Joe

why

• why get up in the morning, only to have to do it again tomorrow?

• why paint a still life, when you can just stare at the real thing for a while?

• why not hunt and forage your own food?

• why not make your own clothes?

• why write boring code, when you can get someone or something else to write it for you?

• why contribute features that you think are interesting to a product that you use and enjoy?

• why post on social media, rather than doing any of the above?

demonstrated any actual competency in this domain

It may be that he/they have significant competency in this domain, just not publically or under this name/pseudonym.

I’ve personally made contributions under pseudonyms just to avoid employer paperwork/approvals, for projects that I’d rather not have my real name attached to, and for sharing in potentially hostile communities.

I’ve also developed software internal to companies that has never been released publicly.

In short … he doesn’t need to prove his prior credentials to you, me, or anyone. He may have some, he may not.

We can legitimately critique what he/they have done in this project all we like though.

Some home internet routers (e.g… from FritzBox) support multiple VOIP providers, letting you configure rules as to which provider is used for outgoing calls (e.g… default for local calls, and another for international calls). And they provide a normal phone connector.

Remember KillerFS? Oakland PD remembers!

I would also do #1, and I’d probably make it work (loooong time Linux user and persistent debugger).

#2 is probably simpler, both conceptually and technically. NAT and FW config is self-contained, and there are plenty of docs and how-tos.

Note: I’m not a proxmox user, so there could be some proxmox specific spanners… But I doubt it.

I was recently reading about Talon Voice, which sounded quite interesting with lots of usability hacks. Unfortunately, not an option anymore if you are a Linux user: https://www.osnews.com/story/145162/accessibility-input-tool-removes-x11-support-doesnt-want-to-support-wayland-users-caught-in-the-middle/

spits on ground, squints reeeeaaal slow

Now listen here sonny… we don’t take kindly to none of that AI business around these parts.

We is simple, God fearin’ folk, raised on sweat, dirt, and good honest labor, not all of that fancy machine learnin’ contraption nonsense.

Ain’t no place for thinkin’ machines where a man’s meant to use his own two hands. So I reckon I’ll mosey on over and downvote this here post myself, nice and proper.

You sir, need an AI agent to maintain your self-hosting addiction and free you from the shackles of homelab responsibility. Automate the automations that maintain the automations. That’s the real endgame. /s

Many people have “itches to scratch” and some interest in development but little time to learn, so AI coding tools will allow them to scratch many of those itches without paying $ to others or investing that time (for better or for worse). Even as an experienced (but no longer full time) coder, I use it to scratch itches when I don’t have the time/lust.

Often enough, you’ll find some customizable app that does 90% of what you want, with a bunch of features you don’t care about. Writing personalized apps is a cool new thing, giving you exactly the functionality that you want. Many times these will be based on OSS or open libraries, which the AI just glues together.

Will this personalized development result in new quality OSS apps, though? I doubt it. We also don’t really need more sloppy code on github.

There are a lot of personal apps that just happen to have an OSS license… and then there are OSS projects, built and maintained as OSS community projects. It takes dedication to run a real OSS project, build a community, handle issues, websites, etc.

Will AI coding tools assist developers of real OSS projects? Sure… many are already using it to varying degrees. We’ll increasingly see it being used to find and fix bugs and security issues ahead of time - security researchers & blackhats are already having a field day.

Don’t bet on it. Senior devs tend to know there is complexity and pitfalls over time, and hope that by using library X (or following pattern Y) they can future proof the product. So instead of writing 50 lines of self-contained code + tests, some people will happily write 60 lines of integration code + tests, and pull in a dozen dependencies.

However: With appropriate interfaces and a little forethought, you can start with the simple solution and extend it or complement it with libraries or needed abstractions down the road if and when the need arises.

Another bug-bear of mine is being asked to review/run over-engineered one-off programs (eg. simple ETL scripts). I remember replacing about 1000 lines of java (many years ago) with a 20 line python script, and passive-aggressively asking the senior developer to review the new script.

Indeed. I suspect it would need to be framed around national security and national interests, to have any realistic chance of success. AI is being seen as a necessity for the future of many countries … embrace it, or be steamrolled in the future by those who did, so a soft touch is being embraced.

Copyright and licensing uncertainty could hinder that, and the status quo today in many places is to not treat training as copyright infringement (eg. US), or to require an explicit opt-out (eg. EU). A lack of international agreements means it’s all a bit wishy washy, and hard to prove and enforce.

Things get (only slightly) easier if the material is behind a terms-of-service wall.

Let me know if you convince any lawmakers, and I’ll show you some lawmakers about to be invited to expensive “business” trips and lunches by lobbyists.

73 feature branches in active development (most for several months), and one intern (currently on m/paternity leave) responsible for merging them. Check! In the meantime, several branches deployed to prod behind a reverse proxy with feature flags.

That all goes well until someone uses your platform for scams or CSAM… or when (as the other guy said), infra costs go up. Throw in various privacy regulations, and it can be a frustrating and costly endeavour.

There’s a sweet spot, but I fear it’s quite a small one.

So you want to create a human exploitation / profit maximising system?

Pretty sure those are proprietary algorithms, with some common knowledge foundations that LLMs will happily tell you about.

It’s all simple enough at a small scale, but the challenge is optimizing it for your use-cases, and building for scale & reliability in a cost efficient manner.

Such companies will likely also have top notch software engineers & statisticians, marketing teams, psychologists and lawyers on the payroll, all contributing their part to the perpetuation of human misery in the name of corporate profit.

No? It doesn’t seem to be a use case they target.

If you want to use git to store sensitive data, you should encrypt it before committing / pushing it.

But not Fire tablets (kids profile) or Samsung TV or many others that Plex currently supports.

JellyFin android phone app’s UI is a little weird at times, but does work pretty well for me.

…

What I would adore from any app would be an easy way to upload specific content and metadata via SFTP or to blob storage and accessible with auth (basic, token, or cloud) to more easily share it with friends/family/myself without having to host the whole damn library on the Internet or share my home Internet at inconvenient times.

Client-side encryption would be a great addition to that (eg. password required, that adds a key to the key ring). And of course native support in the JellyFin/other apps for this. It could even be made to work with a JS & WASM player.

And contributions to codebases that have developed with the goal of meeting the team’s own needs, and who similarly don’t have the time or space to refactor or review as needed to enable effective contributions.

Enabling Innersource will be a priority for management for only two weeks, anyway, before they focus on something else. And if it even makes it into measurable goals, it will probably be gamed so it doesn’t ruin bonuses.

Do you also work for $GenericMultinationalCompany, per-chance? Do you also know $BillFromFinance?

Yeah, at that point I wouldn’t worry. If someone has docker access on the server, it’s pretty much game over.

Encryption will typically be CPU bound, while many servers will be I/O bound (eg. File hosting, rather than computing stuff). So it will probably be fine.

Encryption can help with the case that someone gets physical access to the machine or hard disk. If they can login to the running system (or dump RAM, which is possible with VMs & containers), it won’t bring much value.

You will of course need to login and mount the encrypted volume after a restart.

At my work, we want to make sure that secrets are adequately protected at rest, and we follow good hygiene practices like regularly rotating credentials, time limited certificates, etc. We tend to trust AWS KMS to encrypt our data, except for a few special use cases.

Do you have a particular risk that you are worried about?