Tim

This gets repeated a lot - but for avoidance of doubt, practically no normal people use VPNs in China, and the government is very successful at blocking them.

You can set up a brand new, never seen before VPN on entirely new IPs and random ports today, and at 1am tomorrow it’ll be blocked. Commercial VPNs are basically unusable. (For a while, Cloudflare Warp was a very nice way around - but they put a stop to that too.)

IF you have a competent government willing to put the work in, blocking VPNs is entitely doable. That “if” is probably our best hope in the west, though.

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.

That sounds sweetly naive. “Producing innaccurate technical advice, with a confident tone, at scale” sounds like the perfect credentials for a career in consultancy.

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.)

Another perfectly normal day in Dumbfuckistan.

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.

You do realise that “not being afraid of the police” is actually the norm in most developed democracies, right?

The state of the US police force is not some kind of act of God that nothing can be done about. You’re just all too goddamned lazy and selfish to fix it (see also: healthcare, education, school shootings, …)

Provided they are made with rolled steel and have a big-ass two-stroke diesel attached, I am entirely sure that routers are within the abilities of the US’s high-tech industrial base.

Can you power a router with Clean Coal™?

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.

Honestly, if I thought most homeschooled kids were “learning … from very knowledgeable people” I might find it less disturbing, but the reality is most of them are learning from religious zealots, conspiracy theorists, or other fruitloops who think going to a proper school will make them catch the gay. It creates a self-perpetuating underclass, and the parents should be locked up for child abuse long before the diddling starts.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the first warning sign of a society heading for collapse is when “home schooling” becomes normalised, instead of being prima facie evidence that the kids are being abused and should be immediately taken into care.

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