The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.
I am definitely in the former category. I’m not dedicating the time to replicate a Netflix client equivalent with all the metadata (although I do make the time for FLAC albums). There’s nothing as straightforward as directories and a SMB conf file. Plus, you name individual files however you want.
I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).
It’s fun and games, but you have to bear in mind that joke candidates never expect to win.
It’s entirely possible that every anti-Farage voter could coalesce behind him. Upon winning, he would have his name and face be publicly known. He would attract a huge amount of (global, even) media attention. He would suddenly have a serious job with real responsibilities. And he would have the unbridled rage of everyone in the UK who has decided that 100 years of the Tory/Labour cycle has run its course and meaningful change is needed. To give an indication of the electoral weather, Reform UK has led the national opinion polls for more than a year.
I’m not sure he has the balls for all that, but we will see.
I agree...
I use a Pi4B 8GB as a home server with a number of duties.
Less power consumption than the Pi 5 (and no heatsink), and it was the first to offer the combination of USB booting, more than 1GB RAM, and Gigabit Ethernet. And reasonably priced in 2019.
> Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.
It doesn’t feel that way to me. I remember reading the recent thread about Bun being rewritten in Rust with LLMs. Definitely not a 50/50 split of positive and negative comments. It was a pile-on.
I have some doubt here, because I do know that managers of at least some seniority have the political antennae to be wary of taking responsibility for something they don’t understand blowing up in their face. If they use LLMs directly, then the number of production outages will increase with the use of these powertools in unskilled inexperienced hands. The causes will probably just tilt towards design mistakes and unforeseen exceptions rather than coding language defects. I can see them wanting to keep some techies around simply to have someone to blame. You don’t get far up the ladder without learning how to cover your ass.
> No consistency, chaotic application of different conventions, duplicated code, ghost code (does nothing), and perhaps more as I'm digging in.
I didn’t understand this part. You said you reviewed the code and it was looking good, so how did the cruft creep in?
Were you reviewing every diff, or taking an occasional sample?
I think the biggest factor is fear. When we first started discussing LLMs a few years ago, it was easy to be amused and reassured when looking closer at all the inaccuracies. The models have improved at an alarming rate. Some of us have spent decades automating the roles of others, and now it turns out our own medicine doesn’t taste very nice. The timing is also terrible because the rise of these tools is coinciding with a dramatic post-COVID tightening of the jobs market.
On the other hand, it’s frustrating to see the trend and tools go towards vibecoding and fully agentic development. Many of us have also been in the business of inheriting (and supporting) code, so it goes against the grain when non-developers produce something without even attempting to understand how it works. Because we’ve been there in the trenches trying to diagnose and debug a serious problem out of hours under pressure, and know how essential it is to have a decent mental model of how it is meant to operate.
As a personal anecdote, I was working in an area with someone business-focussed and not particularly technical. There was some functionality we had been discussing, and one day they wanted to discuss it on a call. They then went on to demo something that seemed to have a working implementation of all the features we had been discussing, and more. I was curious, so asked them to screen share the code… at which point they started to get a bit cagey. I managed to get them to show it to me, and it turned out they had vibed the whole system as a single massive React component. And had no clue how any of the code worked. I told them I couldn’t possibly integrate that massive ball of spaghetti, and we agreed to treat it as a throwaway demo prototype and develop any production system properly.
That sort of mess is inevitable when banging Accept All like the LLM is a casino slot machine.
So personally, I have spent the last few years trying to amplify my skills and experience with these tools rather than bury my head in the sand. Three decades as a freelance consultant developer (with several stack pivots) has taught me that new technology trends don’t simply vanish if they are providing at least some business value. Don’t wait for all this to go away, because that day will never come.
I also think this technology makes us all generalists, unless somebody’s specialist knowledge and skills are very deep and highly unusual. It won’t be so easy to be a backend-only guy who doesn’t touch frontend, when your project stakeholder thinks he could have a stab at it with his free Claude account.
On my journey with this tooling I’ve struggled to find the line between how much I write versus how much I generate, and tried to maintain the balance between velocity and quality. I gravitate towards a workflow of insisting that I understand and approve every diff, and use the knowledge ingested by the LLMs to keep learning, and try to be sensitive to when the convenience has become laziness and there’s a danger of de-skilling. I combine my experience and instincts with the new powertools and feel that we are greater than the sum of our parts. I just have to hope that when this all settles down a bit, there’s a solid market for that type of work rather than being replaced by non-technical vibecoders with only velocity to offer (back in the day we used to refer to them as cowboy coders, but same idea).
I use a Pi 4B as a 24/7 home server in a country where domestic electricity is expensive (and worsening).
Each Pi release is more powerful, but uses more energy. I found the Pi 4B to be the sweet spot for me, because it is the earliest model to support USB booting, gigabit Ethernet, and offer > 1GB RAM.
Perhaps a used one would fit your purposes and budget?
I currently use it to run PiHole, serve media via SMB, host Postgres & Redis, and run some custom written Dockerized apps. Home Assistant to possibly follow, too. The current load seems reasonable in htop, but I haven’t looked into burst scenarios.
The “own nothing and be happy” quote is from a blog post made by the World Economic Forum. I find meta-governmental organisations even more troublesome, and you can’t vote them out.
It isn’t only conspiracy theorists who should be disturbed by whatever politico-corporate freemasonry that goes on in Davos.