GabeIsko

No, the reason why I called them digital slaves is because it is a business pursuit to directly replace workers with unpaid labor automatons. That part is folly. I guess I was baiting a bit. I am not talking about the work itself, or the ethics of using tools - actually in this sense a digital slave would be on it's face ethical because an automaton is a machine, and not a person with rights etc.

I specifically used that term to point out the folly of replacing the human form as a business exercise. It get that it is a very simple business proposition - retrofit existing workspaces designed for humans around digital atomatons that mimic humans and eliminate your labor costs. Theoretically you are eliminating the messy step of systems integration. However, systems integration is a process that you simply can't get away from - you will have to figure out charging stations for these robots, issues will pop up, you will have to maintain them etc. It is not the exchange of money for labor between 2 parties - one is fundamentally a machine and it requires operations and maintenance to keep in working order.

Trying to mimic the human form then starts to undermine the very point of owning a site of business in the first place. While I think that understanding more about our bodies and replicating the motion and control of biomechanics is a very noble research aim, in egineering applications it is a very impractical one. These robots would be much better suited if they were on wheels for instance.

The distance between the pratical applications for these kinds of robots and the imagination that provides them their research and development funding is too much of a gap - it facilitated me leaving the industry to work in software. I found that there was a fundemental mis-alignment. Researchers want to explore motion, business want to solve practical problems. This platform is a compromise that does neither very well.

So the point is that the digital slave term was very intentional, and you actually grokked it pretty well. I wouldn't call a laptop a digital slave - a digital slave would be a human robot that you could program to use your computer for you while you were away from your desktop workstation. That would be a really dumb invention.

It is very simple. Those are not real machines.

This is exactly why I didn't want to work for Agile when I was invited. This stuff is going to get crushed in the market by cheap AGVs and good systems integration.

It was very sad to watch the ambitions of excited robotics researchers turn towards making what are essentially digital slaves. I am not saying that manufacturing or logistics couldn't, or even shouldn't be automated. But the true factories and distribution centers of the future will have to fundamentally rethink what productivity and coordinated work looks like, including having a greater imagination about work and employment.

Mimicking the human form inelegantly is not going to cut it, let alone reduce labor costs. I am all for the research, but the dream of replacing bin pickers with humanoid robots is cynical and hopeless.

Does it matter? Whether they are doing it on device or in the cloud, they are still recording what their customers say and collecting data on it without their consent.

To me, this is really an admission.

That sounds neat, I haven't seen it, although I think someone else mentioned they were using neocities. Do they support random static sites?

It's different for codeberg, because they have a lot of infrastructure they have to maintain, and are ideologically motivated to be a libre option to share peoples code. It's an entirely different motivation than promoting a subreddit that runs on reddit's infrastructure. They are really constrained on the infrastructure cost side, and stability is a constant struggle. They don't have the bandwidth to sort through the AI slop - they would probably rather ban potentially good useful projects at the expense of making codeberg a more restrictive place that people who use AI in a smart way avoid to ensure that they can provide infrastructure for libre software. I kind of see where they are coming from.

It's not just AI stuff btw. I recently evalutated hosting a static site on codeberg for a project I am working on. It is a cool project, and although it is commercial now (it's a video game) I would like it to be open source one day. It would have been a great contribution to codeberg (in my opinion)! Maybe my game can't be open source software right now; sharing open source art is a mess. But I would love to make the blog for it libre!

However, I came to the conclusion that the static page feature of codeberg simply isn't appropriate for this use case. The codeberg staff really only maintains it so that codeberg can be feature complete with other publicly available git forge hosts (github, gitlab, etc.,). It actually is a huge infrastructure burden that contributes to their instability. They have made it explicit in the past - that feature is so that libre software projects hosted there can have a static page if it would make the project better, and they don't care about any other use case. I don't need that - I want a stable platform that will host my small static website blog at a very low cost, with high stability and uptime, no questions asked. We simply don't have goals that align, and that is okay. I don't take it personally. The whole point of making my blog a static site was to build it locally and be host agnostic. The hosting privilege ultimately is going to Cloudflare workers.

I think that is a much healthier way to think of this sort of. The great AI deluge of code (slop) IS disrupting a lot of assumptions we made about the internet that were based on creating code that works is hard. Now creating code is easy. Creating good code may still be hard, but I think it will be healthy to re-evaulate everyone's goals and agenda's, trust in the people that act in good faith and have the best attentions in mind, and respect everyone's limitations.

This is what I love about selfhosting btw - I am a really active participant on that sub and I actually appreciate the balance you guys are trying to achieve between allowing people to share projects they think are helpful (even if some LLM code was involved) vs. not letting it be entirely overrun by crappy AI slop app spam (which opens up a lot of supply chain risk anyway). I love self hosting my software, and I have gotten a lot of use out of my self hosted Qwen model - notes only, no code generation though. Selfhosted is honestly the solution out of this mess. Empowering individuals to run the computing they need to use every day off of their own computers that they own, bringing computing to the masses. I hope we can move past this RAM market cornering BS and get back to that mission.

I braced myself for this, and instead found that it worked surprisingly well for my uses. I only manage 4 gigs though.

Man, I always hoped to find a project like this on hackernews. I starred it.

It's pretty sad in the indie gamedev world that handling and versioning binary data is considered an enterprise feature. I understand that git was explicitly designed for source code, but it would be nice to have any open system that handled versioning binary files well. This is pretty much the only reason I am going to try out lore at some point, although I am not super psyched at some of its implementation.

What is a real text editor, by your estimation? NVim? Emacs? Genuinely curious.

I use VSCode/Codium since I maintain a GUI stack for general usage. But I have all the terminal tools installed for my work there as well. I hate customizing things too, which I find is necessary if you want to get the most out of terminal text editors. VSCode is pretty good out of the box, with terminal access and everything built in.

Jeez, I hope this doesn't turn into a text editor flame war...

I gotta say, Fedora plus KDE - have not had any major issue, and certainly none as bad as desktop utility performance degradation on Windows 11. Probably a little more fragile feeling than Windows 10, but it honestly has felt basically same, which I wasn't expecting.

This thing came by default on AlmaLinux, which I am evaluating for some HomeLab stuff. It's pretty neat! Definitely not a replacement for cotnainer management though - it is really more of a sysadmin portal where you can view services and open a terminal and such, but from a web console.

Let's assume they aren't correct - is the massive cost DOGE is incurring to taxpayers while destroying essential government services and weakening our national security a good thing?

If you have to render html, which is what markdown ultimately becomes, you might as well use a web broswer.

That's not it! Direct engineering effort towards new features that will drive new customers and markets. Functionality is unimportant. Haven't you ever worked in enterprise software?

I'm kidding btw.