- Can confirm no-BYOD policy is typical. I had to whine directly and without invitation to school principal to get an exemption for daughter. The trouble with no-BYOD is the kid must bring the school-controlled Chromebook home and connect to the home network for homework (which often requires Chromebook). Many US middle and high schools have an IT department of 1 or 2 people; it introduces abuse risk I think schools in general are not appreciating.
I see the problem with Chromebooks and cloud stuff more generally as being that it's difficult to see the productive use-case of programming outside just shuffling a bunch of data around. If your program's not actually doing something useful, it seems like it'd be difficult to imagine a career in it. -But if a kid can get a relay to trigger via button and then maybe via web interface and then maybe automate it, I think that opens the world of hacking up to them. You know, for $10, they can have a fully-solar (w/battery) thermometer or whatever they want -- the thermometer can feed a thermostat to energize a relay coil to start a heater or whatever.
-But I might be outlier, because in school we had robotics class a lot of kids were pumped for, but I was confused because we never did anything useful with them; it was more like an art class, except at least in art class we baked ashtrays for our parents. -But what am I supposed to do with a 5-watt robot that follows yellow tape?
- yes, this is also largely how I use it; suiting workflows to my taste in a sort of "artisanal" way. most recent tool is a Windows "omniterminal" for Serial/SSH/SFTP, but there is a handful of bugs and missing wiring left (serial in particular is still in poor shape). 4MB .7z archive; portable binary; Rust source included: https://archivalcopy.com/content/category-utilities/category...
I also agree with comment that it seems silly to try widely releasing something you could just ask an LLM to make. Instead of something taking a team months or years, you can knock out most things in a weekend. I think vibe-coded stuff is best for hobbyists and experimentation.
- Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it.
Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.
- Rust works very well for vibe-coding because the compiler is typically very specific and a bit picky; helps keep it out of traps. I like using WASM with Rust as originator when vibe-coding because AI models are still very "sloppy/forgetful". There is one thing you should still definitely do beforehand, and that's pick out which crates you want and write up the initial Cargo.toml for it, because frontier models have a lot of trouble with fast-updated libraries.
What frontier models also excel at is writing their own libraries and skipping third-party dependencies. It's very easy for a human to just pick up a bloated 750kb library they're only going to actually use 15kb worth of its code for, BUT that library can serve as a valuable implementation model for someone very patient and willing to "reinvent the wheel" a little bit, which is definitely going to be AI and not me, because I just want to point to a black box and tell it what to do. For big things like web server, I'm still defaulting to Axum, but for things like making a JS soundbank parser/player or a WebGL2 mp4 & webm parser/demuxer & player, these are tasks frontier models are good for with the right prompting.
To an extent, maybe counter-intuitively, I think the big thing we'll see out of AI is an explosion of artisanship -- with humanoid robots in 2040, perhaps, our households may be making their own butter again, for example.
- This website has guidelines? I have a friend who vomits out what an AI's response to something is to current events; drives me mad, but I resist being a dick about it (to their face).
I don't recall any instances where I've run into the problem here, maybe because I tend to arrive to threads as a result of them being popular (listed on Google News) which means I'm only going to read the top 10-50 posts. I read human responses for a bit before deciding if I should continue reading, and that's the same system I use for LLMs because sometimes I can't tell just by the formatting; if it's good, it's good - if it's bad, it's bad -- I don't care if a chicken with syphilis wrote it.
- yes; I think it depends a lot on how accepted the icon is. Every few months when I have to open ST's CubeProgrammer, my brain substantially deteriorates because they don't use text and the icons for their main tabs are not always understandable to me. (and the thing's otherwise a relic from 20+ years ago)
X, volume & mute icon, disk icon, upload/download icon -- these are all fine and good; you don't need to spell those out for me because their use is so widespread that even if I didn't know what they meant, it'd be very useful to learn. I have no idea what a generic "integrated circuit" icon means, though, and I doubt anyone will use it elsewhere to mean the same thing, so I just click around randomly until I find what I'm looking for, like I'd do with the previously-unlabeled 6-switch panel in my living room where the positioning of the switches have no obvious relation to the physical placement of the ceiling lights.
I think Apple's menu actually shows exactly what I want and expect; show icons if it'll help me, don't show them if they wouldn't; though in come cases, I think Apple could apply some more icons (like for "Stop", there are a few good choices for that).
- Good luck, bud. I found I wasted a lot of time in my youth and only stopped as I aged; took time to find purpose, I think. That purpose also evolves and becomes both "wider" and "kinder" with age, I think; to move from zealotry into a kind of zen progression.
- def not my wheelhouse, but I assume easiest way to keep bad guys out is to use copyleft license and only enforce against bad guys. despite what some say in defense of billionaires, you don't actually need to enforce every violation of your rights; rights don't disappear under law just because you don't use them.
- I guess it depends on what you do. I do python, rust, and web frontend in Windows. I have a personal bias against Docker, which'd otherwise be the primary WSL draw for me since if I want/need Linux, I can SSH into the majority of the machines in my house.
I'll throw out my unpopular opinion/experience here, too: I haven't liked any "desktop experience" I've seen or used for a Linux distro, and they all look and feel very similar to me: foreign, basic, and difficult for me to tweak and produce with. I greatly dislike the React stuff both on the web and in Windows, and use Classic Shell, which I'm satisfied with. Windows is easy to customize and almost everything can be tailored without even needing a reboot, many even with registry options already made and just waiting for a bit to be flipped.
It helps my puny, smooth brain, too, to just think of Windows being graphical and Linux being text-based; helps me remember what I'm doing.
- yeah, I'd guess the person who made this decision just wanted to cover their butt. it got a good laugh out of me reading the caption, though. "hmmm. who could use this distinct branding so many people are familiar with? it looks a bit orange; maybe it's Home Depot."
- I lean toward the opinion there are certain things people (especially young people) should be steered away from because they tend to snowball in ways people may not anticipate, like drug abuse and suicide; situations where they wind up much more miserable than they realize, not understanding the various crutches they've adopted to hide from pain/anxiety have kept them from happiness (this is simplistic, though; many introverts are happy and fine).
I don't think I have a clear-enough vision on how AI will evolve to say we should do something about it, though, and few jurisdictions do anything about minors on social media, which we do have a big pile of data on, so I'm not sure it's worth thinking/talking about AI too much yet, at least as it relates to regulating for minors. Unlike social media, too, the general trajectory for AI is hazy. In the meantime, I won't be swayed much by anecdotes in the news.
Regardless, if I were hosting an LLM, I would certainly be cutting off service to any edgy/sexy/philosophy/religious services to minimize risk and culpability. I was reading a few weeks ago on Axios of actual churches offering chatbots. Some were actually neat; I hit up an Episcopalian one to figure out what their deal was and now know just enough to think of them as different-Lutherans. Then there are some where the chatbot is prompted to be Jesus or even Satan. Which, again, could actually be fine and healthy, but if I'm OpenAI or whoever, you could not pay me enough.
- in defense of this comment, you do need to do a heck of a lot of preparation (including psychologically) to do anything publicly anymore. wild west days are long gone, at least for US-based servers. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to stop users from interacting too freely, to censor and moderate them so I don't wind up on some news site in 20 years being accused of hosting a site *Widely Used* by pedophilic narcoterror jihadists; I would like to not, but user content (and especially their information) is a huge liability to host... unless you're Equifax or Facebook or Google or some other large corporation -- then you can accidentally dump out everyone's sensitive financial information and only pay them $9 in compensation (or whatever the amount was; I keep throwing the cards they send me in the trash).
(yes I'm salty about that still)
- in defense of 2.5 (Pro, at least), it was able to generate for me a metric UNIX clock as a webpage which I was amused by. it uses kiloseconds/megaseconds/etc. there are 86.4ks/day. The "seconds" hand goes around 1000 seconds, which ticks over the "hour" hand. Instead of saying 4am, you'd say it's 14.
as a calendar or "date" system, we start at UNIX time's creation, so it's currently 1.76 gigaseconds AUNIX. You might use megaseconds as the "week" and gigaseconds more like an era, e.g. Queen Elizabeth III's reign, persisting through the entire fourth gigasecond and into the fifth. The clock also displays teraseconds, though this is just a little purple speck atm. of course, this can work off-Earth where you would simply use 88.775ks as the "day"; the "dates" a Martian and Earthling share with each other would be interchangeable.
I can't seem to get anyone interested in this very serious venture, though... I guess I'll have to wait until the 50th or so iteration of Figure, whenever it becomes useful, to be able to build a 20-foot-tall physical metric UNIX clock in my front yard.
- agreed, though I think the issue more is that these systems, deployed at scale, may result in widespread/consistent unexpected behavior if deployed in higher-stakes environments.
an earlier commenter mentioned a self-driving car perhaps refusing to use a road with a slur on it (perhaps it is graffiti'd on the sign, perhaps it is a historical name which meant something different at the time). perhaps the models will refuse to talk about products with names it finds offensive if "over-aligned," problematic as AI is eating search traffic. perhaps a model will strongly prefer to say the US civil war was fought over states' rights so it doesn't have to provide the perspective of justifying slavery (or perhaps it will stick to talking about the heroic white race of abolitionists and not mention the enemy).
bias when talking to a wide variety of people is fine and good; you get a lot of inputs, you can sort through these and have thoughts which wouldn't have occurred to you otherwise. it's much less fine when you talk to only one model which has specific "pain topics", or one model is deciding everything; or even multiple model in case of a consensus/single way to train models for brand/whatever safety.
- I'm fine enough now to retire but get on my hands and knees whenever I drop a tiny surface-mount resistor, which I have reels of tens or hundreds of. If I can't find it after 5 or so minutes, that's when the "what am I doing?" thought finally hits.
- Youtube already employs DRM on some of their videos (notably their free* commercial movies). if you try to take a screenshot, the frame is blacked out. this can be bypassed by applying a CSS blur effect of 0 pixels, permitting extraction; detection of DRM protection and applying the bypass is likely trivial for the kinds of people already writing scripts and programs utilizing yt-dlp. the css method of bypass has been widely disseminated for years (over a decade?), but programmers love puzzles, so a sequel to current DRM implementation seems justified. YT could also substantially annoy me by expiring their login cookies more frequently; I think I have to pull them from my workstation every month or two as-is? at some point, they could introduce enough fragility to my scripts where it's such a bother to maintain that I won't bother downloading/watching the 1-3 videos per day I am today -- but otoh, I've been working on a wasm/Rust mp4 demuxer and from-scratch WebGL2 renderer for video and I'm kind of attached to seeing it through (I've had project shelved for ~3 weeks after getting stuck on a video seek issue), so I might be willing to put a lot of effort into getting the videos as a point of personal pride.
the real pain in the butt in my present is Patreon because I can't be arsed to write something separate for it. as-is, I subscribe to people on Patreon and then never bother watching any of the exclusive content because it's too much work. some solutions like Ghost (providing an API for donor content access) get part of the way to a solution, but they are not themselves a video host, and I've never seen anyone use it.
- this is the line of thinking which led me to furnish daughter with Windows laptops and, later, desktops; I remove the adware & spyware to some degree, but Windows (and I assume Mac, but I'm not in that space) has the benefit of generally being reasonably intuitive for basic use WITHOUT A CHEAT SHEET and, importantly, fast and easy to teach intermediate use of. if she wants to know how to enable literal (that is, correct) filename sorting in File Explorer or write an HID driver, I'll be here. + I sure don't feel like debugging every strange artifact appearing in Steam games as a result of emulation.
one thing I have protested, to the point of being obnoxious, is school-managed Chromebooks. I've talked to every principal of every school she's been in since Covid-19 to persistently request I be allowed to furnish a Windows laptop or at least a Chromebook I manage. -and in a bit of a surprise to me, everyone's been accommodating (though never to let her use a Windows laptop; I think maybe providing it as an option makes breaking policy to let her bring a self-managed Chromebook seem reasonable). I argue I operate web services with user information at home and don't want school employees on my network, and I don't want the financial liability of her accidentally damaging school property.
- I will throw a story out here because I don't know where else to put it and want it off my chest (I will leave a lot out of this):
Daughter tried suicide a few weeks ago. "It was not a serious attempt," but obviously it is. We go to only local hospital; they don't have a pediatric unit, so ER basically just looks at her and aren't sure what to do because it's not like she's bleeding out. They clean the cuts and ask if I want county behavioral health involved. I'm in over my head and need help, so I say yes.
Behavioral health mobile response person comes out -- good guy, made me see something I hadn't prior -- because I've had her in therapy for half a year prior but we weren't really making much progress on anxiety/depression issues -- but he says we weren't going to get anywhere with therapy before drugs, that she was too far out, and in retrospect that was absolutely the right call. Anyway, he puts her on 72-hours mandatory hold. Here, this means the child must be transferred to a pediatric health facility with suicide watch and psychiatric services. This became a big problem.
Cincinnati Childrens Hospital had no beds (and I have ill will toward them anyway). Dayton had no beds. Charge nurse was calling people for hours and hours, and I joined in calling places (we stayed at hospital the whole time without sleeping), and it wasn't until 24 hours after admission we're finally transferred. My mom was/is a social worker for those with developmental disabilities, and spent about a decade working at long-term facilities for juveniles, where it was almost always court-ordered. I spent a fair bit of my time there for economic/childcare reasons while she was working -- awful place for the kids (not for me; I hung out in staff rooms and watched movies). Doors, by law, could not be locked, and they were terribly understaffed; violence and rape was expected. We had a second person from county behavioral come out, and once I realized the only kinds of places open to us, started pleading and insisting to have the hold lifted, but they refused. I wind up with one out-of-state option, and one in-state; both about an hour and a half away, and both the kinds of facilities I was terrified of. I later talked to other parents and was surprised to find time to find a facility, lack of beds, and travel time were all common issues between us. I went for visitation every day, and at least one adult would almost always come out of visitation crying, not realizing these places are poorly-staffed, unsafe prisons until they first visit and talk with their kid.
Anyway, so the 72-hour clock starts only once daughter's transferred to this pediatric psych facility (she wound up staying for 5 days; this is a whole other issue where they had no social worker available to provide AMA paperwork, they claimed). -And this place is a long-term juvenile psych facility, so it tends to have a lot of kids who were sentenced by courts to be there; violent offenders, but it was a mix (daughter has a story about playing Uno with a kid experiencing "weed psychosis", which'd I'd never heard of before; interesting stuff). You know, so I'm going to bed every night, and I've got some wild nightmares I could share -- BUT everything turned out mostly fine. At one point, daughter witnessed staff slam a kid against the wall hard enough for him to bleed from the head, and didn't clean the blood off the wall; the toilet in her room didn't work and the room smelled like feces; they couldn't lock doors, and the facility was severely understaffed. A recipe for disaster, but it could have been a LOT worse than it was, though trauma is there nonetheless from the experience.
Now, the reason the county insisted on sending her to this hellhole is because it's the only way to unlock county behavioral services. You must first have committed an attempt to harm yourself or someone else, or be ordered by courts. I wrote at the beginning I was able to get a counselor before all this, but this took a lot of emails and phone calls, and the place I found with help required 2 hours on the road per visit. The person I got was new in the field and didn't specialize in pediatric; he was not a licensed psychologist nor psychiatrist, but he was the only person I could get and I was grateful for any assist. There were/are no available pediatric psychiatrists or psychologists EXCEPT through county behavioral; they have them all locked away from the market, basically.
The total bill for all this, by the way (uninsured, cash, including the ambulance) was $8,709.45. I didn't negotiate; I've planned for this, I took out $20k from broker on the first day I got to go home. Money isn't the issue; it's the non-availability of service which's the real problem here, for us. I was surprised to walk into county behavioral and be told while registering at front desk they don't accept self-pay; that they aren't set up for it. I've never run into this before, and it got a morbid chuckle out of me because this's been a heck of a roll of the dice up to now, specifically to get in county services, and now I'm told they don't offer anything for us.
I ask for the people who insisted on the 72-hour hold (and btw, the facility which held daughter prescribed nothing but an antihistamine, with trauma inflicted, though minor; worthless experience except to unlock services) to speak with me, and I get one of them. She talks to supervisor, and apparently nobody knows their own policies because they do, in fact, accept self-pay. I had to fill out a Medicaid form, which we don't qualify for. Now, the strange part about this is if you have insurance (and this is why they have you apply for Medicaid), they charge you on a sliding scale, but if you don't have any insurance and get rejected by Medicaid, they really don't have any system set up to bill you, so everything's free. The psychiatrist and counselor both are free; it's crazy, so I'll kick some money to food pantries while SNAP's cut off in the state due to federal shutdown, but it's like nobody's ever really thought through the systems we have for healthcare; it's inefficient and brittle from every angle, not just the providers/insurers screwing people over for capitalism angle; like a proof-of-concept someone slapped together over a weekend where everyone's spinning their wheels without a clue what to do, except it's something we've had for centuries and are spending $trillions/year on. -And every time the government provides new weapons or issues new mandates, it somehow seems to get worse.
(Things are going well now, btw; we got a real psychologist scheduled same-day, and first appointment with psychiatrist was 2-3 days after intake. She's doing better, but the journey here was straight Hell.)
It would be nice to go back substantially further, though it's not too far back that the commoner becomes voiceless in history and we just get a bunch of politics and academia. Great job; look forward to testing it out.