sircastor

Sometimes when I’m programming I get a little lost in trying to make a pipeline more efficient. While it’s a noble goal, I have to remind myself: “somewhere here, you have to pay the piper”. No matter how you squeeze the bits, distribute the work, or optimize the input, you still have to draw those pixels to the display.

The simplification and optimization makes it easier somewhere in the process, but all of those pixels still have to be drawn, somewhere, sometime.

Extending the metaphor a bit far, we’re about to try to draw the entire buffer. And we’re still populating it.

It’s a “always a free option” which doesn’t clarify what you get with the free version.

IIRC LastPass did this by slowly reducing how many devices and what kinds you could sync. They made the free option increasingly painful.

We've got reusable mesh bags that we use for this.

Since all our local markets have introduced handheld scanners, I don't even bring my bags in. I put everything in the cart barcode up, get to the checkout, scan everything, pay, and go.

When I get to the car I unload into the bags. I'm sure it's not a thing for everyone, but I feel like I'm cutting out a fair bit of shuffling.

I think what might happen is all these other markets are going to end up “playing fair” while the US remains an abused ecosystem- because it’ll be the only place left Apple and Google can push their advantage.

I think if we'd had a "normal" administration, this probably would have been pushed by the US government. The US services have been gunning for this for decades. But we have an administration that seems extremely disjointed in what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. I'm kind of curious about the internal conversations that must be happening on the other side of 5-eyes nations services as they're trying to accomplish their ends with such an unpredictable ally.

This is an incomplete thought, but a friend of mine has this idea around reputation built through a sort-of key signing. You get a key, your friend gets a key, you sign each other's keys. The key can serve as an indicator of trust, or validity that an individual's contributions are meaningful (or something). And if your friend suddenly turns into a corporate shill, you could revoke that trust. And if the people haven't established their own trust with that person, their trust goes when yours does. Transitive trust.

It obviously has some flaws, and could be gamed in the right circumstances, but I think it's an interesting idea.

My iPhone 12 Mini's camera just broke (the zoom is failing..) I have been poking around for any solution that is around the same size. The best answer is generally never-heard-of companies that pop new phone models out and no certainty as to how long they'll last or be supported. That's on top of having to switch platforms (again).

I'm resigned to getting a new iPhone in Sept - reluctantly.

The hardest part about inevitablism here is that the people who are making the argument this is inevitable are the same people who are the people who are shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into it. Into the development, the use, the advertisement. The foxes are building doors into the hen houses and saying there’s nothing to be done, foxes are going to get in so we might as well make it something that works for everyone.

One of the mild tragedies of my youth is that when we switched from the Macintosh SE/30 to the IIci, my MacPaint art didn't make the transition. My dad told me that the files were incompatible. I don't think that's actually true, but I didn't know enough at that age to be able to question it or even explore it. There are many many creations throughout first half of my life that are lost for a lack of storage space at the time.

As an aside: Do your best to capture at least something in a way that will be preserved.

> I have found that there are people who just want to watch the world burn. There are many reasons, but, at its most basic, hurt people hurt people.

I'm not sure that it's even malicious. I think many hackers look at a website or a service as a game to play. They aren't thinking so far as the person that this action affects, just as far as "I wonder if I could get all the data off that site?" or something similar. And on top of that, some view the rate-limiting as a challenge.

I think it's the same thing that drives the excessive snark or cruelty in comments. They don't think of the person on the other end as a person, they think of them as an endpoint.

I absolutely loved it. It’s well structured. The science is well written, but not overbearing. Fun story.

I do a lot of non-work AI stuff on my own, from pair programming with AI, asking it to generate whole things, to just asking it to clarify a general approach to a problem.

FWIW, in a work environment (and I have not been given the go-ahead to start this at my work) I would start by supplementing my codebase. Add a new feature via AI coding, or maybe reworking some existing function. Start small.

I'm a senior engineer with 20+ (oof) years of industry experience. I appreciate that this sucks and you don't want to do it. I wouldn't either. That said, it's a hirer's market out there right now. There will be plenty of people who will be happy to take your position while you're looking for something you prefer.

My opinion is that we're going to have about 5 years of this. Managers and C-suite folks are going to do their absolute darnedest to replace and supplement people with AI tools before they figure out it's not going to work. While I appreciate the differences, I remember seeing this ~6-7 years ago with blockchain at my last role. It'll work itself out. In the mean time, you get to contribute to the situation, instead of simply not being present. It's not going to be fun of course.

I don't think we're ever going back from this. There's an entire generation of new coders, and new managers who are growing up with this stuff. It's part of their experience, and suggesting they not use it is going to be akin to asking if you can use a typewriter instead of a computer with a word processor. Some companies will take longer to adopt, but it's coming...

I didn’t want to be attached to the Synology system or hardware anymore. Synology Photos is great (and we’re still using it for the upload atm), but Immich lets me control the whole thing, top to bottom.

I’m running a DS1813+. It’s stopped getting new feature updates. This approach lets me keep the storage running while migrating away the server components.