco outage while visiting family out of town. As far as I can tell there wasn't a power outage, but it took a hard reboot of the modem to get connectivity back. Frustrating because it meant no checking home automation/security and of course no access to the servers. I'm not at a point where my homelab is important enough that I would invest in a redundant WAN though.
I've also worked in environments where the most pragmatic solution was to issue a reboot periodically and accept the minute or two of (external) downtime. Our problem is probably down to T-Mobile's lousy consumer hardware.
As another commenter said (but got downvoted to oblivion for some reason), its not really about uptime for the homelab, its about graceful shutdown/restart. And theres well defined protocols for it (look up network ups tools, aka NUT).
> its not really about uptime for the homelab, its about graceful shutdown/restart.
These are different requirements. The issue I described was not a power outage and having a well managed UPS wouldn't have made a difference. Nothing shut down, but we lost 5G in the area and T-Mobile's modem is janky. My point is that it's another edge case that you need to consider when self hosting, because all the remote management and PDUs in the world can't save you if you can't log into the system.
Of course there's all you need is a smart plug and a script/Home Assistant routine which pings every now and again. There are enterprise versions of this, but simple and cheap works for me.
I've found that for any sort of reasonable task, the free models are garbage and the low-tier paid models aren't much better. I'm not talking about coding, just general "help me" usage. It makes me very wary of using these models for anything that I don't fully understand, because I continually get easily falsifiable hallucinations.
Today, I asked Gemini 3 to find me a power supply with some spec; AC/DC +/- 15V/3A. It did a good job of spec extraction from the PDF datasheets I provided, including looking up how the device performance would degrade using a linear vs switch-mode PSU. But then it comes back with two models from Traco that don't exist, including broken URLs to Mouser. It did suggest running two Meanwell power supplies in series (valid), but 2/3 suggestions were BS. This sort of failure is particularly frustrating because it should be easy and the outputs are also very easy to test against.
Perhaps this is where you need a second agent to verify and report back, so a human doesn't waste the time?
Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.
But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.
At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
1. Compliancy with relevant standards. HIPAA, GDPR, ISO, military, legal, etc. Realistically you're going to outsource this or hire someone who knows how to build it, and then you're going to pay an agency to confirm that you're compliant. You also need to consider whether the incumbent solution is a trust-based solution, like the old "nobody gets fired for buying Intel".
2. Domain expertise is always easier if you have a domain expert. Big companies also outsource market research. They'll go to a firm like GLG, pay for some expert's time or commission a survey.
It seems like table stakes to do some basic research on your own to see what software (or solutions) exist and why everyone uses them, and why competitors failed. That should cost you nothing but time, and maybe expense if you buy some software. In a lot of fields even browsing some forums or Reddit is enough. The difference is if you have a working product that's generic enough to be useful to other domains, but you're not sure. Then you might be able to arrange some sort of quid pro quo like a trial where the partner gets to keep some output/analysis, and you get some real-world testing and feedback.
That's specifically for AI generated content, but there are other indicators like how many affiliate links are on the page and how many other users have downvoted the site in their results. The other aspect is network effect, in that everyone tunes their sites to rank highly on Google. That's presumably less effective on other indices?
Your main concern is to stay dry and minimize snow incursion. Either wear ski pants that act as gaiters, use gaiters or use boots and socks that are high enough that you won't get snow down the sides.
If you buy boots with insulation, try not to compress it. Otherwise be aware that if you don't keep moving, your boots will eventually cool to ambient and it's pretty hard to get that temperature back up.
Check grip? Hard to test but warm doesn't necessarily mean any good on slick ice. Spikes work well if you're going on a hike and there's a lot of packed snow mixed with ice.
Don't forget good socks. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, but wool is by far the best material (not necessarily merino as it tends to be too thin). You may need to size up because of the extra padding.
Also luxury, but fan assisted boot drying/warming stations are great. They make quite a big difference if you go out a lot because moisture build-up takes ages to dry otherwise.
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