jj4211
@jj4211@lemmy.world
- Comment on Earth needs more energy. Atlanta’s Super Soaker creator may have a solution. 3 days ago:
Well then you need to handle backfeeding all sorts of circuits, which is generally a pain to the extent it works. But it also would barely do anything.
- Comment on Earth needs more energy. Atlanta’s Super Soaker creator may have a solution. 3 days ago:
It is scalding hot, but I think the key takeaway is that it’s not hot enough to boil into steam, which is our current go-to for harvesting energy from heat.
So after you do your steam turbine and you are left with not-quite boiling water, by today’s standards it is useless for further harvesting for electricity. If this article is as-advertised (a big if), then we can harvest more, adding efficiency to any process that boils water to turn a turbine.
- Comment on Earth needs more energy. Atlanta’s Super Soaker creator may have a solution. 3 days ago:
Hypothetically, any energy harvested from a zero-emission strategy might at least displace combusting some hydrocarbons.
- Comment on Proof you don't have to wait for the new year for self improvement 3 days ago:
Dunno, she might be very much ready to “give a fuck”
- Comment on builder.ai has been tricking customers and investors for eight years – selling an advanced code-writing AI that, it turns out, is actually an Indian software farm employing 700 human developers 3 days ago:
Offshored/outsourced code is generally shit regardless of where it comes from.
Question is generally 'how is it that using this company thousands of miles away is so much cheaper? Business folks like to think it’s just because the country is poor, but no, the answer is that it is a grift. It is always a grift.
The good developers in that location? They are too busy doing work for real companies paying real money. Maybe less than an American makes, but not as dramatic as management imagines. So companies looking to offshore will never pay enough to get the actual talent in a geography. What happens when someone competent actually lands in one of these arrangements? Gone in 3-4 months after they get a real job after proving themselves.
So what developers are you getting? People who probably had the equivalent of a high school programming course and didn’t really get it, but there’s a company that will pay money to anyone with some arbitrary ‘certiificate’ that they can claim to clients means you are a trained software developer. They don’t know your use case, and they don’t care. They utterly fail at being competent, but who is going to call them on it? Management has no clue, and besides, it was their idea to outsource, so it has to be a good idea. Leftover technical talent that you kept on as a skeleton crew to supervise the outsourced effort? Oh they are just whining and trying to protect their jobs and being overly dismissive of the offshored staff because it suites their self-interest.
Offshoring is a big old grift wherever they set up shop.
- Comment on builder.ai has been tricking customers and investors for eight years – selling an advanced code-writing AI that, it turns out, is actually an Indian software farm employing 700 human developers 3 days ago:
Yeah, I was thinking it’s impossible to fake AI codegen with humans, for however terrible it is, it vomits the code it generates quickly.
I of course take issue with:
LLMs were already more than capable of generating high-quality code.
That claim will remain unjustified so long as LLMs equally generate imagined function calls and such as much as they like ‘real’ function calls.
But in any event, it’s also telling that despite ostensibly being a company focused around AI code gen, when it came to doing stupid in-house stuff that didn’t need doing they went with a bunch of human developers. And many of those are knock-offs of projects that should be pretty firmly in the territory of LLM codegen to let you ‘vibe code’.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 4 days ago:
The type of problem in my experience is the biggest change in problem.
Ask for something that is consistent with very well trodden territory, and it has a good shot. However if you go off the beaten path, and it really can’t credibly generate code, it generates anyway, making up function names, file paths, rest urls and attributes, and whatever else that would sound good and consistent with the prompt, but no connection to real stuff.
It’s usually not that that it does the wrong thing because it “misunderstood”, it is usually that it producea very appropriate looking code consistent with the request that does not have a link to reality, and there’s no recognition of when it invented non existent thing.
If it’s a fairly milquetoast web UI manipulating a SQL backend, it tends to chew through that more reasonably (though in various results that I’ve tried it screwed up a fundamental security principle, like once I saw it suggest a weird custom certificate validation and disable default validation while transmitting sensitive data before trying to meaningfully execute the custom valiidation.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 4 days ago:
Maybe she sincerely means ‘million dollar company’, a company too dirt poor to pay to have adequate coverage…
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 4 days ago:
Must be owned by Dr. Evil…
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 4 days ago:
Also “lets”.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 4 days ago:
I’ve been using Claude to mediocre results, so this time I used Gemini 3 because everyone in my company is screaming “this time it works, trust us bro”. Claude has not been working so great for me for my day job either.
- Comment on 6🤷♀️7 4 days ago:
So what meaning did Nyan cat have? Or rick rolling, or badger badger badger, or most anything that you would have seen on ytmd…
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 4 days ago:
It’s certainly a use case that LLM has a decent shot at.
Of course, having said that I gave it a spin with Gemini 3 and it just hallucinated a bunch of crap that doesn’t exist instead of properly identifying capable libraries or frontending media tools…
But in principle and upon occasion it can take care of little convenience utilities/functions like that. I continue to have no idea though why some people seem to claim to be able to ‘vibe code’ up anything of significance, even as I thought I was giving it an easy hit it completely screwed it up…
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 4 days ago:
So if it can be vibe coded, it’s pretty much certainly already a “thing”, but with some awkwardness.
Maybe what you need is a combination of two utilities, maybe the interface is very awkward for your use case, maybe you have to make a tiny compromise because it doesn’t quite match.
Maybe you want a little utility to do stuff with media. Now you could navigate your way through ffmpeg and mkvextract, which together handles what you want, with some scripting to keep you from having to remember the specific way to do things in the myriad of stuff those utilities do. An LLM could probably knock that script out for you quickly without having to delve too deeply into the documentation for the projects.
- Comment on 6🤷♀️7 4 days ago:
WASSSSUUUUUP
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 5 days ago:
Yeah, but mispredicting that would hurt. The market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, as they say.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 5 days ago:
Yeah, this one is going to hurt. I’m pretty sure my rather long career will be toast as my company and mostly my network of opportunities are all companies that are bought so hard into the AI hype that I don’t know that they will be able to survive that going away.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 5 days ago:
At work there’s a lot of rituals where processes demand that people write long internal documents that no one will read, but management will at least open it up, scroll and be happy to see such long documents with credible looking diagrams, but never read them, maybe looking at a sentence or two they don’t know, but nod sagely at.
LLM can generate such documents just fine.
Incidentally an email went out to salespeople. It told them they didn’t need to know how to code or even have technical skills, they code just use Gemini 3 to code up whatever a client wants and then sell it to them. I can’t imagine the mind that thinks that would be a viable business strategy, even if it worked that well.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 5 days ago:
An LLM can generate code like an intern getting ahead of their skis. If you let it generate enough code, it will do some gnarly stuff.
Another facet is the nature of mistakes it makes. After years of reviewing human code, I have this tendency to take some things for granted, certain sorts of things a human would just obviously get right and I tend not to think about it. AI mistakes are frequently in areas my brain has learned to gloss over and take on faith that the developer probably didn’t screw that part up.
AI generally generates the same sorts of code that I hate to encounter when humans write, and debugging it is a slog. Lots of repeated code, not well factored. You would assume of the same exact thing is fine in many places, you’d have a common function with common behavior, but no, AI repeated itself and didn’t always get consistent behavior out of identical requirements.
His statement is perhaps an over simplification, but I get it. Fixing code like that is sometimes more trouble than just doing it yourself from the onset.
Now I can see the value in generating code in digestible pieces, discarding when the LLM gets oddly verbose for simple function, or when it gets it wrong, or if you can tell by looking you’d hate to debug that code. But the code generation can just be a huge mess and if you did a large project exclusively through prompting, I could see the end result being just a hopeless mess.v frankly surprised he could even declare an initial “success”, but it was probably “tutorial ware” which would be ripe fodder for the code generators.
- Comment on 4 reasons Plex is turning into the thing it replaced 5 days ago:
So I don’t get it, I have mine up with a domain without tsilscale… The clients are quite happy wherever. I don’t even see that much “crawling” traffic that goes to the domain, most just hit the server by ip and get a static 401 page that the “default” site is hard coded to give out.
- Comment on Skier narrowly avoids a crevasse 6 days ago:
Mine had to go uphill
- Comment on When the AI bubble bursts.. 1 week ago:
The RAM that has been sold will not be viable for desktop systems, but especially with manufacturing capacity build up, you’d have memory vendors a bit more desperate to find a target market for new product. Datacenter clients will still exist but they could actually subsist on the hypothetical leftovers of a failed buildout, so consumer space may be their best bet.
- Comment on When the AI bubble bursts.. 1 week ago:
Unfortunately not even then. Nowadays the GPUs are a pretty alien form factor, usually not pcie cards. SXM and now HGX.
Datacenter gear has resembled consumer systems less and less after a period of getting closer in the 90s and 2000s.
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 1 week ago:
the TLS-ALPN-01 challenge requires a https server that implements generating a self-signed certificate on demand in response to a specific request. So we have to shut down our usual traffic forwarder and let an ACME implementation control the port for a minute or so. It’s not a long downtime, but irritatingly awkward to do and can disrupt some traffic on our site that has clients from every timezone so there’s no universal ‘3 in the morning’ time, and even then our service is used as part of other clients ‘3 in the morning’ maintenance windows… Folks can generally take a blip in the provider but don’t like that we generate a blip in those logs if they connect at just the wrong minute in a month…
As to why not support going straight to 443, don’t know why not. I know they did TLS-ALPN-01 to keep it purely as TLS extensions to stay out of the URL space of services which had value to some that liked being able to fully handle it in TLS termination which frequently is nothing but a reverse proxy and so in principle has no business messing with payload like HTTP-01 requires. However for nginx at least this is awkward as nginx doesn’t support it.
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 1 week ago:
Frankly, another choice virtually forced by the broader IT.
If the broader IT either provides or brokers a service, we are not allowed to independently spend money and must go through them.
Fine, they will broker commercial certificates, so just do that, right? Well, to renew a certificate, we have to open a ticket and attach our csr as well as a “business justification” and our dept incurs a hundred dollar internal charge for opening that ticket at all. Then they will let it sit for a day or two until one of their techs can get to it. Then we are likely to get feedback about something like their policy changing to forbid EC keys and we must do RSA instead, or vice versa because someone changed their mind. They may email an unexpected manager for confirmation in accordance to some new review process they implemented. Then, eventually, their tech manually renews it with a provider and attaches the certificate to the ticket.
It’s pretty much a loophole that we can use let’s encrypt because they don’t charge and technically the restrictions only come in when purchasing is involved. There was a security guy raising hell that some of our sites used that “insecure” let’s encrypt and demanding standards change to explicitly ban them, but the bearaucracy to do that was insurmountable so we continue.
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 1 week ago:
They in fact refuse to even do a redirect… it’s monumentally stupid and I’ve repeatedly complained, but ‘security’ team says port 80 doing anything but dropping the packet or connection refused is bad…
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 1 week ago:
The same screwed up IT that doesn’t let us do HTTP-01 challenges also doesn’t let us do DNS except through some bs webform, and TXT records are not even vaguely in their world.
It sucks when you are stuck with a dumber broad IT organization…
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 1 week ago:
Ours is automated, but we incur downtime on the renewal because our org forbids plain http so we have to do TLS-ALPN-01. It is a short downtime. I wish let’s encrypt would just allow http challenges over https while skipping the cert validation. It’s nuts that we have to meaningfully reply over 80…
Though I also think it’s nuts that we aren’t allowed to even send a redirect over 80…
- Comment on Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy 1 week ago:
So on mine, I haven’t bothered to change from the ISP provided router, which is mostly adequate for my needs, except I need to do some DNS shenigans, and so I take over DHCP to specify my DNS server which is beyond the customization provided by the ISP router.
Frankly been thinking of an upgrade because they don’t do NAT loopback and while I currently workaround with different DNS results for local queries, it’s a bit wonky to do that and I’m starting to get WiFi 7 devices and could use an excuse to upgrade to something more in my control.
- Comment on New tech pulls lithium from dead batteries cheaper than you can buy it 1 week ago:
Right, a lot of questions that are frankly outside the scope of their specific work, since it depends on what the general ‘market’ is for used batteries today and if there’s any opportunity cost associated with the process (e.g. you can get the lithium, but you somehow make retrieving other materials tough.
But yeah, if the $13.17 figure is, say, $3.17 raw lithium and extraction and $10 of ‘processing’, then the cost of spent batteries would have to be less than $0.77/kg by lithium content to be break-even.
I’m hopeful that even nearly break even is enough to move the needle, but companies love taking advantage of cheaping out by inflicting externalized costs on the environment…