Tim

I got a sitewide warning a couple of months ago for suggesting that Trump’s inaugural “board of peace” meeting was the apotheosis of the “you have one bullet…” thought experiment. “After reviewing, we found that you broke Rule 1 because you threatened violence or physical harm.” I’ll wager Trump’s secret service guys were absolutely shitting themselves when they read it, so it’s probably for the best they took it down tbf.

On the bright side, it was the kick up the backside that was needed to get me to try Lemmy, and I hardly use Reddit at all now.

When I’m on a plane I still idly think about the possibility of there being a gremlin out there on the wing eating an engine…

(I fly a lot and even learned to fly gliders/sailplanes back in the day, so definitely not afraid of flying, but if I’m ever sat next to William Shatner I’m deplaning. No point taking chances. ;-).)

Since imgur was blocked in the UK I was searching for an alternative way to occasuonally share photos on a Usenet group I’m in. (Text group, not binary, of course.)

I ended up just settling on a Hugo static site. It’s not quite drag and drop, but close enough for me - I just drag the photos into a content directory, run a build script and push the repo - argo deploys it.

Because it’s just plain old httpd serving static files, in a container, it’s about as safe/stable as I can make it.

You seem to be under the impression that booking.com provides property management services. I’m not aware of them doing any such thing, but if they do them she should absolutely raise a dispute under her contract for those services. A quick scan of their information page for property owners is pretty clear, though, that it’s the property owners’ responsibility to get insurance if they need it (they even have some partner links for insurance providers.)

Using booking.com to advertise and resell her business does not change the fact that managing that business is entirely on her. If she doesn’t want to put in the minimum effort, or expense (e.g. insurance) required, she should get out of the business of property letting.

You can hate booking.com for many reasons, but “not running my spare property as a hotel for me so I can just sit back and count the cash” isn’t really one of them.

I hate not to join a pileon, but if the landlady didn’t want to deal with the consequences of letting random strangers into her property unsupervised for money, she shouldn’t advertise her property for random strangers to occupy for money.

Short term rentals are a business, not a free money machine. Even rent extraction requires slightly more effort than just depositing the cheques - dealing with customers’ behaviour is a cost of doing business. If, like most short-term let grifters, she is not capable of handing that responsibly she should get out of it (and good riddance - short term rentals do no good and plenty of harm to society.)

They know the user’s identity - they have the name and home address on the credit card used to pay.

If you mean “it doesn’t have the user’s ID card”, well that’s true. But that’s mainly because the UK doesn’t actually have an ID card or national ID database/reference number, so NO operator in the UK has “the user’s ID” in that sense.

You think they don’t already? Can you even use an iPhone without an Apple ID? I’m fairly sure you couldn’t install any apps without one, and if you’ve ever paid for anything they definitely already have your real data.

I’ve always preferred Gitlab to Github anyway, but I recently migrated all my repos to a self-hosted Gitlab and it wasn’t too painful. Despite the woeful documentation of the Helm chart configuration.

I know there are other options (Forgejo et al,) but the thought of migrating all my CI/CD pipelines to a new platform was too much to bear - moving from .com to self-hosted though is much more manageable.

Why the ever loving fuck does an init system even need a user database?

Honest to God, if FIFA were giving out a World “Understanding UNIX” Prize, Poettering would be the inaugural, and only, winner. Never in the field of operating systems has one man driven so much enshittification through sheer force of cluelessness coupled with supreme arrogance. And in a world that Steve Ballmer still occupies, that’s one hell of an accolade.

I mean, I haven’t argued with an AI for 2.5 hours straight, because I know how to use them. And I don’t expect them to think for me, because I know they’re not capable of it.

I was writing assembly language for embedded controllers where the memory is measured in bytes not megabytes, professionally, before half of you were born. I’ve developed preemptive multitasking OSes for 8 but microcontrollers, by hand, for money. These skills ceased to be particularly useful decades ago, but I didn’t sit down and sulk because optimising compilers and ludicrously cheap memory had ended my career, I moved with the times.

Practically everyone who calls themselves a “programmer” has never had the training wheels taken off since the invention of managed runtimes, you don’t now get to complain about what is or is not proper programming. The actual software engineers, who understood that the code was always just a side effect of their real job - understanding and solving problems - just have a new, and really cool, tool to learn how to use. The ones who aren’t up to it will spend 2.5hrs arguing with their AI, and then go back to coding for a hobby. And that’s fine - but if you refuse to learn AI as a tool, you no longer have a career in this industry. Any more than I would’ve if I had refused to accept that memory is basically free now and compilers can write assembly better than me.

Warning, anecdote:

I was unexpectedly stuck in Asia for the last month (because of the impact of the war), turning an in-person dev conference I was organising into an “in-person except for me” one at a few days notice.

I needed a simple countdown timer/agenda display I could mix into the video with OBS; a simple requirement, so I tried a few from the standard package repos (apt, snap store, that kind of thing.)

None of them worked the way I wanted or at all - one of them written in Python installed about 100 goddamned dependencies (because, Python,) and then crashed because, well, Python.

So I gave up and asked my local hosted LLM model to write it for me in Rust. In less than 10 minutes I had exactly what I wanted, in a few hundred lines of Rust. And yeah, I did tidy it up and publish it to the snap store as well, because it’s neat and it might help someone else.

Which is more secure? The couple of hundred lines of Rust written by my LLM, or the Python or node.js app that the developer pinky-promises was written entirely by human hand, and which downloads half the Internet as dependencies that I absolutely am not going to spend time auditing just to display a goddamned countdown clock in a terminal window?

The solution to managing untrusted code isn’t asking developers for self-declared purity test results. It’s sandboxing, containers, static analysis… All the stuff that you are doing already with all the code/apps you download if you’re actually concerned. You are doing those things, right?

Honestly, any developer that isn’t using an LLM as an assistant these days is an idiot and should be fired/shunned as such; it’s got all the rational sense of “I refuse to use compilers and I hand-write my assembly code in vi.”

(And I speak as someone who has a .emacs file that’s older than most programmers alive today and finally admitted I should stop using csh as my default shell this year.)

Here’s the disclosure you need: all projects you see have involved AI somewhere, whether the developers like to admit it or not. End of. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. Railing against it really isn’t going to change anything.

If you’ve seen how badly specified, documented and behaved OpenAI’s APIs are, you’d guess this was already the case.

I don’t see the pitchfork mob making that distinction. (And I think you are severely underestimating the capability of, say, the qwen-3.5 models locally hosted with a good CLI agent like Mistral Vibe.)

Personally, I run them on my own hardware, and am trying to learn to use and supervise them appropriately. The things they are good for they are amazing at. And yeah, they are also often mendacious and unreliable with the possibility of going rogue - but no more than any junior developer or intern. If you can’t manage an AI, you can’t manage hires either - which for a hobbyist is just fine of course, but if you’re a professional it’s not a good look.

You either learn to ride the wave, or you let it drown you. Shaking your fists at the tsumani though is a sure fire route to involuntary early retirement.

You’re exactly right.

I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.

AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.

I ain’t reading all that… All I can say is, sync (both ways) with Keepass & Nextcloud on Android works just fine for me.

What’s the problem with Nextcloud? I use KeepassDX (on android, KeepassXC on desktop) with the database on Nextcloud and don’t have any problem syncing.

find . -name LICENSE.md -print

There, arduous search complete.

I thought it was well known/understood that the server component was how Joplin pays their wages, and thus being under a different license is hardly a big shock; it’s entirely optional, and the fact they’re still sharing the source seems like a good thing rather than bad.

As for “they could just keep adding licenses!!!” Well, yeah, but so could any project. Apache could stick a proprietary license deep in a folder of httpd tomorrow and unless you were looking, you’d never know. Even a GPL project could incorporate a proprietary licensed component tomorrow provided it wasn’t linked into the binary/was a separate piece of software - like, say, the server component of Joplin. You just trust that they won’t, and/or properly check changes whenever you pull a new release like you were supposed to be doing anyway for security (hahaha, ok, no you weren’t,) or trust that if they did pull shenanigans it would be ‘news’ and you would hear about it.

That Joplin is open about it, and they retain the original licenses of FOSS they have incorporated instead of deleting/hiding the original license is a good thing. I wish more did it.

Actually it was Sequoia that was the last straw for me to get rid of most of my Macs (replaced them with Linux machines in the main - I was just so sick of Apple trying to turn the OS into a phone while not fixing basic known bugs that have been around for years - like forgetting external display layouts one in ten boots, not restarting external drives properly after sleep, and the finder being, well, everything about the finder…) And constantly having to fight with crappy “oh, today all your builds are going to fail because I’ve decided ld.so isn’t trusted any more” locked down platform nonsense. And creeping “you don’t need to know where your files are stored, they’re In The Cloud, stop asking for a file dialog (and that’s why we’ll never fix the finder btw)” type crap from the ever increasing number of un-uninstallable crapware applications wasting disk space with every update…

But yeah, you’re right - the visual horrorshow that is Tahoe was the trigger to finally give Asahi a try on my last remaining Mac.

Shame really; until a couple of years ago I’d had exclusively Macs for desktops & laptops since the late 90s (from the lovely Powerbook G3 Lombard on.)