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.
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.
Some slot machines do. Some slot machines have a fixed wager. Does that make them not gambling?
And I’m not sure what the relevance of casinos having more than one type of gambling is. I’ve worked in the industry more than 30 years, and not once do I remember a regulator saying “it’s OK, as long as you only do one of these things, you don’t need a license.”
You seem to be trying to define sports wagering as the only thing that qualifies as ‘gambling’. Casinos would like a word (or actually, they probably wouldn’t, they’d love this world of yours where casino games are apparently not gambling.)
(And trust me, if all that was required for a slot machine to avoid gambling regulations was “you always get something back”, they’d all be paying 1c or giving you a discount voucher for your next Happy Meal on every losing spin tomorrow.)
Another perfectly normal day in Dumbfuckistan.