I'm done trying to take the hard-line anti-genAI stance that I see so much both here on the fediverse and in the broader discourse among programmers. When I'm truly honest, I have to admit that I find the technology too fascinating, entertaining, and yes, sometimes useful to outright avoid it on ethical grounds. I'm through being a hypocrite. As with my rejection of religion some 14 years ago, it's better to admit I don't really believe, in this case in the arguments against using genAI.
What does this mean specifically? For starters, I won't keep repeating and amplifying the arguments that I've now rejected. I'll use genAI models as I wish, for both business and pleasure. I may post publicly about particularly useful or entertaining things that come out of those sessions, behind this content warning. And I'll start playing around with Claude Code or other similar agents.
But, I'll respect the wishes of any project or future employer that does not want LLM-generated code. I'll review all LLM-generated code that I contribute to any project, and be forthright about the use of genAI in writing that code. And I'll try to be careful about not using an LLM to closely imitate code from known copyleft-licensed projects in whatever domain I'm working in.
Asking for help! My wife is currently locked out of most digital services due to her phone being broken, and all passwords being in #bitwarden . The bitwarden webapp doesn't help because it asks a verification code, sent on an email which password is.. in bitwarden. What can we do?
- stop hiding which window has focus. It used be done well in 1984 - stop stealing fucking click. If I dismiss one of you fucking dialog the click should not be passed down - start serving user, and I don't mean in a cookbook way
Когда я была ещё маленьким аутёнком и не понимала людей, я решила прочесть одну из книг-инструкций Дейла Карнеги. Прочла. Из всех советов помню единственный: подумали что-то хорошее о человеке — скажите ему.
В подростковом возрасте следовать совету для меня было почти невозможно, но со временем получилось. И всем хорошо: человеку — от комплимента, а тебе — от его радости.
В итоге, понимать людей мне помогли не инструкции, а тонны прочитанной художественной литературы и внимательное наблюдение за окружающими. Так что мало кто разглядит во мне того аутёнка теперь. (А он есть.)
Those of you keeping track will know that I did a Christmas market tour early December last year. I ended up downloading the Karlsruhe transit authority’s (KVV) app and buying a day ticket or two off them.
These days I’m more familiar with German transit ticketing, so I haven’t used the KVV app since then.
And today I have received this SMS, telling me they’re going to delete my account soon.
…
⁃ A company that is systematically deleting accounts after a year? ⁃ That takes their data protection responsibilities seriously? ⁃ That proactively informs their data subjects with plenty of time to cope? ⁃ That doesn’t do so using dark marketing patterns that try to guilt me into staying? ⁃ Or upsell me? ⁃ Or trick me into clicking somewhere as the only way to exercise my rights?
I am agog. My flabber is truly ghasted.
Genuinely, this sort of attitude needs to be praised. It’s been 10 years since GDPR, and this sort of thing is still that rare.
⁃ It was sent by SMS to my Spanish number. They don’t care that the number is not German. Their systems will allow this. ⁃ It was sent by SMS, not WhatsApp, which is annoyingly increasingly becoming the default messaging platform for this sort of thing, thus making an American company the mediator of all your messages. ⁃ It was sent in English, my language of choice on their website and app, their processes are capable of checking my language preferences ⁃ No link was included. Nor instructions. If you care about this, it’s obvious what to do. No need to send something that can be turned into a Phishing vector ⁃ My name wasn’t mentioned, no need to attempt to gender me by giving me a title
None of these things are standard yet, and they should be. If you work for a consumer-facing company, can you say that your customer data will be treated this way?
Almost makes me want to keep my account with them, just for the respect they’ve shown
Memphis residents say they're already grappling for clean air after Elon Musk’s AI company began pumping out plumes of pollution to power its gargantuan data center.
You might not notice it in your peer group, when you are not their age, but my daughter showed me that many 20-30yr olds are switching to dumb phones, are cancelling their Facebook/tiktok/twitter accounts and are discovering libraries and printed books. As a conscious decision. Not all of them, but quite a lot and it's growing.
another nice thing you can do with delta chat is having in-chat tools like shopping lists in the family chat where anyone can add or mark an item as done and is marked for everyone, collaborative text pad, to-do lists, split bills, mini-games etc. you can even write your own small utility apps and share it in the chats and your contacts will be able to use them in all platforms
the speed is of chatting is realtime if you use the optimized chatmail relays instead of classic email
Running a whole GUI as root, with a ton of unaudited code running in the same process and that brings in more code across IPC barriers, and has the tendency to poke at random environment variables, mmap random files, and read/write configuration.
Unfortunately the open source ecosystem doesn't have many external signals to users about which components are on the other side of a GUI's d-bus interactions and whether they have been audited. The polkit prompts give many uses the sense that they are granting the GUI application permission to "Run as Administrator" in the language of Windows.
IIRC, udisks is pretty complicated to set up (and depends on polkit which can also be quite tricky). Consider that folks who need a GUI want something dead simple. Like “sudo gparted-daemon” and then “gparted-gui” on another terminal.
It also the kind of tool that is usually used quickly in some one-off scenario, not something for which one wants to dedicate lots of time setting up and configuring.
"depends on polkit" yeah, no shit. The privilege escalation flow is a solved problem if you use the tools that the OS provides you. "Something dead simple" is not a thing, unless you want to re-implement everything that already exists and is well integrated with the rest of the OS. In short: people don't want "dead simple" as in "I have to run two binaries"; they want something that works like everything else.
in short: yes, there's some complexity, usually already dealt with by the people developing the applications and integrating your OS. The complexity is not there for shits and giggles, and it's only visible if you're taking over from those two roles above. Some computer touchers enjoy doing the integrator's job, but that's not something that actual users have to care about.
people want “dead simple" and “want something that works like everything else”. That’s why they (try to) run gparted as root.
You can just create a socket for IPC, and use group membership to control permissions. Linux, BSD and any other Unix-like support this just fine.
Perhaps polkit+udisks has some technical advantage (compared to a socket) in some specific use case, but folks will always go for convenience. Especially the kind of folks who want a GUI.
an OpenBSD and Alpine user coming here and arguing for ease of use with handrolled IPC sockets instead of the proper privilege escalation API that is well integrated with desktop environments used by millions of people…
I've been hearing this argument for 10 years, specifically about GParted. What's the reason that the functionality you describe never got implemented? Or was it implemented, and people are just using it wrong?
@Corax42 it's a simple case of nobody putting in the work after the introduction of polkit in 2007; people worked around it with `sudo gparted` because they could.
I have an alarm in my phone called "Germantown." I have no idea why. It was probably a dictation error. But today I need to call someone from Germany at 9 AM, and as I was setting an alarm for it, I realized that "Germantown" is set for 9 AM. So I just turned it on instead of making a new one. Small things amuse me sometimes.
Iran may be on the verge of Internet shutdowns again. If you have friends or family in #Iran, now is the time to let them onboard for example with tiiiz.ir -- because using in-country servers helps to stay connected. If you need support for setting up a relay in or for Iran, send us a DM and we'll see to connect you with other knowledgeable operators. با آرزوی فردایی بهتر...
Please don't overwork yourself. If you feel exhausted, please take a break. Pease don't hesitate to call us via DECT 1023 at any time to sign out of a shift if you can't make it or feel uncomfortable for any reason.
While some people on our team are enjoying the opportunity of learning a lot more things about postgresql, in the meantime here's a rendered version of the map of the event as of the evening of December 24th:
how do you make these decisions around the repo, such as where to host it and what version control system to use? Is it a somewhat rational process or is it a decision from the guts?
its typically a discussion in the team and an attempt to sense what people in general would like and prefer, but ultimately also a good portion of gut feeling...
Matt Campbell
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Matt Campbell
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