VariousPrograms

22 uur geledendiscuss

Just self host if you want freedom. I switched to Codeberg to maintain a semblance of project discoverability while having freedom from Microsoft but I don’t need the code police telling me what I can build or how I can build it. My open source values are more WTFPL "freedom to do whatever you want" and Codeberg is more AGPL "freedom to do whatever we allow you to", which is totally fine.

VariousPrograms

eergisterendiscuss

Same, the vibe I got from Codeberg was "Kumbaya everyone, come build free software here away from The Man spying on you". According to many HN commenters today it was always meant for serious projects and they don't want to waste money hosting your hobby side projects.

They should consider removing the word "hobbyists" from their homepage to avoid confusion if that's the case. When I think of hobbyist programmers, it could be someone making the trillionth todo app or vim extension, not maintaining curl.

VariousPrograms

eergisterendiscuss

Should I be concerned that many of my hobby projects are little "one-off software [projects] specific to my need"? Is Codeberg only for hosting large, community-driven projects that require long-term support? I certainly "don't actually have a community" around my (hand-written) solo projects.

Fair enough if Codeberg isn't the correct place for stupid little personal hobby projects, but that wasn't the sense I got when I signed up.

VariousPrograms

6 dagen geledendiscuss

Make your LLM boyfriend with an open weight model so you don’t have to resort to online petitions to companies that could not care less about you.

VariousPrograms

19 dagen geledendiscuss

It's worth learning to harvest with a scythe because it's cheap, good exercise, and has no mechanical parts to fail.

The issue isn't whether it's worth learning something in a personal development sense, it's whether it's worth going into massive student loan debt to pursue a career path that was once seen as a ticket to a comfy office job. LLMs probably won't replace top performing software engineers. Will they replace the mediocre cog-in-the-machine coders that most people become? In 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? That's what has college students worrying about whether it's "worth it".

VariousPrograms

20 dagen geledendiscuss

This is a good way to get outside and do challenges like jogging every single street in your town. I figured that OSM was basically complete, but info was severely lacking for my area. It’s really easy to make local maps MUCH better.

VariousPrograms

29 dagen geledendiscuss

Dramatic pause. "Then AI arrived."

The silver lining is that it's currently easy to recognize LLM blog posts and the "authors" never realize how bad they sound. This "author" probably removed em dashes and thought he was all set. These slop posts will be worse when LLMs are better at sounding human.

VariousPrograms

vorige maanddiscuss

As someone who’s only used Emacs for around 5 years, Emacs is awesome even if you haven’t been using it since 1987. I used to get intimidated by the fact that every single Emacs user has been using it for decades. System Crafters was fantastic for getting a handle on things. It’s one of the coolest programs ever.

That said, I’m usually in vim. Emacs is a neverending rabbit hole of a hobby that begs to be tinkered with forever. I find it easier to just do useful stuff in vim and I’m always trying to add a new efficient keybinding or function to my Emacs config.

VariousPrograms

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Fellow LLM doomer here. Don’t forget how many people uncritically accept LLM responses as true, unknowingly read LLM-generated articles, or listen a Youtubers reading LLM scripts as if it’s real thought/opinion. I saw an obviously LLM-generated Steam review for some reason today. It will be 100x worse when even people hyper aware of it can no longer tell what’s real.

Whoever controls the model weights will just get to control information, data, and opinions of the masses going forward I guess. This is going to be my generation’s Fox News one day.

VariousPrograms

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I'm done for once the authorities know I have an account on HACKER News.

VariousPrograms

2 maanden geledendiscuss

If I was an end user of a working product (AI or not), I wouldn't care.

At work generating and fixing loads of slop is less rewarding work than doing old coding, troubleshooting, article writing, whatever. The internet is full of fake blogs full of fake information. Youtube is full of fake videos and people reading LLM scripts. It feels impossible to share or appreciate small projects because it's so much harder to tell if any effort or thought went into something at all now. My parents can't tell what's real on social media. I'm less sure in my career path because I might spend my time learning skills that become useless in 5 years. I have conversations on the internet or Jira where people respond with LLM output (half the time saying "Claude says..." half the time not.) Kids are cheating their way through school. I'm probably getting dumber by using it.

There's plenty of reasons to be "anti-AI". It's not just a tool that's making programming more convenient.

VariousPrograms

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I asked an LLM (Gemini) about a calculated field in my taxes that was wrong but I couldn’t figure out why and every time it tried to tell me something like “It’s a common glitch for tax software to calculate like this.”

When I did figure out what was wrong and asked if that made sense, it told me I was absolutely right though.

I think people are lucky the IRS fired all their employees this day and age so this work isn’t getting checked as much.

VariousPrograms

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Once every single thing connected to the internet (iPhone + 10 years?). Tech products, software, video games, etc. were new and exciting ways to solve problems. Now every single thing is a way to monetize, steal your data, or lock you into a platform to do those things later.

VariousPrograms

3 maanden geledendiscuss

To fill the gap left by all the sites being blocked, the company intends to offer access to a library of religious content, including AI-generated Bible videos.

Truly a serious and spiritual company. Maybe you can chat with AI Jesus instead of going to PornHub.

VariousPrograms

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Since last year Amazon doesn’t let you download your books as files from the web anymore. You have to sync purchases to a (presumably supported) Kindle device. I have a jailbroken Kindle and was shocked at the added hoops to read a legally purchased book.

Obviously the solution is to stop supporting Amazon. Some authors unfortunately only sell ebooks there.

VariousPrograms

4 maanden geledendiscuss

This could just be a skill or wrong use case thing, but do you only use spreadsheets for pure number-crunching? I've played terminal spreadsheets, mostly sc-im, but I often have some longform text field (like 'Notes') that becomes more fiddly to deal with than a GUI.

Visidata is the only terminal program I've found that handles large text fields in tabular data nicely the way you can drill down into a table row, then Ctrl+O to edit a field in your editor, but it's not a spreadsheet.

VariousPrograms

5 maanden geledendiscuss

I have AI automation metrics that are tracked. We have automation that automates the AI usage whether you want it or not so our metrics are 100% for everyone. Presumably this makes the stock go up somehow.

VariousPrograms

6 maanden geledendiscuss

I know this is nothing new, but it's insane that we need policies like "When talking to us you have to use human words, not copy pasted LLM output" and "You must understand the code you're committing."

When I was young, I used to think I'd be open minded to changing times and never be curmudgeonly, but I get into one "conversation" where someone responds with ChatGPT, and I am officially a curmudgeon.

VariousPrograms

7 maanden geledendiscuss

Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.

You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.

People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.

VariousPrograms

7 maanden geledendiscuss

Last I used Visidata, it didn't play nice with fields like %sort (they'd disappear if you re-saved the file) and if you had two fields with the same name in one record they'd get combined into a single field like "Name[2]:" when you re-saved. It might've also killed comments? I'm certainly not surprised it only has basic recfile support, because who use recfiles, but I'd be careful using VD with them for anything but viewing.