• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think it’s quite the contrary, and AI will actually increase our job security. Because now, you have a lot of people learning to code using AI, and I’ve heard from my friends who was talking to other CTO’s at a conference that they have even discusses whether it’s even worth it to bother with hiring juniors now, because it turned out that a surprisingly large amount of them are in fact just a front-end for ChatGPT.

    Can you eventually get a problem solved by talking to a LLM about it? Sure, but it will take you a lot longer, and you don’t learn much programming skills. It’s basically a lot worse version of copy-pasting code from StackOverflow, because there you can at least be certain that the code you are copying has been reviewed by at least someone, and the explanation isn’t in most cases hallucinated stuff that sounds correct. You also can’t keep asking Stack Overflow to edit your code for your use-case, and have to figure it out yourself.

    But I’m really looking forward to major companies trying to replace programmers with AIs. Google implementing LLMs into search results was my favorite recent trainwreck, and reading articles with the CEO squrming that “We actually have to manually filter the results, because solving the LLM models halucinating turned out to be a really difficult issue”. No shit, it’s almost as if you want factually correct and precise outputs from a statistically-biased but still random generator.

    Please, I want to se a company fire most of their programmers to replace with AI, and watch them burn. Hopefully, it will happen soon.



  • On the topic of Mullvad, what made me choose Kullvad over LibreWolf was the VPN being bundled in. If I’m not mistaken, the whole point of ToR browser is that you have exactly the same fingerprint as any other Tor browser user, making it a lot harder to distinguish you from others using your extensions, browser and other minor stuff your browser reports about you, that combined makes for a pretty unique fingerprint, evej of you are using a VPN.

    But, if you have a browser that has the same fingerprint for all users, and it has an accompanying VPN, you can partly expect that most of other users of the same VPN will also be using the same browser, making it a lot harder to track you - because while there may be only a few thousands users of Mullvad in the wild, which renders the same fingerprint not much of an advantage (because you would be one of the few users of i.e Proton VPN with Mullvad), if you also use Mullvad VPN, it’s probable that most of other users who share your Mullvad VPN IP are also Mullvad browser users, making it easier to blend in.

    Bit that’s mostly my theory, why (along with being able to pay with Monero) I feel like the combo of Mullvad browser and VPN is the best combination as far as minimizing fingerprint is considered. If someone has more knowledge about the issue, I’d love to hear some counter-arguments or tips how to improve my setup.



  • I cheated the MFAs by switching what I could to SMS, Yubikey or just copying the MFA private keynto Bitwarden. Kind of defeats the point of MFA, but makes stuff definitely easier.

    Anything that’s important however is on yubikey, however.

    Also, good luck! Are you going through the Digital Minimalism book? I should refresh on it, every time I try it, it doesn’t last long, but I always get rid of one more stupid online habit that I don’t pick up when I inevitably return to my pre-reading the book intetnet usage. So, after already going through like 4 attempts in the last 3 or 4 years, my internet usage is slowly but surly changing for the better. But it’s more of a long run, rather than being able to get everything on the first try, in my experience at least.

    If you’re not doing it because of the book/haven’t heard of it, I definitely recommend reading Digital Minimalism by Carl Newport.


  • How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don’t even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.

    We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I’ve encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.

    How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it’s so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn’t there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you “step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>.”

    I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I’m obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I’ve done is shit or useless :D



  • When I tried that, it lasted me for almost a year and a half, before I unfortunately got a second job that required MFA and I needed to be more online in general due to juggling two jobs. And it was amazing!

    What I eventually did however was to get a dumb phone that can do a wifi hotspot, and still carried my smartphone but without simcard and net access, and powered off. When I really needed to get a taxi or look up a way home when I overslept drunk on public transport and ended up who knows where, I could always just fire up hotspot, power on the smartphone and do stuff I needed. Cause when that happened first time, it was when I first realized how much dependent I am on smartphone and net access.

    Thanks for reminding me, I just quit one of the jobs and I can afford to be more offline, so back to the dumb phone I go! Convincing my GF again that she has to text me instead of using discord will be hard, though … Or explaining that I really cant look up the fact she wants, or call a taxi quickly…

    I still have a python bot that forwarded discord messages to my own bare html website, so I can chat with her with the basic web browser of the dumb phone.


  • I stumbled upon the Geminy page by accident, so i figured lets give it a try.

    I asked him in czech if he can also generate pictures. He said sure, and gave me examples about what to ask him.

    So I asked him, again in czech, to generate a cat drinking a beer at a party.

    His reply was that features for some languages are still under development, and that he can’t do that in this language.

    So I asked him in english.

    I can’t create images for you yet, but I can still find images from the web.

    Ok, so I asked if he can find me the picture on the web, then.

    I’m sorry, but I can’t provide images of a cat drinking beer. Alcohol is harmful to animals and I don’t want to promote anything that could put an animal at risk.

    Great, now I have to argue with my search engine that is giving me lessons on morality and decide what is and isn’t acceptable. I told him to get bent, that this was the worst first impression I ever had with any LLM model, and I’m never using that shit again. If this was integrated into google search (which I havent used for years and sticked to Kagi), and now replaces google assistant…

    Good, that’s what people get for sticking with google. It brings me joy to see Google dig it’s own grave with such success.



  • There’s a piece of code in our hobby game project that I’ve written after attending classes in college about how to write clean and SOLID code. It’s the most overengineered piece of shit I’ve ever written. I’m not saying it’s the fault of the lectures, of course it’s on me being a little bit over zealous, but it does check all the boxes - It’s a simple “show selectable list of stuff”, follows MVC, it’s extensible without rewriting to adittional data-types and formats, extensible view that can show any part of data you need, generic, and in general it could be used anywhere we need, for any kind of data.

    There’s only one place where we need and use such list in our game.

    I needed to rewrite a part of it, since the UI changed drastically, to not need this kind of list, while also adding events into the process. I haven’t seen the code for almost 4 years, and it’s attrocious. Super hard to understand what’s going on, since it’s too generic, interfaces and classes all over the place, and while it probably would be possible to rewrite the views for the new features we need, it’s just so complex that I don’t have the mental capacity to again figure out how it was supposed to work and properly wire it up again.

    I’m not saying it’s fault of the classes, or SOLID. It’s entirely my fault, because the classes inspired and hyped me with ideas about what a clean code should look like, that I didn’t stop and think whether it’s really needed here, and went over-the-top and overengineered the solution. That’s what I’d say is the danger of such Clean Code books and classes - it’s easy to feel clever for making something that passes SOLID to the letter, but extensibility usually comes at a complexity, and it’s super important to stop and think - do I really need it?


  • I’m starting to think that “good code” is simply a myth. They’ve drilled a lot of “best practices” into me during my masters, yet no matter how mich you try, you will eventually end up with something overengineered, or a new feature or a bug that’s really difficult to squeeze into whatever you’ve chosen.

    But, ok, that doesn’t proove anything, maybe I’m just a vad programmer.

    What made me sceptical however isn’t that I never managed to do it right in any of my projects, but the last two years of experience working on porting games, some of them well-known and larger games, to consoles.

    I’ve already seen several codebases, each one with different take on how to make the core game architecture, and each one inevitably had some horrible issues that turned up during bugfixing. Making changes was hard, it was either overengineersled and almost impenetrable, or we had to resort tonugly hacks since there simply wasn’t a way how to do it properly without rewriting a huge chunk.

    Right now, my whole prpgramming knowledge about game aechitecture is a list of “this desn’t work in the long run”, and if I were to start a new project, I’d be really at loss about what the fuck should i choose. It’s a hopeless battle, every aproach I’ve seen or tried still ran into problems.

    And I think this may be authors problem - ot’s really easy to see that something doesn’t work. " I’d have done it diferently" or “There has to be a better way” is something that you notice very quickly. But I’m certain that watever would he propose, it’d just lead to a different set of problems. And I suspect that’s what may ve happening with his leads not letting him stick his nose into stuff. They have probably seen that before, at it rarely helps.


  • I agree, the post shouldn’t have called him out directly by name. It should’ve been a post of just a screenshot with the commit messages, and not mention the repository or the person. It’s definitely not nice, and may even affect the person - I mean, if I was called out like that somewhere and seen people laughing at my practices, I wouldn’t be exactly happy.

    On the other hand, I think that raising the issue in itself - FOSS repositories without commit messages - is a pretty good discussion that fits here well. It’s just a shame that it had to be at the expense of some FOSS developer, because it also derails the discussion into talking more about the guy and whether he can or cannot do it (such as your comments, which I agree with), instead of focusing on what are the issues with FOSS projects without commit messages in general. Because there are many arguments why it’s important, and a few arguments about why it shouldn’t matter, which makes for an interresting discussion about best practices and why they are important.