Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc.
Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.
I run nixOS as well on my home infrastructure (gateway/firewall, a couple of internal servers).
But I have had, uh, non-trivial breakages happen also when I upgrade the system itself to the next yearly release. Non-bootable kernel kind of breakages.
But I will give you that I can just boot from the generation before the upgrade, and it works again. So there's that :)
I use Xcode, but just to run the app with Command-R so I can see log messages or stack traces if I need to drop it into the agent for analysis. Everything else is done by Claude Code / Codex.
The apparent quality of our pull request messages and documentation is sky high (at least from a language and grammar perspective), but I do miss the days of hand crafted prose, it was easier to tell the low effort crap from the gold.
I grew up in a similar environment, similar trajectory, but in Africa.
Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.
Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.
Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.
I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.
Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)
Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.
This is rural Scotland in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
I know that a part of why I did so well in programming was being forced to think about what to do and how things worked for so long, and it gave me a lot of stamina to brute force my way through problems.
But these days, I'll admit even I reach for an LLM more often than not, and I can feel my mental muscle memory atrophy.
I don't know how to give my son the same experience (currently at age 8, he still does not have any of his own devices, and has highly restricted access to the iPad).
This is 100% already happening. No need to worry about licensing or dependencies any more, just have the LLM launder it into a plausibly different structure!
This kind of reminds me how I saw some teams deal with a vulnerability scanner flagging an OSS dependency as having a reported vulnerability. The dependency was always OSS anyways. Copy & paste the entire thing into your project. Voila, dependency scanner doesn't find any problems any longer.
I don't think I ever used the ultra wide camera in my phone. I find the default wide angle already too wide for most use cases. For some reason every phone includes one but not a ~50mm equivalent. Weird.
Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.
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