jfc is that a thing now, people just ignoring the enormous theft that’s wrapped up in LLMs and calling it clean?

It really is a thing. Far too many conversations lead to the moronic “no no it's cool, I heard in the USA they say it can't be copyrighted”, as though that addresses the concern at all.

I'm here for the end of copyright, but if someone believes copyright will be just poofed out of existence because an LLM washed the code? They are not paying attention to how many lawyer hours these corporations are willing to drop on your head for daring to challenge their monopoly.

We're still looking. This ain't it.

This is the correct answer.

Anything a computer is doing, the software that does it is doing that because someone(s) programmed it.

You're not looking for a programming language specific to a task; those exist, of course, but it's better to know how systems are programmed, and what APIs are used to program the system you're interested to control. Choosing which programming language to use should come after knowing what you want the computer system to do.

A child of five would understand this. Fetch me a child of five.

—Groucho Marx

We shouldn’t even be in this situation, where just politely asking someone’s computer to delete files is effective.

Exactly, it's a problem only for those who have knowingly handed their development environment over to obey commands from an untrustworthy source.

If you're the one holding the syringe to your own vein and pushing the plunger, but you didn't think to ask what's inside first? That's no one else's fault.

This is a well targeted sabotage of a system that's causing untold damage. Of course it's going to annoy and surprise the people using the system it's targeted to.

Screenshotting a text post on the Fediverse, to post an opaque image on the Fediverse.

The post was right there to be shared.

any kind of undocumented subversive behaviour in your thing.

Fortunately, this behaviour is explicitly documented.

Please put in the effort to write (in the post) a synposis of what you're linking to, and why you think it's worth visiting, before we go there.

I donate to a number of free-software projects via https://liberapay.com/ which lets me control the individual donation amounts and frequencies, and pay from a single account that I top up periodically.

When approached about allowing me to donate to them via Liberapay, I've had several people respond positively and set up their end of the deal. It often just takes a friendly conversation.

AI is a tool

There is no such thing as “just a tool”.

Even so, some technology (like the examples of “autocomplete” you give) are effectively harmless to anyone else. But some technology is harmful to others even if those others don't use it.

if you don’t like it, don’t use it, but let others do what they want.

I'm happy to let others do what they want where it harms no one else.

LLMs as currently deployed are not that. Their use, by anyone, is harmful to us, and we need to resist it for the sake of everyone.

The Unix shell remains an excellent IDE.

A huge array of text- and data-manipulation tools, with more available through the standard package manager in my operating system.

Add in a powerful text editor like Vim or Emacs, and nothing can beat this IDE.

Magit is what allowed me to finally commit to switching to Git full time.

It's such an excellent front-end for Git that I've known numerous workmates learn Emacs just to use Magit.

Magit, which is the best Git porcelain around. Git, because it has an unparalleled free-software ecosystem of developer tools that work with it.

Why is Git's free-software ecosystem so much better than all the other VCSen?

Largely because of marketing (the maker of Linux made this! hey look, GitHub!), but also because it has a solid internal data model that quickly proved to experts that it is fast and flexible and reliable.

Git's command-line interface is atrocious compared to contemporary DVCSen. This was seen originally as no problem because Git developers intentionally released it as the “plumbing” for a VCS, intending that other motivated projects would create various VCS “porcelain” for various user audiences. https://git-scm.com/... The interface with sensible operations and coherent interface language, resides in that “porcelain”, which the Git developers explicitly said they were not focussed on creating.

But, of course, the “plumbing” command line interface itself immediately became the primary way people were told to use Git, and the “porcelain” applications had much slower development and nowhere near the universal recognition of Git. So either people didn't learn Git (learning only a couple of operations in a web app, for example), or to learn Git they were required to use the dreadful user-hostile default “plumbing” commands. It became cemented as the primary way to learn Git for many years.

I was a holdout with Bazaar VCS for quite a while, because its command-line interface dealt in coherent user-facing language and consistent commands and options. It was deliberately designed to first have a good command-line UI, and make a solid DVCS under that. Which it did, quite well; but it was no match for the market forces behind Git.

Well, eventually I found that Magit is the best porcelain for Git, and now I have my favourite VCS.

@super_user_do@fedd.it, don't fall for the (insanely voluminous) hype around LLM capabilities.

LLMs aren't better than you even today. They will extrude mediocre code, far too verbosely, and inevitably lose track of what they are supposed to be doing. When asked to make a change, they will frequently change far too much. They will make a mess that no one understands, least of all the LLM.

You can do better than them, today and in the future, by being curious, reading to understand, intending what you write, and improving from mistakes. LLMs can do none of this, their design does not allow them to.

To be clear, articles like this are saying “China”, “Belgium”, etc. as shorthand for the national government of that country.

Not that everyone in that country must switch; only that the country-level government is declaring they will switch computers they use.

This does have a strong effect on what other organisations and individuals use, but it lags a long way and certainly doesn't directly affect everyone in the country.

With that said: Yeah the Chinese government is made up of a great many more people than European national governments. It's a big move.

Passkeys are a potentially good technology, that is frequently implemented in an insecure and user-hostile way.

Good: a standard way for authentication that can be implemented in common on client and server, such that the user doesn't need to know a secret.

Bad: Most OS and platform vendors breathlessly implemented this standard using their proprietary APIs and making it practically infeasible (read: impossible for typical end-users, therefore they won't, therefore insecure) to attempt syncing your passkeys outside their walled garden.

It is entirely feasible to implement passkeys in a way that users are in control and can freely move between devices and operating systems. But many implementations make that impossible, while still calling their implementation “passkey”.

So, we need to reject any implementation which puts any barrier to the user freely migrating and syncing all their devices regardless of platform.

So, it was gambling, then.

10×s developers who could produce 0 code without it

Let me see; ten times nothin', add nothin', carry the nothin'…

Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.

Thank you for correctly describing what a Luddite wants and does not want.

Platinun