talkingpumpkin

So basically... AI can be addictive (to vulnerable people)? Maybe the bubble will not burst then.

Here it is:

Many of us got hit by the agent coding addiction. It feels good, we barely sleep, we build amazing things. Every once in a while that interaction involves other humans, and all of a sudden we get a reality check that maybe we overdid it.

In His Dark Materials, every human has a dæmon, a companion that is an externally visible manifestation of their soul. It lives alongside as an animal, but it talks, thinks and acts independently. I’m starting to relate our relationship with agents that have memory to those little creatures. We become dependent on them, and separation from them is painful and takes away from our new-found identity. We’re relying on these little companions to validate us and to collaborate with. But it’s not a genuine collaboration like between humans, it’s one that is completely driven by us, and the AI is just there for the ride. We can trick it to reinforce our ideas and impulses. And we act through this AI. Some people who have not programmed before, now wield tremendous powers, but all those powers are gone when their subscription hits a rate limit and their little dæmon goes to sleep.

Looking at Gas Town (and Beads) from the outside, it looks like a Mad Max cult. What are polecats, refineries, mayors, beads, convoys doing in an agentic coding system? If the maintainer is in the loop, and the whole community is in on this mad ride, then everyone and their dæmons just throw more slop up. As an external observer the whole project looks like an insane psychosis or a complete mad art project. Except, it’s real? Or is it not? Apparently a reason for slowdown in Gas Town is contention on figuring out the version of Beads, which takes 7 subprocess spawns. Or using the doctor command times out completely. Beads keeps growing and growing in complexity and people who are using it, are realizing that it’s almost impossible to uninstall.

I don't remember them asking for any ID. Then again I gave them my real name/address and I payed with my credit card so... it's not like they can't confirm it's me.

(I missed the first part so I'm not sure I follow)

How are the the subdomains resolved? If you registered them on a public DNS that might be what leaks them. Otherwise... maybe your browser?

I moved to infomaniak because registering domains come with a free mailbox (or at least they used to - IDK if it's still like this).

It works fine with lego (as should any other supported one).

IDK.

I just asked this to perplexity as an experiment:

write a macos terminal command that makes a backup copy if all files in documents/ my home adding the current date and time to each filename

Here's what it concocted:

cd ~ && find Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sh -c 'for f; do cp "$1" "Documents/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"; done' _ {} +

Now, I am no "prompt engineer" and surely there are better way to ask it stuff, but then again a layman is no prompt engineer either.

So the question is: would a layman be able to provide feedback and have perplexity fix its command?

My "layman-like" feedback (now that I re-read it, IDK how much a layman would have used "recurse"... I'm doing my best here):

I want the files copied to a "backups" folder in my home. It should also recurse into the "documents" folder.

mkdir -p ~/backups && cd ~/Documents && find . -type f -exec sh -c 'mkdir -p "~/backups/$(dirname "$1")" && cp "$1" "~/backups/$2/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"' _ {} "$(pwd)" \;

Feeback:

it says "No such file or directory" (because of $PWD passed as $2 - of course I didn't say this to the LLM)

mkdir -p ~/backups && rsync -a --include='*/' --include='*.*' --exclude='*' --no-links ~/Documents/ ~/backups/"$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"/

the date must be in the file name

mkdir -p ~/backups && find ~/Documents -type f -exec sh -c 'dir="~ /backups/$(dirname "${1#"$2"}")"; mkdir -p "$dir"; cp "$1" "$dir/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"' _ {} ~/Documents \;

I don't think I need to continue?

BTW: the LLM also instructed me to do a whole bunch of seemingly useless stuff, like giving Terminal.app full disk access via System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access (which I assume is actually a thing in macos but can't verify as I run linux)

edit: I hope I didn't misinterpret the bash commands (I didn't actually run them) and spotted the right bugs in them - even if I didn't I guess my point still stands?

Being able to use an LLM turns a layman into a coder no more than being able to use CAD turns them into an engineer.

It's a real pity that LLMs seem to have taken over as the sole topic of discussion in programming communities such as this one. It might be just me, but I find the whole topic barely interesting at all (ie. not more interesting than the discussions about stackoverflow coding we used to have).

I won't comment on:

Claude Code Co-designer & Implementer Every line of code, tests, and docs

but, even so,... what's the point of this expression language?

Why would I want to "compile"

let x = 12, y = 13 in x + y

as javascript

(function (_) {
  return (() => {
    const x = 12;
    const y = 13;
    return x + y;
  })();
});

ruby

->(_) {
  (x = 12; y = 13; x + y)
}

or sql

(
  SELECT
    (
      SELECT
        x + y
      FROM
        (
          SELECT
            13 AS y
        ) AS _let
    )
  FROM
    (
      SELECT
        12 AS x
    ) AS _let
)

IDK where I've read that... should have double checked before posting, my bad.

Quick fact checking:

US police kills some 1,281 people last year (wikipedia).

1,281/340,110,988*100,000 gives around 0.38 police killings/100,000 people, which is below homicide rate in EU.

I couldn't (be bothered to) find out what the overall European homicide rate actually is (it also depends on what you count as "Europe"), but Germany is at around 0.8, France at 1.8, Italy at 0.57, Spain at 0.9 and Poland at 0.8 (these are the five most populous countries). So... let's guesstimate it at around 1? (numbers are from this random source).

We can conclude that US policemen are roughly 38% as deadly as European criminals (if it wasn't clear, this last statement is a joke)

TLDR: Protesting or resisting privately inside your house does not lead to social change and is not the most rational way of protecting yourself if you feel threatened by your government.

Self-hosting is not "resistance": at most, it's prepping for nerds, with computers instead of guns.

Self-hosting is not even a rational/efficient way of making a statement. If that's what you want, it's far more efficient to follow the established tradition of declaring you are moving to Canada and not following up with actual actions.

Don't get me wrong: I can relate to the nerdy way of coping with the ugliness around us (I say "us", but thankfully I don't live in the US), but - the way I see it - it's that your society that needs change, and self hosting won't help with that.

Frankly, the shit you US people are putting up with is unreal.

It has always been (~~US police forces kill far more people than the overall homicide rate in Europe - read that again and pause a second to think about it~~ this isn't true - see comments below), and it's just getting worse.

If you feel threatened you can essentially respond by fighting, fleeing, or cowering.

If you wanna FIGHT (this is what "resistance" is about), try to use whatever power you have and apply your energies to bring actual change. If you don't feel comfortable acting outdoors, this could include lending your nerd skills to protesters or (nonviolent) resistance groups. Heck, even being a keyboard warrior is more useful to changing society than being a hobbyist sysadmin.

If you wanna FLEE, just leave the country. Honestly, there are better places to live than the US, and (if you have or plan to have any) better places to raise your children.

If you wanna COWER, then be a prepper or a self-hoster or whatever, but be aware that, while misrepresenting your reaction as "resistance" may make you feel more heroic than you are, spreading the misrepresentation can also lead others to cower instead of fighting. Is that what you want?

By that reasoning, backup isn't redundancy because you'll lose your data if the backup gets corrupted while restoring.

That said, there's nothing wrong in redefining "redundant" to mean "having two or more duplicates"... you should however tell people if you do, to avoid misleading people that assume the dictionary definition.