25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • From that guy’s twitter? The primary source of this article is that guy, who is a lobbyist and lawyer. Someone whose career is based on legalistic wordsmithing to convince people that other people are bad.

    I’ve seen papers served before, both by a cop and a regular dude (going by appearance). The fact that the server was a deputy in this case doesn’t honestly seem relevant at all. Cops are frequently hired because someone in a police uniform knocking on your door is more likely to be answered than someone who looks like a salesman. But jurisdictions are different—I’ve never heard of papers being served by registered mail, for instance.

    That’s why I’d like for the journalist to have brought in some kind of legal analyst to weigh in. They didn’t and what we have is a bunch of quotes from an expert wordsmith and a tech journalist who may not know anything more about the legalities than we do.

    I genuinely appreciate that you took another step to look into this and respond, but hearing more from the guy’s own perspective doesn’t help me feel like I know what’s really going on here.

    I think I’m done with this whole topic until I hear something about it from a better source. If this is never mentioned again, I’ll assume this is just an attempt at manipulating public opinion over a mundane matter that isn’t outrageous at all. If there is something to it, we’ll hear more about it.


  • What if I develop software all day long and just don’t feel like an OS I need to fuck around with? I feel like Mint is great for anyone who just doesn’t want to fuck around with their own computer. Every game I want to play works. Every productivity tool I want is there. Any software I develop works fine. Anything I want to serve on my local network works fine. I click the update once a week or so and it just works.

    I feel like people scoff at Mint because you don’t need to know anything about computers to use it, but that’s actually a hell of a feature even if you do know.


  • He’s not just a random dude, though. His organization is involved in lobbying efforts around OAI. The article claims there’s no connection between the case being subpoenaed for and the stuff he did, and that’s the part that might be abnormal and dirty, but it’s nuanced and the clear bias on display demands their claims be taken with a grain of salt.

    It looks to me like this article is carrying the guy’s PR water for him. But just because the article feels manipulative doesn’t mean there’s necessarily no factual basis for it.

    So I just… don’t feel informed at all.


  • From my experience, OAI may be the public face of AI, but Anthropic is murdering them in coding capability and cost - as in my company pays more in a week for me to use Claude than I would’ve paid in a month to use the top OAI API. (Actually I paid 1/10th that because I couldn’t afford that for what was essentially just a toy for my discord users—I wasn’t using it for development.) It really puts things in perspective when I can see in Cline the running totals for each task.

    Of course, I have no idea what the operating costs are.



  • Mate, the great thing about Linux is it isn’t just one thing. I love Mint, but I think it’s great that people who like different things can get what they like, too. In fact I want those folks not to use it. If everyone used Mint, it would just become another Windows (or maybe RedHat would be a better parallel).

    Having options means everyone is pushed to improve. Consolidation means ossification.

    That said, Mint rocks and people should use it—if they want.



  • The hardest part about learning to code is that the projects you really want to do are far beyond your abilities as a beginner. I recommend starting with modding, creating websites, or even writing macros for stuff like excel. They get you started.

    Then also watch some YouTube videos on stuff like SOLID, design patterns, functional programming, and “getting started with <language>”.

    Then try to write your own versions of stuff. I learned a bunch of stuff by writing my own versions of stuff. Like I tried backporting Java Functions, BiFunctions, Predicates, etc to Java 7. It didn’t work great because the language support wasn’t there, but I learned a lot about what things are hard and why things are designed the way they are. I feel sorry for the poor bastards that inherited that code.

    Also, don’t let people give you too much shit about asking questions of AI. It frequently explains things way better than it executes. It’s a great first line of learning even if you really need a deeper dive into the documentation to understand the more esoteric stuff. If you have a question you can’t find the answer to, ChatGPT will explain it in 30 seconds where you might have to wait days on a forum for someone to feel like answering.

    Beware: ChatGPT is awful about mixing different versions of stuff so the answers it gives may well be obsolete. But if you’re really confused it can point you in the right direction. Yeah, you’ll have to learn a lot more nuance when you start doing shit professionally, but if you’re just fucking around it’s great. And googling for answers isn’t much better in that regard. The best answers come from the docs, but especially when you’re starting out, the documentation often assumes a baseline of contextual knowledge you aren’t going to have.

    Try implementing a custom collector in Java just based on the docs. Have fucking fun with that.


  • Investment is not inherently a bad thing, but this is certainly the case. When the owners of the company care about increased profit instead of the employees and customers (which would be aligned in a perfect world but they are not necessarily so in this one) enshittification is inevitable.

    As soon as it is more profitable to lobby for legal changes that make more money at the expense odds your customers or employees—or find other ways to use your money to the same ends, you’ve gone to the dark side. I wish it was illegal for organizations (other than non-profits) to be involved in politics, but as a practical matter you can either allow it or accept it will happen out of view and ability to influence, like drug use.

    These issues are why I’m happy being a worker bee than a queen—there’s no solving people’s problems when the problems almost always turn out to be the ability/drive of some of us to adapt to any system for maximum personal gain at the expense of others.



  • Agreed. I would imagine they are looking for new revenue streams because it feels like just running an LLM costs more than the derived value. Right now investors are pouring money into AI by the swimming pool full in the belief that a renaissance is right around the corner. But the view from the ground is that the value is never going to return that investment without getting creative.

    And when companies get creative rather than rely on fundamentals that drive sustainable growth, it’s generally a steep slope to enshittification.