linsomniac

I'm in the US, but:

>Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity."

that sounds similar to what I'm seeing, but in my case that restriction is limited to their "evaluation-level" services. It says in full:

>Evaluation and Additional Services. In some cases, we may permit you to evaluate our Services for a limited time or with limited functionality. Use of our Services for evaluation purposes are for your personal, non-commercial use only.

Thanks again for pointing this out. I think we're in the clear in the US.

I'd be seriously considering Debian or, hear me out, NixOS. We run all our work servers on Ubuntu, but ~6 months ago I switched my workstation to NixOS and I couldn't be happier. I've been following "latest" or whatever they call it, being able to treat the OS package versions like the rest of our software (update the flake.lock file and then burn it in in dev+stg for ~2 weeks before rolling to prod) is pretty attractive.

>Productivity went down because an engineer spent 2 weeks

Yes, that is something you have to be careful of. In this case, as I mentioned I believe, it was done in spare time, not full time, and it was mostly the AI that spent 2 weeks, I'd guess he probably spent a day or two, and the testers probably spent another day (however, I think this ended up coinciding with our quarterly "full site" test, so it would have happened anyway).

Agreed, but remember this was a reply under an article about modernizing existing code.

In this case the situation was that we had other higher priorities for the last decade so we were walking around with this technical debt.

I know a lot of people think that the AI tools level the playing-field, but we aren't experiencing that. The guy that did this translation is doing more tickets than the other 4 software devs combined. And it's not because they are low-effort tickets. That's also on top of the 6 hours a week of meetings he has that the other devs don't.

Does it change it that we are an organization of 8 people? As far as I know our use is permitted, but LMK if that isn't the case.

We just recently use Claude Code to port an old Coldfusion site to Java Spring and it went amazingly well. It's around 50K lines of Java, one of our engineers did it in his spare time over about a week, using the $200/mo Claude plan. We had been talking about doing it for at least the last dozen years but never found the time. It would have taken around 12-18 engineer-months to do this manually.

He had the translation use browser integration to compare the new site to the old site automatically. The result was so good that he had to change background color on the new site because he couldn't be sure that he was testing the new site; it was so close to the original he was paranoid about accidentally being on the old site and not knowing it. The whole thing was done in under 2 weeks, including coding, developer testing, tester testing, and deployment. It's been in production 4-6 weeks now and we've had no reports of problems.

"I keep hearing that coding was never the hard part but you're not going to hear that from me. Coding was hard. If it'd been easy, none of us would be grieving."

That seems very plausible, thanks!

Looks like it's available in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection and at the time I read _Toast_ I was also reading a bunch of these "Years Best Sci Fi" collections. I've snagged this and will give it a read, but I'm almost 100% certain that you nailed it!

These covert communications are reminding me of a short story I read a few decades ago but haven't been able to track back down. I thought it was a Charles Stross story in the _Toast_ collection, but I re-read it and it isn't there.

In the story some University students take part in a trial that involves a brain scan and then them spending the rest of the day answering a customer support message. They can spend the whole day working on researching and writing a really good customer support reply to a user request. While doing this they notice something odd and realize through some sort of back-channel that this isn't the first time they've spent the day writing a customer support message; they are stuck in a simulation.

I'd really love to go back and re-read it, but I've not been able to find it again.

In _Toast_ is another story that's also relevant: A fairly innocuous news story pops up and our hero calls his partner at work to tell them that it's time to get their go bag and get off planet. This news story indicates the Earth is in the beginning stages of reaching an AI singularity, and this isn't the first time our hero has gone through this on a planet.

>I still don't understand the point of Ghostty, Kitty, Wezterm...

WezTerm can run on my Mac but give me a native GUI experience of a Wezterm session on my Linux workstation. It's like tmux, but with a native GUI experience including mouse click-drag selection that doesn't pick up "window" borders.

That alone is what is keeping me on Wezterm, since I get a native experience on some terminal sessions I access remotely on my macbook but then can switch to on my 30" screen when I'm at my desk.

FWIW: This is NOT what "balcony solar" is. See my top level comment clarifying it.

Nevada has started allowing it, and other states are starting to allow it in Jan 2027. However, these all rely on equipment that meets standards that equipment is not yet certified for (UL 3700). It's a bit of a waiting game in the US right now.