tor0ugh

Written with compassion while also talking without cheap rage.

I am still convinced that the ongoing push of ’smart’ things into our networks being ad driven is a comfortable lie we tell ourselves, especially in the broader community of techies. Confronting the fact that gathering ‘data’ in this depth and broadness without an immediately observable use is much more nefarious looking in all its Damocles’ish vagueness than just doing the hand waving about ‘the ad industry’. This very industry is applying and developing ever new methods of capturing attention and manipulating our decision making processes. If you repeat that without the prefix ‘ad’, this sounds exactly as dangerous as it is.

But laws will not save us. The principal ideas of data sovereignty that the European Union tried to implement were spot on, but without real and pragmatic enforcement, they are essentially moot.

I don’t have even a single original thought about all of this. But being at my wits end makes me interested in other people’s thoughts about this complex.

It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated content, curated interfaces - everything that resembles some kind of hardship ironed out in thousand steps of iterations to appease the market which means the lowest common denominator.

But I also see that the people who can create the absolute most and the good things and the working things and the maintainable things nowadays are the people that have gained a tool, but not lost the knowledge of the medium we are using it on because we are tied to this old world so perfectly put under the spotlight in this blog post.

Thank you very much for this well structured comment despite your clearly visible emotional turmoil speaking if the region. It matches what a friend of ours tells about her relatives that still live there in parts. The diaspora of people from the DRC is surprising huge in Europe - a fact I was not aware of really.

This was an insightful read despite sounding like the usual shallow AI-pocalypse posting. I had a suspicion that the initial velocity that coding assistants made achievable would cool down rather quickly as we all are aware of the shortcomings of coding agents. The illustrated K confirms my gut feeling that the amount of steering, handholding and double checking would eventually consume more human ressources than a slower build process.

Perhaps current incentives and agent behavior will reshape in the near future - right now even the SOTA-models give me Golden Retriever vibes in their eagerness to please and work for me. The constant paranoia I developed when working in larger or complicated code bases has me apprehend “don’t code, talk to me” still, even after the advent of system prompts and MD-based skills.

Nice collection of sources and the author doesn’t gallop logically or starts evangelizing as the usual developer crowd tends to do when writing.

I was using this religiously but there’s a bug currently that makes the initialization fail and/or throws an error on the phone client. Absolutely great piece of software otherwise, free, anonymous, encrypted and so on. Really hope the team can fix this soon - I would hate to switch back to tmux tunneling.

Quick feedback: the link to the API docs is currently localhost:8000 in the GitHub MD - perhaps it’s tongue in cheek and I don’t get it but I would clean that up.