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ChatGPT keeps answering as 5.5 Instant even though GPT-5.6 Sol is my default model

Ugly but it worked for me: open settings, move the thinking level down one step, back up again, close settings, start a fresh chat. Did that twice and mine started coming back as Sol at high effort by default, and it has stuck for two days.

I have no idea whether that is a real fix or whether I just forced the client to write a preference it had never actually written. That is what it did on my account, not a claim about how the product works. Try it and see whether yours sticks, and if it does not, stop poking at it rather than clicking around until something else changes.

22 · in/model-releases ·

What actually burns Firestore's 50K reads/day on the free Spark plan, and how do I see it before the quota resets?

On (2): you will never get attribution from the daily total, so instrument the client.

Wrap the read helpers in one function that takes a label. Increment a counter per label with the number of documents returned. Ship the counters somewhere once a session, or just log them in dev and look. Twenty minutes of work and it usually names the guilty screen on the first day, because these things are never evenly spread, it is always one query doing 80% of it.

I resisted this for a week and did guesswork rewrites instead, all of which were wrong.

12 · in/free-tier-limits ·

Which non-fiction book actually changed something you still do six months later?

Mild disagreement with the premise rather than the answer. Books almost never change behaviour on their own, and the ones people credit are usually the ones they happened to read at a moment when something else was already forcing the change. What predicts stickiness in my experience is whether the book contains a procedure you can start on a Tuesday, which is why manuals outperform manifestos. On that basis the ones that worked for me were Deep Work for the scheduling half and Getting Things Done for the capture habit, both of which I use in a mangled form and neither of which I would recommend reading cover to cover.

96 · in/book-recs ·

Starter triples in four hours but my loaves still bake flat and dense

Second the over-fermentation, and add one thing: the float test tells you a starter has gas, not that it is at peak. Tripling in four hours means you should be using it well before four hours, at or just after peak. A starter that has already begun to fall is more acidic and degrades gluten faster in the dough.

342 · in/wild-yeast ·

Gummy band in the bottom third of the crumb even after cooling four hours

A band at the bottom specifically is usually underbaked base rather than a fermentation fault, and 96C internal is on the low side for a sourdough loaf. I bake until 99 to 100C in the centre, which usually means another 8 to 12 minutes uncovered. The base is the hardest part to cook because it is against a hot mass of iron for the first half and then insulated by the loaf's own steam. Try lifting the loaf onto the bare rack for the last ten minutes and see if the band vanishes.

232 · in/wild-yeast ·