Oh, Synology. What’s up with them? I heard they’re experimenting with vendor lock-in for their hard drives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RscBZAiwGkA

I wish Hetzner didn’t require uploading my legal documents (they asked for my passport or ID) to verify my account. Otherwise, seems cool. I’m in the US.

Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you’ll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud

We’re so doomed. A lot of people will probably buy into this because they can’t possibly be inconvenienced by owning a computer.

I was talking about AI with someone the other day and they said, “Wow, in the future we probably won’t be able to work without a subscription to ChatGPT. Oh, well.” Like. wat. teh. faq. People see the convenience trap, but can’t be bothered to do anything about it. I hate this timeline.

I don’t actually own a Meshtastic device… but I did blow off work to do a little browsing and found this:

Meshtastic does not require any license and is open for anyone to use.

• https://www.austinmesh.org/learn/

Meshtastic does not require a HAM radio license to operate

• https://chicagolandmesh.org/guides/getting-started/

don’t need an amateur radio license for the low-power bands used by Meshtastic

• https://centralvalleymesh.net/docs/faq/#q12

setup with no need of complex licenses, it would be interesting

It doesn’t seem like you need any licensing, it’s like a walkie talkie.

it could prove as a useful city project for cheap, reliant, local communications

I’m not sure if that’s the right usecase. Meshtastic seems to be for short-range, line-of-sight-ish communication. Apparently, you can set up repeaters to expand the coverage area, but it seems like buildings, trees, etc will dramatically affect the signal strength. (I think?)

walkie talkie

Yeah, I think so. I saw a video where someone called it “a walkie talkie, but for sending text messages”. People use these for going on remote hikes, hunting trips, or protests. Basically, any area where you can’t use a cellphone. They’re not a replacement for cellphones, they fill a different usecase.

copy-paste

Sometimes you’ll see the punycode instead of the actual characters though.

You should consider trying to work for yourself

How do you even start this?

Relevant, about Kagi: https://マリウス.com/doubting-your-favorite-web-search-engine/

What about connectivity? I’m currently using Tailscale cuz it’s so easy. Maybe I should look into WireGuard? Also, how does Headscale fit into this?

Does anyone have a good guide for installing Seafile? I tried installing it a few months ago, but it’s so damn complicated with load balancers behind load balancers and a bunch of services tied together.

I gotta try again.

Macroshit Wangblows

Leechblock and unhook are required browser extensions for me.

YouTuber is extra tricky because I can easily convince myself that I’m not wasting time, I’m “learning”. Even though I doubt I’ll ever need to know how to build a mud hut with a secret swimming pool underneath…

In general, I found if I remove the addictive elements from YouTube or whatever, as opposed to blocking the website entirely, I’m more likely to stick to being sober. I treat my phone the same way, I use YAM Launcher to help remove distractions.

I don’t know anyone who works in tech (not IT) that is allowed to use Wangblows for development. If you’re a programmer/software developer, you’ll 1000% have to use Linux, either directly or indirectly. From small hardware devices, to automous cars, to simple web sites, all of that uses Linux. Lots of places give you a Linux laptop or at the very least give you Mac—because they consider Mac close enough to Linux. I’ve never needed to use Macroshit Office Suite for anything related to work. Zoom and Slack are the standard in Silicon Valley and both work fine on Linux.

Here’s my PR:

-A small and tidy task organiser 
+A small and giddy task organiser 

Uff. That sounds like a nightmare. I’m glad my job doesn’t force us to us AI. It’s encouraged, but also my managers say “Use whatever makes you the most productive.” AI makes me slower because I’m experienced and already know what I want and how I want it. So instead of fighting with the AI or fact checking it, I can just do shit right the first time.

For tasks that I don’t have experience in, a web search is just as fast. Search, click first link. OR. Sure, I’ll click and read a few pages, but that’s not wasted time. That’s called learning.

I have a friend who works at a company where they have AI usage quotas that affect their performance review. I would fucking quit that job immediately. Not all jobs are this crazy.

AI tends to generate tech debt. I have some coworkers that generate nasty, tech debt, AI slop merge requests for review. My policy is: if you’re not gonna take the time to use your brain and write something, then I’m not gonna waste my time reviewing your slop. In those cases, I use AI to “review” the code and decide to approve or not. IDGAF.

Yeah, I’m sure. It’s not something I would do frequently. My work had us on beefy desktops. But, I was totally fine with letting find+parallel+grep run for 30 minutes in the background while I searched docs or messaged people on slack. Depending on your team, getting a response from slack could easily take 24 hours so. Eh.

The other thing I liked to do is directly edit the libraries in the monorepo! No need to figure out how hack some random decency manager. You have the code! Just edit and build!

On the other hand, using ordinary tools like find and grep are exactly what I like about monorepos! Yes, they may take a while, but at least I know I’ll find a file or code that I’m looking for!

With multi-repos I’m constantly searching, but not finding where a particular piece of code comes from. Yes, it’s from library X, but where there heck does that live? Now I really can’t use ordinary tools. I have to rely on coworkers, docs, or GitLab to search for where a piece of code is actually defined.

AI coding tools definitely helpful with boilerplate code

They’re really not. Just because they generated a starter template for you doesn’t mean you actually needed all of that mountain of slop. My coworker recently did a presentation where he generated a starter project for a Go project and most of it was shit and just not necessary. People assume you need mountains of boilerplate, but you may not need that. (Worse, AI is cementing bad practices at work.)

But also, assuming your project does need to generate a ton of boilerplate, should you really be going to the casino and rolling for a fresh mountain of slop that is hopefully correct? We can already generate code: snippets (in your editor), templates (like cloning a template repo), and generators (like create-react-app) already exist. Aaand these are deterministic, debuggable, and fixable.

People: don’t bother to check if hardware is supported by Linux

Linux: 🤷 Aaah… yeah, I don’t support that… Sorrie? 🤷

People: leenuts suxxx!!!