Yep. As a Gen Xer with a teenage son, when I hear my peers freaking out about our kids and technology, I remind them what our parents said about MTV.

Are we living in a world in which the JS/TS ecosystem is the yardstick by which we measure well written code? I mean… Wait a minute! I figured it out! This is the Bad Place!

This was the most informative thing I read on the internet today. I can’t wait to go start a blog.

This is the grossest thing he’s done yet. I literally feel nauseous.

Even if this were true, did the pharmacists get a raise? Are they making more money? Or are they just seeing more patients (doing the extra emotional and mental labor that entails) and paying less attention to each one while Safeway and Walgreens pocket any increased revenue?

deleted by creator

My code projects lately?

“This project uses an API written in PHP, with HTML in Lua (OpenResty) and JavaScript. We’re starting with the PHP component, please write me a burger with cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickles, ketchup and mustard.”

“Absolutely! I’d be happy to help with that! I understand that we’re creating a burger in PHP. Here is a burger, with cheese, bacon, lettuce tomato and mustard. Explanation of the burger: The bacon is on top of the cheese, so it doesn’t fall off. The lettuce is included, to create an underlying HTML structure.”

"Um, that’s not at all what I asked for. First of all, you completely forgot the ketchup, which I explicitly told you was a requirement. Secondly, you said there was mustard, but I don’t see any. Third, the cheese is cottage cheese? No one puts that on burgers! Why would you put cottage cheese? Third, the bacon is turkey bacon. That’s not what I wanted at all. On top of that, the lettuce is UNDER the burger, not ON it. We’re not writing HTML, this is meant to be a rest API. All the output should be JSON.

Please try again. Write me a burger in PHP with pig bacon, mustard and ketchup, which you forgot to include last time, cheddar cheese (NOT cottage cheese) and tomato, pickles and lettuce INSIDE the bun. This is an API, so don’t write any HTML!"

“I appologize for the misunderstanding. Here is your burger with bacon (made from pigs, not turkey), mustard, ketchup, cheddar cheese, tomato, pickles and lettuce inside the bun. I understand this is an API, so I’ve taken out the HTML. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.”

“It looks like you’ve called a function to put the lettuce inside the bun, but you never created that function?”

“You are correct. Your PHP code would need to have the function defined to put the lettuce inside the bun. Here is your updated PHP code with the putLettuceInsideBun function included.”

“Thank you, there’s a tomato and the lettuce is inside the bun now. I’m not sure why you called the putLettuceInsideBun() function twice, but at least it’s in there now. I note there’s still no bacon, cheese, ketchup or mustard. You know what? I’m just going to write those parts myself!”

“Writing PHP code can be a fun and educational challenge! Please let me know if I can assist you any further with your PHP hot dog grilling project.”

If those words are connected to some automated system that can accept them as commands…

For instance, some idiot entrepreneur was talking to me recently about whether it was feasible to put an LLM on an unmanned spacecraft in cis-lunar space (I consult with the space industry) in order to give it operational control of on-board systems based on real time telemetry. I told him about hallucination and asked him what he thinks he’s going to do when the model registers some false positive in response to a system fault… Or even what happens to a model when you bombard it’s long-term storage with the kind of cosmic particles that cause random bit flips (This is a real problem for software in space) and how that might change its output?

Now, I don’t think anyone’s actually going to build something like that anytime soon (then again the space industry is full of stupid money), but what about putting models in charge of semi-autonomous systems here on earth? Or giving them access to APIs that let them spend money or trade stocks or hire people on mechanical Turk? Probably a bunch of stupid expensive bad decisions…

Speaking of stupid expensive bad decisions, has anyone embedded an LLM in the ethereum blockchain and givien it access to smart contracts yet? I bet investors would throw stupid money at that…

The Fediverse is Already Dead

Eh… This take is one grumpy dude in a hacker space somewhere soap boxing.

“At 9:43 EDT, the devs decided collectively to do a “rollback” to the previous release. This was the worst possible mistake,”

No, the WORST POSSIBLE MISTAKE was doing a major roll out, then NO ONE STICKING AROUND TO WATCH WHAT HAPPENED! Seriously, who does this?? It’s like lighting the fuse on your firework show, then having an all hands staff meeting in a sound proofed trailer with blackout curtains.

We’re also using Forgejo for a small consulting team working on lots of different projects for a lot of different clients.

A couple of our team members who came from a more complex and scaled environment (particularly our DevOps / SRE guy who’s worked at such places as LinkedIn and Snowflake) want to move us to Gitlab because it’s “more powerful” but I like Forgejo because it’s just super simple. Just does exactly what I need, doesn’t give me to many more options.

We have

• Projects segregated into teams, organized by client (so only those working on a specific client’s projects have access to their repos).
• Able to invite clients and put them into the team for their project (we’ve had a couple clients that want that).
• Able to automate deployments with webhooks (this was pretty easy to get working).

One of our devs wanted to use Actions. It’s hard to get that working and (at least a month ago) there were warnings that Actons aren’t mature yet and are probably insecure (looks like that may have changed with the recent jump to Forgejo 8.0). I think it’s now a non issue for us though because we were like “Dude, stop trying to role your own CI/CD, that’s why we have two infrastructure people!”

*goes and peaks at r/conservative for the schadenfreude .

Too complex to explain to anyone who’s not a politically / culturally curious intellectual (or who even just lacks a lot of the sci-fi / gaming and science nerd inspired philosophical context).

A lot of these breakdowns of the weird and out of touch thought coming out of upper class technocrats and their acolytes are missing this kind of bridge: a simple way to explain this to anyone who wouldn’t read more than the first paragraph of this article. No one like that is going to try to parse an acronym like TESCREAL.

My main thought about this is that “Right” and “Left” aren’t even the right terms and using them gives people the wrong impression of what’s happening. It’s better to say that techno-authoritarians with their heads in the sci-fi clouds are attracting followers from the intellectual and better educated side of the “disaffected young men” pool and are aligning themselves with more traditionally conservative authoritarians for the sake of political convenience. They don’t want the government or left wing populism getting in the way of their profits and science experiments, so their support lines up with the party that wants to sabotage the government.

As a security professional, what finally got me to move from Apache to NGINX was OpenResty.

I sometimes still put Apache behind it, depending on my goals.

This exact thing happened to one of my clients. And it sucked because they didn’t even register the domains with Ionos, they registered them with some other company that then got bought by Ionos. They were not technically savvy and didn’t understand what was happening until it was way too late. They lost about 8 domains closely associated with their business and with their CEO’s research.

Thank you. But I don’t do it anymore. I could not earn enough money to have a stable life and family.

I have a whole different rant about that.

Are you trying to say “Well the US sucks, so… don’t… don’t criticize Russia… man…”

Or are you trying to say “States gonna be states and do shitty state things.”

I have a kid, I spent 10 years working with kids professionally, and I agree with this dude.

In fact, lots of people, myself included, are drawn to leftist anarchism BECAUSE of lessons we learned about the failures of authoritarianism in school from parents and teachers. It’s always super annoying to see parents and teachers settling comfortably into an authoritarian role with their own kids, after hearing them wax emphatically about the effects of authoritarianism in adult society. I’m surrounded by hypocrites, and it’s not harmless. It’s like everybody either forget what it’s like to be kids, or think that the lessons of adulthood give them license to stop caring about those “little” problems, (and be fricken condescending in the process) when actually they just find it “easier” or it “feels safer” to them.

I have friends who we’re excellent teachers, but left the school system in absolute despair because they went in intending to be collaborative, entertaining teachers and passionate advocates for the kids in their care… Only to run up against all the bureaucratic walls the education system throws up to prevent exactly that and create as much conformity as possible… And then the icing on the cake is the vast majority of parents who just don’t get it, Don’t even try to get it, Don’t listen, know what they know, their opinions are their opinions and talking to them is just effing hopeless.

Whenever I’ve dealt with really difficult children, 9 times out of 10 you meet the parents and you’re like “Oh, this all makes sense!” (I can actually only think of three exceptions and two of those were clinical sociopaths). Or you go to work with a school (I’ve worked with and at dozens of schools) and you’re like “Oh, I understand why the kids from this school that I see in my program are always behaving in X, Y and Z dysfunctional ways. How is everyone this clueless and incompetent??” I have watched teachers utterly fail to teach or connect with the kids in their charge, and then watched those same teachers play politics and keep their positions while teachers who are doing a great job get let go (or forced out through social bs) because they want to ignore all that crap. I have had teachers come up to me when I’m running a program or event at their school and had them say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I saw the kids in your program and those are all the most difficult children we have!” And I’m like “these kids are fine! You’re an authoritarian in an authoritarian environment, aren’t you??”

And I’m literally surrounded by adults who like think they know what they’re doing, and aren’t even trying to get it and MAN do they have opinions they want to share and it pisses me the fuck off.

My kid creates super good boundaries, he emphasizes kindness in communication in ways I was totally unable to do it his age, he advocates for himself (and other kids) like someone a decade older, and if he’s on his phone in class, it’s because the teacher is failing to engage the class. End of discussion. When I see that situation, I’m almost always like “I could teach this class and these kids would not be on their phones, and I have the experience under my belt to prove it.” (And I have seen shit like that).

I have it working on Debian, it wasn’t THAT hard, but I never got it to work with the GPU so it was SUPER slow. I’ve since found XTTS2 which set up super easy, comes with a web GUI and just supports my GPU out of the box.