Tim

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.

What’s the problem with Nextcloud? I use KeepassDX (on android, KeepassXC on desktop) with the database on Nextcloud and don’t have any problem syncing.

find . -name LICENSE.md -print

There, arduous search complete.

I thought it was well known/understood that the server component was how Joplin pays their wages, and thus being under a different license is hardly a big shock; it’s entirely optional, and the fact they’re still sharing the source seems like a good thing rather than bad.

As for “they could just keep adding licenses!!!” Well, yeah, but so could any project. Apache could stick a proprietary license deep in a folder of httpd tomorrow and unless you were looking, you’d never know. Even a GPL project could incorporate a proprietary licensed component tomorrow provided it wasn’t linked into the binary/was a separate piece of software - like, say, the server component of Joplin. You just trust that they won’t, and/or properly check changes whenever you pull a new release like you were supposed to be doing anyway for security (hahaha, ok, no you weren’t,) or trust that if they did pull shenanigans it would be ‘news’ and you would hear about it.

That Joplin is open about it, and they retain the original licenses of FOSS they have incorporated instead of deleting/hiding the original license is a good thing. I wish more did it.

Actually it was Sequoia that was the last straw for me to get rid of most of my Macs (replaced them with Linux machines in the main - I was just so sick of Apple trying to turn the OS into a phone while not fixing basic known bugs that have been around for years - like forgetting external display layouts one in ten boots, not restarting external drives properly after sleep, and the finder being, well, everything about the finder…) And constantly having to fight with crappy “oh, today all your builds are going to fail because I’ve decided ld.so isn’t trusted any more” locked down platform nonsense. And creeping “you don’t need to know where your files are stored, they’re In The Cloud, stop asking for a file dialog (and that’s why we’ll never fix the finder btw)” type crap from the ever increasing number of un-uninstallable crapware applications wasting disk space with every update…

But yeah, you’re right - the visual horrorshow that is Tahoe was the trigger to finally give Asahi a try on my last remaining Mac.

Shame really; until a couple of years ago I’d had exclusively Macs for desktops & laptops since the late 90s (from the lovely Powerbook G3 Lombard on.)

It would be quite nice if they added some MacOS features back to MacOS instead of trying desperately to turn it into a mobile phone OS.

That said, Sequoia is so objectively awful it finally gave me the kick I needed to nuke my MacBook Air and install Asahi, and I’m genuinely really impressed. The only shame is having to waste 80gb of disk for a MacOS partition that I’ll never use, but otherwise it’s actually good enough to be a daily driver.

Coding is a solved problem; people with zero understanding can do it by copypasta from stack overflow, and similarly skilled LLMs can do it right now, cheaper. If you’re a “coder”, you have a lovely hobby but no career. Sorry.

If you’re a software engineer though, you have nothing to fear from current LLMs. But there is much more chance of LeCun’s models learning engineering - i.e. problem solving, in which writing code is just one of the tools, and not even the most important one - through physical experience and not just text. It is, after all, how all the software engineers today did the vast majority of their learning.

I still find it fairly wild that on US domestic arrivals they seemingly dump your baggage straight onto the sidewalk and you have to race to get to it before the nearest tramp does… There is much about US airport design that seems absurd in an international context.

Are the airport facilities (i.e. how much space is given over to security, how many scanners there will be, the queuing arrangements, that sort of thing) part of TSA’s remit, or is that someone else’s problem and they just work with what they’re given by the airport authorities (genuine question)? Because as an outsider, it doesn’t feel like “having basic airport security” is an absurd thing - it’s “doing it badly with completely inadequate capacity” that is. It doesn’t have to be that way (nowhere else in the world seems to have this problem), but it seems like in the US instead of doing the job properly they’ve instead decided to just come up with an endless number of schemes to allow people to pay to jump the queue instead of actually fixing the queue. I guess if that’s the TSA’s responsibility, I’d probably hate them too…

I mean, sure, if the only threat you can imagine is an exact replica of 9/11, sure, I guess they’re useless. But there have been far more people killed by bombs on airliners than 9/11, and someone needs to do the screening.

It can be true that the TSA are assholes, and also that US airport security was laughable before 9/11 and someone probably ought to be checking baggage for threats. Particularly while, as a nation, you seem to be doing everything in your power to make every country in the world except Russia hate you.

The weird thing about this thread is just how many people hate the TSA.

And I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t, but - it’s weird. I don’t hate the guys and girls who work at airport security anywhere else (and I fly a lot, around Europe and Asia.) They’re just people doing a job that I regret is necessary, on the whole keeping people safe. Even the ones in China with a battery and cigarette lighter fetish.

What is it about the US that means as soon as someone gets even the remotest sniff of ‘power’ that they have to turn into a monumental asshole? There has to be something about education, society, organisation structures, whatever that makes the US almost uniquely like the Stanford Prison Experiment on a continental scale.

It’s definitely starting to feel like having your rights enshrined on unalterable tablets of stone, but which must be re-interpreted by a half dozen political appointees holding a seance with the founding fathers every few months, may not be the platonic ideal of governance that Americans are constantly telling the world it is.

China does not control the vast majority of rare earths because they’re only found in China (or even because they’re particularly rare, they’re not.)

China controls the market because they were the only people who actually bothered to build extraction and refinement capabilities.

If the US invested half the money it puts into “clean coal” or oil and gas extraction into rare earth extraction and processing, it would have its own supplies. But that would be woke, or something.

The US is battling the environmental and human rights issues that so agitate them about China by promoting ‘clean coal’ and rounding up brown people in concentration camps without due process.

It’s almost as if environmental and human rights issues weren’t their real concern 🤔.

But also markedly better in many. I’ve worked in Changsha on and off for the last decade, and I’d move there to live in a heartbeat. The modern US I wouldn’t touch with a hundred foot pole.

That’s subjective of course - but, while I don’t know what you’re taught in the US (it’s actually exciting to learn that you still have schools, I thought they’d all been converted into gun ranges) about China, that some people are clueing up to the reality being different is an objectively good thing - even if it’s not all sunshine and roses in Xi’s world either.

I seem to recall that if the disk had copy protection you could also use this to simulate an earthquake as the 1541 threw its heads against the stops with all its might…

Happy days!

Don’t forget a UK gallon is about 25% bigger than a US gallon (160fl.oz vs 128fl.oz).

(Why yes, yes Imperial measurements are fucking ridiculous, thank you for noticing…)

Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.

I live in (Eastern) Europe.

That’s an incredibly longwinded way of saying “mahh Tezlur burns three times as much ‘clean coal’ per mile as a commie BMW, yee-haw”.