Tim

Unfortunately it is the nature of the anti-coding-LLM debate that people who never wrote a line of assembly language, and never in their lives wrote a line of code that wouldn’t be run in a managed runtime of some kind, now think they’re the Masters of the Coding Universe and are qualified to dictate what are the Right Tools and the Wrong Tools to be a Real Programmer™.

Fortunately, as you rightly point out we’ve seen this dance a hundred times before. This too shall pass.

Yep, I set mine up last weekend.

Used a nice Racknex rackmount kit to put a Raspberry Pi with SDR in the rack, and a little LCD display on the front that cycles through the details of aircraft currently in range - so it also serves the important purpose of Blinkenlights.

I’m fortunate to live close to two international airports (one small, one big) and under a reasonably busy flight corridor as well, so plenty of planes to spot - light aircraft, helicopters and military all the way up to A380s.

TL;DR:

• Some of Cloudflare’s customers are bad people.
• Canonical used Cloudflare to defend attack.
• Did Cloudflare blackmail Canonical!???!?!??!!!11

TWTLT;DR:

• No.

You can subnet logically with IPv4.

If you go IPv6 on the internal network you ‘win’ not having NAT, and exposing all your intrrnal services to the net (which… just why?), but lose the ability to do redundant ISPs/failover/loadbalancing, policy based routing, VPNs… Unless you do IPv6 address translation. Which puts you back to “IPv4+NAT, except more complicated.”

IPv6 inside the firewall is more or less entirely pointless.

I wouldn’t have an objection to paying them for that.

I did object them to them trying to charge me to stream from my server to my TV in the same house without touching any of Plex’s infrastructure at all, because their license-check is too dumb to understand some of us use things like “subnets”. (I objected even more that their “support” teams are evidently staffed by obnoxious jerks trained only to say “give us money”.)

Fortunately I found the switch to Jellyfin incredibly easy, and so far it’s actually been more reliable than Plex ever was.

I was contributing to Open Source almost certainly before you were born, so wind your neck in kid. But, even if we suppose you are right and the GPL somehow restricts the use of licensed works for AI training (although a quick refresh on the license shows no evidence that it does) - while GPL fanatics make the most noise, it is absolutely not the most popular open source license.

GPL variants covers roughly 20% of the licensed work on Github. The vast majority of such work is permissive open-source licensed, with the MIT license covering almost 50% alone. That’s because the vast majority of open source contributors are not in fact wannabe Citizen Smiths, but rather people who want, without restriction, to contribute to the advancement of computing.

Have you ever read an open source license? They gave away those rights, voluntarily.

If you have evidence that AI is being trained on world licensed to the contrary then by all means get exercised about those “workers” rights (right on, man,) but given the vast quantities of code released under permissive open source licenses, it’s not going to change anything.

I don’t know if it was a decade ahead, but it was really nice. Well thought out UI, really nice and fluid even on not the best hardware, the address-book integration with messaging and throughout the OS was really nice for its time, and some of the phones were actually pretty good (my Nokia had a great camera compared to most.)

Most important for me, at the time it had by far the best dual-SIM support - with active/active radios and proper management of things like separate default SIM for messaging/calls/data at a time when most Android phones with dual SIM were pretty awful, and nearly a decade before Apple would offer dual SIM at all.

I was genuinely sorry to let my last Windows Phone go.

How is it “stealing” if it’s open source?

I have sympathy with artists, authors and the like whose work was taken to train AIs. But software engineering - nah. We gave the training data away for free, neatly catalogued in bitesize chunks with explanations for every change - we don’t get to call “take backsies” now.

That seems unlikely; trust me, there are services running behind Cloudflare tunnels that are doing more requests per second than whatever you’re hosting does in a year.

The only times I’ve had performance problems with Cloudflare tunnels it’s been intermediate network kit that didn’t like IPv6 or didn’t like QUIC (or both). You can try disabling both in cloudflared to diagnose (at least, you used to be able to disable them/switch to HTTP/2+IPv4, it’s been a very long time since I’ve needed to so I’m just assuming it’s still an option.)

That’s brilliant, thank you!

They should cover JPEG compression at some point; when I first learned how that worked (at uni nearly 40 years ago… God) I was blown away by how beautiful that algorithm is.

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.

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.

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.