• 4 Posts
  • 82 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Which puts you ahead of the curve. But you are still depending on enough other people to be watching every update and so forth.

    I am not saying I am much better. But it is one of those things where anyone considering the selfhosted Fun should REALLY spend some time dealing with software supply chains and the like. Too many people just figure “it is open source so it is safe” or, even in this thread, assume something is more or less safe based upon what app pulls it.



  • Too lazy to dig for it myself but would love to see someone do a deep dive on what an “upgrade” actually would be.

    How many of the gen 1 parts are just plug and play in a gen2 chassis/mobo? How much of the gen2 parts can be put into the old gen 1 case? The upgraded heatpipes already make that questionable.

    I am obviously not the biggest fan of Framework Corp (and I genuinely think they are contributing to significantly more e-waste than traditional “upgrade” paths). But this also feels like a good use case to study for anyone who actually thinks they are going to meaningfully upgrade their laptop every 5-10 years without just buying a new laptop.

    Because didn’t the 16 just get a pretty massive (possibly backwards compatibility breaking?) design upgrade like last year? I remember all the tech youtubers (except GN for whatever reason…) talking about the adjustable keyboard layout for people who hate their wrists.


    Which is also one of the dark secrets of desktop PCs. Okay, AM4 was fucking insane and that STILL gets new CPUs? But, generally speaking, if you are the kind of person who “upgrades” your PC every 6-10 years (so roughly a console gen)? Your “upgrade” is a full rebuild more often than not but you re-use that nvme so it still counts.


  • Precident has been set since the dawn of the net to choose which elements you download & execute, e.g. text only, no script, no autoplay video

    Has it? Maybe during the usenet days but even then most stuff was downloaded as a digest. And basically once we hit “the good internet” with geocities et al, images were everywhere and things kind of spiraled from there.

    Again, this is a world I would prefer and I love/hate that there are browser plugins to get stripped versions of websites and the like. But precedent wise? I… don’t think we were using the same internet for the past 30-40 years.

    I DO think the argument for power and (at least where it is monitored) data usage could be a thing. But I am pretty sure the outcome would be landing pages that EVERYONE hates and bypasses.


    Also obligatory: Legal Precedent is a very specific thing that is almost entirely based around court rulings and cases. And there are a lot of reasons almost nothing related to The Internet or piracy ever goes to trial.


  • Can a website operator prove I consented to their terms if I block their consent popup?

    If you continue to use their website than that is a you problem. It is no different than actively ignoring the signage at the local kroger saying “no guns allowed”

    I also don’t consent to having billboards all around me or ads literally mailed to me in the post.

    Which is a very different mess with very different laws governing it. That said? You would be shocked how easy it is to complain about a billboard ad and get it to go away.


  • The difference is that you are choosing to engage in “business” with that website but insisting that you get to dictate the terms without agreement from the other party. If you don’t want to disrupt your sovereign cit-err, the sacntity of your computer: Don’t go to that website or any website that runs those ads.

    Don’t get me wrong. I run an adblocker AND a dns level adblocker and have zero qualms about it. I am not sure if I consider it “ethical” but, from a legal standpoint… yeah, it probably does fall into the same bucket as piracy.


  • Yes and no.

    Yes, they have every single version of every single comment you ever made and can fetch whichever one they want whenever they want.

    But reddit is massive. That is WHY it depends so much on unpaid mods (like other social media sites of a much smaller size…).

    So unless you are a “top influencer”, the most they’ll do is revert your deleted comments maybe one extra version. So if you use one of the tools that edit it prior to deletion, you are in good-ish shape.

    Which is what we saw during the “protests”. Plenty of people (self included) saw their comments come back. But the people who ran one of the editing deleters (with a non-default message) saw their edited messages return. Because that was the most recent on the stack.







  • There are two layers to that.

    The first is how to develop skills. And you do that the exact same way everyone before you did it: you actually do the work. Calculators are awesome but you still learn how to do long division and the like because it gives you insight into how to approximate things. Same with sims/solvers versus actually solving PDEs.

    The other is… if your boss wants you to feed everything into an LLM then you won’t have a job much longer. So you can either look for a new one or work toward more advanced tickets/tasks. Make it clear that LLMs have limitations and that some stuff will need a proper coder and that YOU are that proper coder.


  • But also AI cannot currently do everything, so you need someone to fill those areas.

    And who is going to be able to fill those gaps? Probably not the person who “knows what I want to achieve but (…) don’t know how to actually implement it”.

    Which ties in to

    their capability to learn, their personality, will they mesh well with the existing team, have they got drive to make things better, do they have soft skills to position themselves to become better, is the person adaptable

    is the bar for what is considered fundamental shifting?

    If the bar is “I know how to ask a magic box to do my job for me” then there is genuinely no need for previous training and experience and a company won’t be hiring engineers or spreadsheet gandalfs or marketing experts. They’ll hire the cheapest “prompt engineer” they can, underpay them, and then replace them the moment they ask for a cost of living increase.

    And… the companies considering that really aren’t the ones with any longevity. Yes, yes, any port in a storm. But they will RAPIDLY run into that wall and have no way to move past it. Whether that is getting the senior engineer in cargo shorts to do it or curating training data to improve the model.

    but as time went on we got new levels of coding and so knowing how to write low level code is no longer a required skill.

    And that is another barrier that MANY companies have run into.

    The average coder? Yeah, they don’t need to understand how to optimize a loop. But when there are forty tools on the market that all just call pytorch? The one company that knows how to optimize a critical path function suddenly looks REALLY good with their 10% performance (and thus power) savings.


    Again, these tools are incredibly powerful and I regularly use chatgpt et al to generate a first draft of a utility script. And I’ve been using editor plugins for… sweet Eothas over two decades now, to generate docstring stubs and even a lot of unit tests. And people SHOULD know how and when to use these tools.

    But you also have to consider what you can get out of it. “AI” generated documentation is pretty much worthless outside of checking off a box that you have documented every function in the code. Your LLM won’t understand what that function was trying to achieve or why “it is wrong but that is because this library is wrong” and so forth. Any documentation that is actually meant to be referenced still needs a proper pass from whoever drew the short straw in Engineering.

    Same with testing. AI can generate tautologies. AI won’t stress test your code because it doesn’t know what you think that code might do in the future. By all means, generate the boilerplate, but you are still going to be the one who has to go in and add that really weird corner case that TOTALLY didn’t break prod lats month.

    And… you know who historically did those tasks? Interns and junior engineers. The same ones who are adamant that their entire job can be done by chatgpt and lamenting that they don’t know how to move from idea to implementation. And guess how you learn how to do that?


  • I have a rough idea of what I want to achieve and some steps on the way there, but don’t know how to actually implement it.

    That is literally what the job is. If you can’t do that then you aren’t an engineer.

    I’m concerned that there are skills I am missing out on developing, but at the same time if AI is being pushed so heavily is it not something I should lean into to be better equipped in working with it?

    I’ll tell you what I told my nephew: Yes, everyone is going to use AI to one degree or another. So why would I hire you over anyone else? Or, more pointedly, why would I hire someone at all?

    Getting to that interview gets harder and harder every year (every month, really). But engineers (and even many managers) can immediately tell someone who knows their shit versus someone who “vibe codes” all the “hard parts”.


  • These days it more or less explicitly refers to asking an LLM to write your code for you based on prompts.

    But on a broader spectrum it is just the idea of (I forget the buzz word) Ticket Driven Development. A manager defines software based on a series of (jira, gitlab, kanban, whatever) tickets/issues and someone below them (in this case, an LLM) implements it.

    Done properly? It is incredibly effective as it allows designers and “idea people” to work to their strengths and junior developers to work to theirs. The problem being that, much like when it is a junior dev under them, the person making the tickets likely has no idea what they are doing.

    Which is the big problem. Someone who has been writing scripts for decades? Using chatgpt to get the syntax of a function or even to write a utility script is great. They can focus their brainpower on the harder/more fun stuff. Someone who has been writing code for, at most, a year or two? They never learn those foundations and never have a way to do anything the LLM can’t (or verify if the LLM is correct).