thejml
@thejml@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on GOG.com gives away free horny games to protest credit card company censorship 1 day ago:
Good thing its not NNN.
- Comment on Are you worried about your child’s screentime? Get a landline 3 days ago:
Last I heard, all the providers in the US are in the “we’re not actively canceling them, but we won’t roll out new ones or fix problems.
- Comment on Are you worried about your child’s screentime? Get a landline 3 days ago:
I miss POTS. Copper landlines are a thing of the past. Now it’s just VoIP with a battery that doesn’t last long enough and another bill. (And place for scam/telemarketers/junk calls)
- Comment on Google tool misused to scrub tech CEO’s shady past from search 3 days ago:
Pretty sure that was exactly the desired use of the tool. Definitely not misused.
- Comment on YouTube to be included in Australia’s social media ban for children under 16 5 days ago:
Youtube is the second largest Social Network
I never saw it that way I till I saw a report on what the preferred social media platforms for teens… and it was the number one slot at that time. Apparently teens (and others) have entire conversations in the comments, share videos with friends, and doom scroll YouTube.
And I don’t know if you’ve read YouTube comment threads (I don’t usually) but they can get pretty toxic, even on tame content. Not to mention all the FUD and propaganda being distributed there.
- Comment on Samsung’s One UI 8 might shut down bootloader unlocking on Galaxy phones 5 days ago:
As long as they grease the right palms in the US it’s fine.
- Comment on Bitchat is a new private Bluetooth messaging app that doesn’t need the internet – here’s how it works 5 days ago:
- Comment on US condemns French inquiry into Elon Musk's social media platform X/Twitter. 1 week ago:
The only thing I condemn the French inquiry on is that it should have already happened.
- Comment on Proton freezes Swiss investment over surveillance fears 1 week ago:
They need to NOT have an LLM. Period. I want a light weight, inexpensive, security focused email/docs platform with zero AI.
- Comment on New Executive Order:AI must agree on the Administration views on Sex,Race, cant mention what they deem to be Critical Race Theory,Unconscious Bias,Intersectionality,Systemic Racism or "Transgenderism 1 week ago:
“Immigrants, we get the job done.”
- Comment on The Future is NOT Self-Hosted 1 week ago:
Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. I’m talking publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services.
I worry that quickly this will follow this path:
- Someone has to pay for it, so it becomes like an HOA of compute. (A Compute Owners Association, perhaps) Everyone contributes, everyone pays their shares
- Now there’s a group making decisions… and they can impose rules voted upon by the group. Not everyone will like that, causing schisms.
- Economies of scale: COA’s get large enough to be more mini-corps and less communal. Now you’re starting to see “subscription fees” no differently than many cloud providers, just with more “ownership and self regulation”
- The people running these find that it takes a lot of work and need a salary. They also want to get hosted somewhere better than someone’s house, so they look for colocation facilities and worry about HA and DR.
- They keep growing and draw the ire of companies for hosting copies of licensed resources. Ownership (which this article says we don’t have anyway) is hard to prove, and lawsuits start flying. The COA has to protect itself, so it starts having to police what’s stored on it. And now it’s no better than what it replaced.
- Comment on Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China’s Controversial ‘996’ Work Schedule 1 week ago:
If I was in my 20’s I’d have thought about that 2.5x offer. Now that I’m in my 40’s I can say i wouldn’t even do it for 5x. You can’t buy back missed time, no matter how much money you have.
Part of me says that I’d do it for 20x… but I’d just end up quitting in a few months, take my money and retire early.
- Comment on 6G mobile could divide the world 2 weeks ago:
Same. I kinda wonder if it’s saturation… when 5G was first announced and I happened to be in one of the first cities with it on a business trip, and I happen to have just bought a new phone that had it and it was AMAZING. Sites were snappy, it was like I was on my personal wifi.
Ever since it became more widespread, I can rarely tell a difference between LTE and 5G and honestly, If anything, my phone is slower when I see the 5G icon.
- Comment on China's Robotaxi Companies Are Racing Ahead of Tesla 2 weeks ago:
I’m sure the board will soon be calling for Elon… to get more money.
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 2 weeks ago:
While I 100% agree with the fact that even modern things can be fixed with some knowhow and troubleshooting (and spare capacitors or the like), there’s a few things at play: `
- people generally don’t have this skill set
- electronics tend to be made cheaper, this means they may fail faster but also means they can be replaced cheaper
- it costs real money for tech support that can fix said issues, often many times more money than the thing costs to replace `
As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff. Even in the retro sphere, the math starts to side towards fix because of the rarity, but it’s not always clear.
- Comment on What are the most in-demand Tech Skills? (besides AI) 2 weeks ago:
As a DevOps manager who regularly talks with development about hiring/architecting, and works at a Fortune 500. Here’s our short list:
- kubernetes/containers (like deep knowledge, not just “I ran helm once”)
- CI/CD, and IaC + GitOps
- golang/rust/dotNet… modern statically typed and compiled languages are greatly preferable. Python/bash/PHP is clutch, but it’s also easy to pick up if you know the above, and honestly I kinda just assume it at this point.
- actual complete understanding of Git.
- solid full stack development experience/understanding
- cloud experience (AWS or Azure mostly, but GCP is close enough)
- thinking/problem solving skills
Honestly, I’ve seen so many people with AI experience of some sort, it’s not a difference maker. It’s fairly easy to learn and no Fortune 500 is hosting their own LLM unless that’s the point of the business. If you actually understand the stack and how things relate, it’s huge.
A big part of hiring is understanding what the person knows and how well they know it to know if they can apply their wisdom to other things. You know some day AI is going to burst, something better than Blockchain will happen, Rust or Golang will be superseded, a new cloud provider will appear, etc. I need to know you can apply your understanding and knowledge to some new challenges using tools that aren’t even concepts now.
- Comment on Is there anything like a self-hosted version of medium of substack ? 3 weeks ago:
I’ve heard lots of good things about Ghost. I’ve also hosted Grav for a while and it’s pretty solid. You can do Wordpress, but I’d stay away as it gets bad fast and there are better alternatives. If you needed even more scale, Mediawiki is selfhostable too.
- Comment on Yet again, a free open-source Chinese AI has beaten all the investor-funded favorites like OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, etc. 3 weeks ago:
China’s government is absolutely bankrolling the AI efforts there, just as the US government is openly bankrolling efforts here in the US. It would be dumb for them not to. The Cold War of AI is upon us.
I’m not sure western AI companies will go bankrupt due to China’s models winning, though. There are plenty of security focused “we can’t use foreign AI” things that would keep them afloat, especially as not everyone needs the absolute most cutting edge AI for their stuff and many US and EU companies are self hosting tuned models for their customers needed.
There’s, of course, the fact that most of it at the moment is a giant bubble that will eventually pop as the next big thing takes its place in importance for world dominance. Will AI continue to find a place in the tech stack? Definitely. New models, tweaks for niche use cases and huge benefits for specialized industries, etc. Will newer tech and processes usurp it over the long run, absolutely. That’s just the way Tech has always worked.
- Comment on xkcd #3114: Building a Fire 3 weeks ago:
It’s a typical instruction delivery speech structure:
- Okay, let me tell you how to ____ 2-n. <steps to do the thing> n. And that’s how you ____ (Optional) n+1. Any questions?
Hence the text in panel 4 completes the pattern.
- Comment on Exclusive: OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome 3 weeks ago:
Hey a chrome alternative!
- New product is part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to capture data on users’ web behavior
Oh, so same thing as Chrome, got it.
- Comment on How big is your media library? 3 weeks ago:
What do you use for your music server if I might ask?
- Comment on This Is Why Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Needed Human Babysitters 4 weeks ago:
I think the IDEA of Elon back then was charismatic and energizing. He was seen pushing space flight and EV’s forward into the future. Watching a video stream of the first Falcon flight to land the booster back on Earth was exciting. The fact that their stream was on the internet and full of interesting detailed real time telemetry and video was something new and different and felt like the future.
But watching Elon the man talk and stumble through even early interviews and press conferences was not, and to this day, I find it painful to watch. A great orator he is not. But then neither is Trump, I suppose.
- Comment on This Is Why Tesla’s Robotaxi Launch Needed Human Babysitters 4 weeks ago:
Sure, but Elon isn’t charismatic in the slightest.
- Comment on Is Internet Content Too Engaging? 1 month ago:
The number of tabs I have open from sites I’ve clicked on, started reading, said “eh, I’ll get back to this later” and never have, says no.