• 9 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Because for privileged people it is just “oh ha ha, that person is an asshole”

    For a lot of folk? It is a sign that someone actively wants you dead or enslaved and doesn’t care who knows it.

    Or, in this case, it shows that they care so little about the actual victims that they think it is Ironic to wear a nazi uniform around so long as they flip the skulls upside down.



  • Yeah. It is why I hate all kinds of bait like this.

    Ha ha. You are on edge because people actively want to murder you for not being a human and you judged me when actually I am a great guy. Ha ha. That’ll teach you to judge a book by its cover!

    Like… 80/20 this is very much a “I hate all the division and we should all get along” kind of asshole.


  • 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).


  • What you are describing is less a throuple and more just bog standard Ethical Non-Monogamy with shades of Polygamy. It would be your wife with multiple partners and you making the proverbial (sometimes literal) sandwich.

    I emphasize that because there is a lot of media and societal pressure on all sides. ENM has increasingly become divided on gender lines with (cishet) men having been taught by the tates and the manosphere that it is taking THEIR women away from them and ruining THEIR women forever and so forth. Whereas women (and the lgbtq community) have almost flocked to it in a similar manner to “free love” back in the day as there is an increasing push to not actually have kids… at which point monogamous sex starts to make a lot less sense. Also it is a “good” way to justify splitting a two bedroom apartment’s rent six ways.

    Whereas throuples are often romanticized. In large part because people watched/read the trainwreck that was Twilight and all came to the realization that “she got two hands…”.

    At the end of the day? Every person and every relationship is different and it is really on you, your partner, and your friend to decide what works for you.

    For what its worth? Some very good friends of mine are in an ENM relationship and I’ve had a relationship in the past where we also weren’t exclusive sexually. But the ground rule we, and they, use is that they have one emotional partner. Sex is fun and harmless (if you use protection). I broke up with my ex but for completely unrelated reasons and said friends are perfectly happy as far as I can tell. Emotional bonds are where things get REALLY messy. I’ve always avoided it but every couple I’ve known that tried it fell apart within a year or two. Whether that is good or bad really depends on your life experiences and where you draw the line on “save the relationship” and “live your lives”.

    So, personally? If you and your partner want to try this I would suggest NOT banging the dude you clearly both already have emotional connections with. But, again, you do you.


  • 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.



  • If you are capable of setting up your own personal VPN, you don’t need Tailscale. You still may want to use it though, depending on how much of a novelty Network Fun is for you in your spare time.

    For me, the main advantage to Tailscale et al is that it is on a per device basis. So I can access my SMB shares or Frigate setup remotely while still keeping the rest of my internal network isolated( to the degree I trust the software and network setup). You CAN accomplish that with some fancy firewall rules and vlanning but… yeah.


  • Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.

    For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

    1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
    2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
    3. Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines

    My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).


    To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.



  • This isn’t piracy since you are legitimately-ish getting stuff but:

    If you are actually in the US, check out your local community colleges. Depending on the college (and state), that may range from free to “you only need to sell a kidney once every four years”.

    A scumbag cousin of mine has been doing that for probably coming on 20 years now. He signs up for a course every other year, never attends it, and then drops it. Keeps his dot edu email active for “free” software and I think he also flips laptops and the like.


    That said, also consider actually attending the course. One night a week to learn a new skill or just keep the (questionable science of) neuroplasticity going.




  • WWE is a special beast. They embraced The Internet a lot earlier than most media and their social media and astro turfing game is on point. It is why you’ll hear that every single wrestler on the planet’s life goal is to be in the WWE Hall of Fame ™ and why Roman “The Rock’s Cousin Who Was Such A Charisma Void That All His Lines In Hobbes And Shaw were cut” Reigns and whoever the hell is the greatest story ever told on television ™ and so forth.

    Spend a bit of time discussing wrestling and you rapidly realize you are talking to a “bot” in that different statements trigger the exact same response from different people.

    So it is less that The Fans think that cena taking time out of his busy schedule of caping for a rapist sex trafficker was truly amazing and more that people on twitter and PR folk on The Subreddit told them to think that and they are repeating it.

    As for the other aspect:

    Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

    Because wrestling is “event television” in a way that only sports really is anymore. Andor is one of the greatest shows of all time but, unless you are doing a Reaction podcast, it doesn’t matter if you watch that episode from Season 2 tonight or tomorrow or a week from now. Wrestling and sports? People DO still want to watch that “live” because they are afraid someone will spoil the score of the Bulls game (in large part because we grew up with sitcoms where that was the joke). So, in that regard, it makes more sense to cover it with sports rather than to cut into a movie review with how taylor swift’s boyfriend caught a ball real good.

    Which… gets to the last point that is not WWE specific. A lot of people don’t have the time or money to watch it live. This mostly goes back to when PPVs were 50-90 bucks and when all weekly shows were on TV that a lot of “cord cutters” didn’t have. But it also just speaks to the general lack of an attention span. A LOT of the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC)… don’t actually watch wrestling. They follow live threads or watch clips and then they wait for Dave “It’s cool, he just didn’t like her tits” Meltzer to give them a star rating.

    It has become a lot more prevalent in the AEW era where we have “something else” on weekly TV (no. TNA didn’t count. I loved TNA but that shit was the #4 promotion even when there were only two on TV in the US) and the “AEW style” is still heavily informed by The Indies and New Japan where people try to tell a self contained story in every match rather than relying on six months of promos on TV. You will RAPIDLY notice that the IWC will barely mention character work that is not part of a clip released by the company or one that was so good that wrestling twitter clipped it themselves. A live thread might lose their shit over how much rotation a tall lady got on a powerbomb spot and then immediately “forget it” because wrestling twitter didn’t care and the company didn’t bother to release a clip of it.


  • To add on to what others have said:

    It is also part of the white supremacist manual* and we have seen it for decades. It used to be that people would “joke” about how their thoughts aren’t “politically correct” before they say something. But mostly it was the idea of accusing people who care about… anything of being a “social justice warrior” and so forth.

    The idea being that you make people react with “Ugh, not again” rather than “Yup, that is fucked”. It equates both sides and encourages people to become “apolitical” because they are privileged enough to not have to actually care.

    And that is more or less it now. The idea is that if any character has even a hint of melanin, all the usual chuds will lose their god damned minds and try to destroy it. And yeah, everyone hates asmongold et al. But they also hate the people who “take the bait”. And the studios rapidly learn that it will mostly hurt their sales to have anything but the whitest of white cis men as heroes and the whitest of white big titty girls as damsels.

    Then EVERYONE is happy. The devs/film makers/whatever don’t have to worry about death threats (hmm. Do you think that best friend might be Jewish? Better play it safe and still threaten to hunt down and rape that guy’s daughter). The people who care about basic humanity don’t have to say anything. And the chuds get to live their fantasies. And everyone else doesn’t have to hear it and can “just enjoy something”. Well, unless they don’t want to be a white dude. But who wouldn’t want to be a white dude, am I right?

    It is REALLY REALLY fucking annoying and I strongly encourage people support (that may mean subscribing to) outlets that give a shit.

    *: couple decades back there was a pretty major “leak” of a neo nazi handbook for how to indoctrinate people. And it is terrifying how often the same tactics are used. It is probably on archive dot org somewhere?


  • The counter argument that picking and choosing creates a sense of priority and “missing out”. Because even if you didn’t actually want the canned peaches (NOBODY wants canned peaches), you are worried that the person ahead of you got it. Which tends to lead toward discontent or outright discouragement amongst those who “don’t really need it and are doing fine”.

    Whereas the box of food set aside by the volunteers? Half of you got canned peaches and the other half canned beets. While people are annoyed they got the god awful peaches, they at least feel better because “everyone is in this together” and so forth.

    Charity is a shockingly hard problem because so many people will insist they don’t actually need any help and so many things can create a barrier to make them decide it isn’t worth their time or the hit to their pride. And different models tend to appeal to different people. But, from talking to some of the organizers at a food bank I used to volunteer at a couple years ago, the “take what you need” model tends to pull in more “dumpster diving college kids” rather than “actual people in need”. But I suspect a lot of that is also a function of it having been in a college town.


  • It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.

    Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.

    THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.

    And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…