jmbwell

I love how LLMs have brought DIY software back. Need an app? Just make it. Like back when you’d write programs in BASIC

Just remember, the morals of someone making an argument have no bearing on whether an argument is sound.

If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.

If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.

Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things

I’ve been a die hard native package or static binary proponent for a long time. I still hold that there are real advantages.

As podman has improved and compose stacks have improved, I’ve conceded that containers simplify deployment and updates and isolation, and at this point I find for me the benefits more than outweigh the hassles.

Instead of crafting a set of ansible plays that do all the manual native installation steps, I have a relatively lightweight ansible rig that reads containers and relationships desired from a manifest in inventory, then builds or modifies compose files, then just deploys. Much less futzing. And I’m more likely to keep things up to date regularly as a result

Or, increasingly, dispatch codex to handle it for me

In this way I update home assistant across multiple instances now like magic. I don’t even dread it a little anymore

Withings opened my eyes. I’d been using cheap crappy devices that didn’t do much at all. “Upgraded” to withings and holy crap, the new user experience was a complete tour of my personal health data they wanted to ingest and control. I was finding no way to opt out. I couldn’t use the thing until I answered all the questions. It’s clear they’re all-in on vacuuming up data for their own purposes. I went back to a dumb scale and dumb bp cuff. I’d love to have things that automatically connect and record in my software of choice. But you can see what withings feels that costs them. They want you to pay not even to escape their confines, but just to allow your data to go to your own system. This shit has to end

You’re absolutely right about learning languages. Perhaps I should have clarified, don’t speak and aren’t trying to learn.

It’s not getting better with AI. I’m 100% with the author on wisdom. LLMs don’t seem much to exhibit the benefit of experience in their outputs

When my dad does this it’s mortifying

When I do it though it’s very cool and fun!

Of course I don’t call women “girl” or try to order in languages I don’t speak

Someone commented once about the Trader Joe’s people always flirting with everyone, and a) that’s probably true but b) is just being nice to random people these days so intimate and invasive that it’s equivalent to getting hit on? That would explain people cringing

I put passkeys in both iCloud and Bitwarden. I count on having access to one or the other, or at least being able to recover access to one or the other, but it’s the same situation with my passwords generally

In fact I quite like having separate passkeys for each manager instead of one password and -maybe- separate TOTPs (usually not) shared between them

So in my own experience, the same tool I use for TOTP is the one I use for passkeys, suggesting it’s at least possible for passkeys to be as frictionless as TOTP.

On the rare occasion I’m logging into a device that isn’t mine, that doesn’t have my password manager on it, scanning a QR code from a device that does have my password manager on it has been enough to get me in. Without sharing any secrets with the foreign device, incidentally

So I’d wager your concerns are valid and are likely to be addressed over time, as this stuff develops rapidly. It might even be better in your scenarios already

Lately it has been a tap-tap operation to enroll a passkey. Sweetwater.com surprised me with it the other day. I was done in seconds, and now I can log in without even having to enter a code. Face ID handles it for both iCloud Keychain and Bitwarden

See also: the McDonald’s ice cream machines by Taylor, their half assed and overpriced vendor locked in system, the raspberry pi based alternative, and then the ensuing legal and commercial chicanery

The profit motive absolutely favors neglect, and may even punish attempts at reasonable maintenance

Yeah this seems like a decision yielded by a model. One of countless examples of the model’s outputs careening into individually defensible but holistically nonsensical results

A human seems less likely to embark upon a path that most humans know leads to something a human is unlikely to want

LLMs produce amazing things, but only one token at a time. Anything beyond that is retrospectively emergent at best

The precedents for a site operator allowing only “approved” software are many. Passkeys doesn’t prevent that, and indeed offers a new way to implement it. The author argues that this is a trap.

On behalf of my late mother, these look impossible to clean