While I do hope this leads to a pushback on “I just put all our corporate secrets into chatgpt”:

In the before times, people got their answers from stack overflow… or fricking youtube. And those are also wrong VERY VERY VERY often. Which is one of the biggest problems. The illegally scraped training data is from humans and humans are stupid.

If your goal is to actually make a point or argument: make it. Don’t just tell people to read a manifesto until they agree with you.

I mean… that is kind of what happens with a lot of these projects.

As they get larger you get more and more of those obnoxious jerks who will close ANY issue if it even slightly is related to something in the past or isn’t formatted correctly and so forth.

Personally? I am a firm believer in working with (actual) users to make things better. But I have definitely had weeks where it is just “Yup. We got mentioned by Youtuber X again” and we more or less ignore any issue not made by an established contributor.

Partially addressed in the other branch but:

Issues from people who can’t even be bothered to make a burner account are almost never useful. And issue tracking that is not fed directly to passionate people who care about maintaining a project is worse than worthless.

That’s what signed commits are for

Then it is a good thing I addressed the existence of those. And… those also more or less need a semi-centralized source of truth that is independent of gitlab/hub/whatever.

Also, pull/merge requests and issues are sent to the origin instance, just like in the fediverse

So everything would still happen on the single source of truth for an a project? But you can have an account on whatever service you want?

Homie? You just described oauth.

As one of the core contributors for even a moderately sized project on Github: HELL NO.

We already get more than enough drive by spam from everyone who just makes an account to complain that our code doesn’t do something we never said it did. And if they don’t even have to do that? Ugh.

I do firmly believe that more projects need to understand the implications of where they host something (similar to the IOS app that alerts you if ICE is in your area). But if someone can’t be bothered to even use a throaway protonmail address to file a bug report or feature request? Quite frankly, what they have to say wouldn’t have been worth our limited time anyway.

For those who were out of the loop:

What exactly is the idea of federated gitlab? Git is already inherently distributed and automagically mirroring to other remotes is generally like three lines in any CI syntax (and there is probably a precommit hook for it too).

Also: I can see a LOT of security issues with not having a centralized source of truth on what the commit hashes should be and so forth. is fedgit dot zip the source of truth for this app or fedgit dot ml or fedgit dot ca? Theoretically that is where signing comes into play but that gets back to: What advantage does a “fediverse” frontend have?

Just to be clear: if someone has actively shown growth then I am all for them moving past shit (obviously the amount of growth required depends on the level of shitty before but). James Gunn being kind of the poster child for that where he was an edgelord dipshit when he was younger. But every time that comes up, almost everyone around him makes it clear that he has grown significantly and he owns up to it every time.

Like… look at idubbz. I, and many others, aren’t sure if we can ever actually “forgive” him considering how much abuse we received because of people directly quoting his hate. But he also (at least briefly. Not sure what he has done since) made it a big point of actually APOLOGIZING. And… getting a lot of shit and hatred from other youtubers who refuse to apologize for their shittiness for whatever reason (shoutout to moistcritical for breaking his apolitical stance to aggressively insist Ian didn’t need to apologize for slurs and bigotry…).

Contrast that with “he said the N word a lot a few years back but hasn’t done it recently” with no indication beyond that.

Its not even new linux users.

I semi-recently built a new PC and even having done this repeatedly… it took me longer than it should to have realized why re-adding my library folders didn’t add those games to my installed games list.

Yup. We see this with StopKillingGames too where it is “Well. So what if asmongold literally advocated for genocide and ethnic cleansing? He is on our side and that is what is most important!”.

pewdiepie I think mostly fell off the past few years so no idea if he has shown any sign of growth. But it is still a GREAT message to say “Racism is less important than my OS of choice”

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).

I don’t use jellyfin but my general approach is either:

1. Expose it over a VPN only. I usually use Tailscale for this so that I can expose individual machines but you do you
2. Cloudflare tunnel that exposes a single port on a single internal machine to a subdomain I own

There are obviously ways to do this all on your own but… if you are asking this question you probably want to use one of those to roll it. Because you can leave yourself ridiculously vulnerable if you do it yourself.

You uh… don’t need to tell people stuff like that.

I mean… I have seen some REALLY REALLY stupid drivers so I could totally see multiple people thinking they found a short cut or not realizing the road they are supposed to be on is 20 feet to the left and there is a reason their phone is losing its shit all while their suspension is getting destroyed.

But yeah. It is the standard tesla corp MO. They detect a dangerous situation and disable all the “self driving”. Obviously because it is up to the driver to handle it and not because they want the legal protection to say it wasn’t their fault.

Played a bit of this the last time… GOL posted almost that exact same article?

The interface and concept is cool but it feels less like programming and more like assembling lego blocks (the visual coding interface is also basically what the mindstorms had). Mostly because you have no real control over what functions/constructs you use outside of what you get as drops or what rolls in the store. So it is less “I am gonna do something clever to optimize my loop and do more damage” and instead just chaining a bunch of commands together and giggling when you get a for(3) drop.

And the survivors/bullet heaven aspect is also kind of lacking. Full disclosure, I only did the first character/encounter. But there were no boss enemies I could see and I basically only had 2.5 attacks (laser/ping and a shockwave or nuke). So it felt ridiculously samey even over the course of a single [looks like they delisted the demo so I can’t see my play time. Maybe 10 minutes?] run.

I dunno. The concept is REALLY cool to me and a zachtronics bullet heaven sounds AMAZING. But this ain’t it. Would probably be better if we instead had only certain instructions as drops and the rest (branches, jumps, loops… which are just the previous two, etc) instead controlled by complexity metrics (total instructions, memory, computational intensity, etc).

And if you live as close to a Best Buy as it sounds, both would likely just be same day delivery on their end. Just a question of when they box up your order.

For anything but same day? It isn’t

For a same day delivery? It is the cheapest courier service out there since the gig economy is all about pushing every expense onto the workers.

As if I weren’t already on enough watch lists:

Consumer drones aren’t conducive to “a 9-11”. They just can’t carry enough explosives. A terrorist attack using drones will be isolated attacks on public gatherings and likely not even put a dent in the M-4 tax we pay every fucking day.

Also: Defense against drones actually isn’t all that hard from a military and hardpoint standpoint and mostly uses existing tech. The same mic arrays that installations use to triangulate gunfire? Picking up drone motors is of comparable difficulty and gives a pretty fast angle to point the baby phalanx (or net guns) at. Would be HORRIBLE in an area dense with civilians but would protect anything that “we” actually care about (military resources and whichever politicians trump likes this week). Chaining the net gun/tiny gatling gun to the sensors with a human in the loop so it doesn’t violate any treaties covers that.

The reason they are so ridiculously effective in Ukraine are because Russians have horrifically bad opsec and tend to leave armored vehicle hatches open (even at bases) and have sprawling unfortified trench lines that are only designed to keep infantry out.