Spyke

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GUIs

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The cli has one other benefit which I think is rarely recognised: it's pretty easy to tell someone you need to run "xyz -a -b -c" (bringing the safety risk with it to be fair), but it gets a lot harder to be like "so in the top left there is a cog button that opens a panel on the right where you're looking for the 2nd tab and there'll be a checkbox".

The things I appreciate even more than a good gui are programs with a good gui and a cli.

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*Permanently Deleted*

The fact that he didn't do it by himself tells you he did not wear it with any previous partners who didn't make him. So yes, that puts his likelihood of STD rather high.

You were 100% right to make him wear one.

privacy

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Apple and Google have been given until September to install software that blocks explicit images on children’s mobile phones or face legislation

Starmer said the plan meant the UK would become the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images.

Oh yeah for sure, definitely how it's gonna work out. If history has taught us anything it's that teenagers give up easily and aren't at all persistent and innovative when it comes to being told no. And surely they don't care about porn at all either.

After all, the online safety bill has been a sweeping success. Something to be proud of.

privacy

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Driver facing camera in cars

We got a modern BYD recently as a rental on a holiday that had this, it was really annoying. Anytime anything happened the car beeped, it was near constant different beeps - super distracting. Most of the things could be turned off, but had to be turned off each time the car was started, on a tablet buried in various menus.

The attention thing also wasn't working great with the driver wearing sunglasses, it'd randomly start complaining. It also complained when the driver would lean forward to get a better view around a corner or anything.

It was a very fancy car, but I'd definitely never choose a car with these features, even though some may probably be useful.

I'd also never trust one of these companies not to change the policy on what they can do with this camera in the future, at which point you'll have little to no choice about it. Or, to find out they messed up and now anyone can watch you in your car.

I'd go back to the dealership and complain, either ask for a refund or a way to be able to cover the camera, especially if they only disclosed it as you got the car.

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We can't just call AI-generated code slop anymore

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Even if that were true (and in some rare cases it probably is) the machine is trained on stolen data, ignoring all licensing or companies selling people's contributions without their approval - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

To call it slop is a great way to discredit it and to not support an unethical business/technology.

linux

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[Discussion] My thoughts about the usability of Linux

I never understood the argument of "if it's not in the UI you may need to use a command to achieve it and it's scary".

On windows, if it's not in the UI you have to use either a powershell command or update the registry to change it - which are both a very similar experience.

The only difference I actually see in this point is that Linux has a lot more options.

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We can't just call AI-generated code slop anymore

I don't think everything is getting called ai slop, but I would say if any part of your project is ai slop (like your "lazy uis") I'd also immediately lose trust in the entirety of the project, especially if it's intended to be around security. I do think most projects that use AI for code generation are slop though, I've seen far fewer examples of good use (i.e. where the output looks human written because the operator reviewed and refactored every part of it, or where it was used to write small parts of functions rather than entire functionalities)

Your last sentence I think provides a great argument for why people here (and more and more broadly in engineering) hate on ai generated code in general. It produces such vast quantities of code (and often unnecessarily) that it becomes infeasible for a human to review it, immediately requiring us to place trust in the machine to both generate it and review it, and to continue maintaining it while the human operator probably does not even have full understanding of what's changing. A machine, that we all know hallucinates and generates often low quality garbage, including severe security vulnerabilities by design. According to GitHub, your project has millions of lines of changes on a weekly basis in the earlier days, that does scream slop to me.

Last, AI is more and more hated due to the increasing number of horrible impacts it has on our world, personally I'd not support AI generated projects just on that principle alone.

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All my new code will be closed-source from now on - Marc J. Schmidt

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I don't think it is selfish to expect to be compensated for your work - open source or otherwise - especially when you do start doing it for others (e.g. dealing with issues, reviewing prs, fixing and implementing things you wouldn't just for yourself).

If you don't expect it that's great, but as he pointed out - that's charity. No reason to expect that everyone will be in a position to do that indefinitely, especially when it comes to massive projects that turn into full time jobs.

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What thing at work made you rage quit your job?

I worked for a reasonably successful startup in IT, and quit around the time when investors started calling for their returns. It went from the focus being providing good service to selling something, anything, whether we have it or not to boost the books before the end of next quarter. Every quarter. Our sales team who used to be part of the product design process and knew more about our product than some engineers were getting replaced with people who didn't even know the name of features. They just made up things to potential customers and straight up lied, once the paper was signed they were done.

It was demoralising to see and go through this, I was a tech team lead for one of our core products and the requirements were mad. Every customer started becoming their own product because of all the overpromising, and it was all the absolute bare minimum. Anyhow, I was on good terms with the remaining few old sales people as we had worked together a lot prior to this mess.

I remember sitting in a meeting with some higher management and one of these older sales guys where he was saying he does not know what to do anymore and needs help or we need to change something as it's impossible to do his job well anymore with these expectations that we just abandon customers as soon as they're signed and chase new business. He broke down crying during the call while he was explaining how soul crushing it was to have to do this to people - build up a relationship, convince them to pay us and then ignore them immediately. There was an awkward quiet in the room when he finished and the "top dog" in the room just said "try to detach yourself, it's just business" and then we moved on.

I saw myself becoming that man in a year, maybe 2 tops. I started interviewing the next day and found a new job in about 2 weeks (luckily this was when IT was booming and recruiters were lining up for anyone with engineer in their title). The company has since been sold multiple times and completely exhausted to a husk. The last sale I'm pretty sure was just a large enterprise acquiring staff and some tech.

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GenAI has started to kill open source projects

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"Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever," he added. He then goes on to explain that "The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework."

People no longer need to look at their docs or their website because they ask AI how to do something with tailwind instead, so they no longer get to expose and advertise their product (tailwind plus).

Tailwind plus is a one time payment, not a subscription. If there are no new customers to buy it, their income is gone.