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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Don’t tear down your server just to have fun - setup a vm (or get one of those minipcs), call i “playground” and have fun there.

    Redo your server after you’ve tried different things, and only if you feel like you found something that is worth it.

    Experimenting with different distros can teach you a lot (especially if you try very different ones - mint and debian aren’t that much different) and I do recommend you do it, just don’t do it in production :)


  • I’d say it’s because:

    1. the people who ask for recommendations won’t like (or understand) debian? (it’s just “old packages this” and “outdated that” for most people)
    2. the people who do use and appreciate debian don’t read “I hate windows pls recommend me a distro” posts (or at least don’t reply as often as the <insert popular distro> fanboys)

    And, no, I don’t use debian myself.

    but when I finally switched over to Debian, everything just worked!

    That’s most probably because you learned how to use your system without breaking it in the meantime :)




  • Should I just learn how to use Docker?

    Since you are not tied to docker yet, I’d recommend going with podman instead.

    They are practically the same and most (all?) docker commands work on podman too, but podman is more modern (second generation advantage) and has a better reputation.

    As for passing a network interface to a container, it’s doable and IIRC it boils down to changing the namespace on the interface.

    Unless you have specific reasons to do that, I’d say it’s much easier to just forward ports from the host to containers the “normal” way.

    There’s no limit to how many different IPs you can assign to a host (you don’t need a separate interface for each one) and you can use a given port on different IPs for different things .

    For example, I run soft-serve (a git server) as a container. The host has one “management” IP (92.168.10.243) where openssh listens on port 22 and another IP (192.168.10.98) whose port 22 is forwarded to the soft-serve container via podman run [...] -p 192.168.10.98:22:22).










  • Here it is:

    Many of us got hit by the agent coding addiction. It feels good, we barely sleep, we build amazing things. Every once in a while that interaction involves other humans, and all of a sudden we get a reality check that maybe we overdid it.

    In His Dark Materials, every human has a dæmon, a companion that is an externally visible manifestation of their soul. It lives alongside as an animal, but it talks, thinks and acts independently. I’m starting to relate our relationship with agents that have memory to those little creatures. We become dependent on them, and separation from them is painful and takes away from our new-found identity. We’re relying on these little companions to validate us and to collaborate with. But it’s not a genuine collaboration like between humans, it’s one that is completely driven by us, and the AI is just there for the ride. We can trick it to reinforce our ideas and impulses. And we act through this AI. Some people who have not programmed before, now wield tremendous powers, but all those powers are gone when their subscription hits a rate limit and their little dæmon goes to sleep.

    Looking at Gas Town (and Beads) from the outside, it looks like a Mad Max cult. What are polecats, refineries, mayors, beads, convoys doing in an agentic coding system? If the maintainer is in the loop, and the whole community is in on this mad ride, then everyone and their dæmons just throw more slop up. As an external observer the whole project looks like an insane psychosis or a complete mad art project. Except, it’s real? Or is it not? Apparently a reason for slowdown in Gas Town is contention on figuring out the version of Beads, which takes 7 subprocess spawns. Or using the doctor command times out completely. Beads keeps growing and growing in complexity and people who are using it, are realizing that it’s almost impossible to uninstall.





  • IDK.

    I just asked this to perplexity as an experiment:

    write a macos terminal command that makes a backup copy if all files in documents/ my home adding the current date and time to each filename

    Here’s what it concocted:

    cd ~ && find Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sh -c 'for f; do cp "$1" "Documents/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"; done' _ {} +
    

    Now, I am no “prompt engineer” and surely there are better way to ask it stuff, but then again a layman is no prompt engineer either.

    So the question is: would a layman be able to provide feedback and have perplexity fix its command?

    My “layman-like” feedback (now that I re-read it, IDK how much a layman would have used “recurse”… I’m doing my best here):

    I want the files copied to a “backups” folder in my home. It should also recurse into the “documents” folder.

    mkdir -p ~/backups && cd ~/Documents && find . -type f -exec sh -c 'mkdir -p "~/backups/$(dirname "$1")" && cp "$1" "~/backups/$2/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"' _ {} "$(pwd)" \;
    

    Feeback:

    it says “No such file or directory” (because of $PWD passed as $2 - of course I didn’t say this to the LLM)

    mkdir -p ~/backups && rsync -a --include='*/' --include='*.*' --exclude='*' --no-links ~/Documents/ ~/backups/"$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"/
    

    the date must be in the file name

    mkdir -p ~/backups && find ~/Documents -type f -exec sh -c 'dir="~ /backups/$(dirname "${1#"$2"}")"; mkdir -p "$dir"; cp "$1" "$dir/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"' _ {} ~/Documents \;
    

    I don’t think I need to continue?

    BTW: the LLM also instructed me to do a whole bunch of seemingly useless stuff, like giving Terminal.app full disk access via System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access (which I assume is actually a thing in macos but can’t verify as I run linux)

    edit: I hope I didn’t misinterpret the bash commands (I didn’t actually run them) and spotted the right bugs in them - even if I didn’t I guess my point still stands?


  • Being able to use an LLM turns a layman into a coder no more than being able to use CAD turns them into an engineer.

    It’s a real pity that LLMs seem to have taken over as the sole topic of discussion in programming communities such as this one. It might be just me, but I find the whole topic barely interesting at all (ie. not more interesting than the discussions about stackoverflow coding we used to have).