I find it really weird that something as simple as the basic functionality of nextcloud seemingly can’t be implemented in a stable and lightweight manner.

Nextcloud always seems one update away from self destruction and it prepares for that by hoarding all the resources it can get. It never feels fast or responsive. I just want a way to share files between my machines.

There are other solutions, I know, but they’re all terrible in their own way.

Using the Rabbit R1 instead of generic ML was too obvious.

None of the things you mentioned were in my description. You made that up completely. I talked about meetings, no scheduling information.

She’s not entitled to asking multiple times day if you’re done yet.

Did I even imply that? No. You made that up.

I work above senior, have done management and tech lead.

Hearing only what you want, not what the other person said makes you almost perfect management material.

Seriously, look at my comments and your replies. You answered to a completely different reality.

Nah, I think you’re mixing things up here.

“Toxic” is just a label you’re putting on everything you don’t like and you’re also putting a ton of implications behind it.

If Stacy wants a feature, and she’s the official representative, I need to clarify what that feature means. A manager can’t shield me from having to research the technical implications, that’s my job.

Also, you can ignore calls all you want, if there is a genuine need to communicate, you need to have that call at some point. That’s actually your first point in the list above.

I think you never worked in a role above code grunt. As a senior developer, my job is to do all what I described above. I need to do all the technical legwork a manager can’t. I need to write everything down. I need to get feedback from stakeholders. That’s nothing a manager can do and that’s nothing a junior can do.

I code something like half an hour a day.

I feel like these memes of hating everything other than lone coding is because you keep working for toxic companies.

No, it’s because we are working with humans and their deeply flawed organizations. As much as people hate corporations and love startups, both are always a mess. Every organization I’ve seen from the inside is barely functioning. Cruft, interpersonal conflicts, incompetence, or simply very bad market situations.

Software engineering kind of has to get involved with almost all of that. If you need to get approval from department A and Stacy just keeps changing what she wants, you’ll have to carry that chaos into the development and it will usually percolate through half the engineering department, because hardly any interface is actually a stable attack surface. That means meetings, calls, meetings, reviews, meetings, and fucking Stephen again wants to pitch this weird framework he’s so in love with, meetings, budget calls, because there’s no way, simply changing the field length can take that much work, meetings, …

Again, that’s not what obfuscation means.

Also, what exactly is the difference between cat and journalctl? You can’t read a text file without a program either.

Of course, raw text files are more common, but what you’re drawing up here is a mixture of old man yells at cloud and tin foil hat territory.

So literally every program on your machine is obfuscated. Linux kernel? Obfuscated. Wayland? Obfuscated. And even VIM: obfuscated.

You’re creating problems where there are none.

Are you really sure, you’re using “obfuscation” right? Because that implies that someone intentionally makes something harder to read to hide something. That’s not the case here. Nothing is hidden, it’s all there, the formats are well defined and easy to read.

I think you are either trolling or you fundamentally don’t understand, what you’re talking about.

Nothing is obfuscated. You can download each and every code file, audit it, and build the binaries from exactly that code. You can even compare the binaries to the ones provided by major distros thanks to reproducible builds.

Just because you don’t understand code, doesn’t mean it’s obfuscated. Following that logic, even a loaf of bread is “obfuscated” because you don’t understand sour dough.

The reality is, that hardly any projects actually need or benefit from micro services.

Most applications would scale just fine as a monolith, micro services seem to be rather an organizational tool to separate modules, because you can’t come up with a proper architecture.

That’s what’s really confusing me: why add an expensive feature, that obviously doesn’t work and even in the best case adds only minor improvements?

I mean, it’s not another option like with Bing. It’s the default. Every stupid little search will take up AI resources. For what? Market cap?

You can absolutely blame the schools, if so many other countries manage to do better.

You’re basically blaming the children.

You seem to have a much too positive view of our system: https://www.das-parlament.de/inland/bildung/wie-gerecht-ist-das-deutsche-bildungssystem

I could see those as an option for rural areas without much traffic. A full train might not be economical, but a small pod is. It could transport people to the closest proper train station where they can hop off.

But that would mean you’d have to maintain a ton of tracks for a handful of people.

Compared to Java, it makes me write the same data structures three or four times.

Just an example: if I want to be able to insert a struct via Diesel, I need to write the actual entity, an entity without the id for inserts and maybe some other structures for queries. Also, I need to write a schema file defining the DB plus an SQL statement for actually creating the needed tables.

Another example: explorative testing. Sometimes you need to disable chunks of code for testing purposes. Maybe that long running computation or a DB query, etc. Rust often forces you to write a bunch of “corrections” to make the code seem correct again.

I get that this is useful, but for my line of work, it’s just a pain in the ass.

Rust needs some layer on top to make it more usable for the typical business apps.

I tried to build simple CRUD apps, but it’s still a huge pain, because there’s just so much stuff I need to do myself and so much low level overhead that I need to keep in mind.

Java is worse in many ways, but for cobbling together a mess that barely manages to do its thing, it’s really great.

They’re recycled, look at the end of the dev duct.

Basically an extended IQ test, back then this was done at the local university, probably by some psychologist.

I’m not entirely sure in how far these tests have changed over time and how different they are from adult IQ tests. I definitely remember a longer interview with someone, which isn’t part of a regular test, I think.

Well, thank you very much, Captain Obvious!

Are you aware that generalizations can sometimes be a proper rhetorical device or do you need your contrarianism for self validation?

No, I was actually in a class specifically for gifted children.

However, this was over 20 years ago and back then, this was a relatively new concept in my region. That meant the class had to be padded with “regulars” and the special treatment we got, was rather limited. Looking back, it seemed like they dropped the idea almost completely after 9th grade or so.

And even today I’m pretty sure there’s no comprehensive testing going on. So a ton of smart children get labelled as having ADHD or just as delinquents if they’re from a “bad” background.

Funny thing is, Germany actually did have a three tiered school system for decades, where after elementary the children were separated by “performance”, but since this country is laughably bad at creating equal opportunities, this de facto became a class filter. Parents are academics? Off to the Gymnasium with you! Parents are poor/migrants? Well, Hauptschule will have to do. Good luck at being underemployed for life.

I’d say the real world doesn’t reward being actually gifted.

School rewards obedience and memorization. If you’re aggressively mediocre, but sufficiently agreeable and willing/able to memorize a bunch of bullshit, chances are, you’ll get pretty good grades. I know several people with very good grades who are simply not very intelligent.

Universities also reward memorization. If you’re good at learning facts and writing bullshit like the prof wants to read it, chances are, you’ll get good grades in at least some areas (business, psychology , medicine, and as a CS graduate, even CS to a frighteningly high degree).

If you’re gifted (like I’m actually certified to be, whatever that means), you’re often bored at school, you won’t learn because you don’t really need to, and you don’t really want to play ball with all the bullshit. You can see through it, and especially for teenagers, that’s extremely frustrating.

In the “real world” being gifted isn’t really a huge benefit either. I’m good at what I’m doing and what’s the result? I’m now de facto managing other people at doing what I’m good at. I can’t complain, cushy job, very good pay. But a literal monkey could do 70% of my tasks. I’m inside a corporate cage, that I realistically can’t escape from.

And I think that’s where many of the “gifted, but neither genius nor psychopath” people are at. Overqualified for what they’re doing, but caught in a system where they can’t really excel in the ways they could.

Have you considered something like tailscale?

Ukrainian infiltrators started the fires using the jewish space lasers the Americans are raving about!

(It’s actually frightening, that only the reasonable part of that sentence is made up)

And what is the result? Either you have to check the sources if they really mean what the agent says they do, or you don’t check them meaning the whole thing is useless since they might come up with garbage anyway.

I think you’re arguing on a different level than I am. I’m not interested in mitigations or workarounds. That’s fine for a specific use case, but I’m talking about the usage in principle. You inherently cannot trust an AI. It does hallucinate. And unless we get the “shroominess” down to an extremely low level, we can’t trust the system with anything important. It will always be just a small tool that needs professional supervision.

See, again, nitpicky details, even though we both know exactly what was meant.

Oh, I’m terribly sorry that I didn’t use the exact wording that the semantic overlord required for his incantations.

Let’s recap, you only read the title, which by definition does not contain all the information, you wrote an extremely arrogant and absolutely not helpful comment, if challenged you answer with even more arrogance, and your only defense is nitpicky semantics, which even if taken at face value, do not change the value of your comment at all.

You are not helping anyone. No, not even others.

Even agents suffer from the same problem stated above: you can’t trust them.

Compare it to a traditional SQL database. If the DB says, that it saved a row or that there are 40 rows in the table, then that’s true. They do have bugs, obviously, but in general you can trust them.

AI agents don’t have that level of reliability. They’ll happily tell you that the empty database has all the 509 entries you expect them to have. Sure, you can improve reliability, but you won’t get anywhere near the DB example.

And I think that’s what makes it so hard to extrapolate progress. AI fails miserably at absolute basic tasks and doesn’t even see that it failed. Success seems more chance than science. That’s the opposite of how every technology before worked. Simple problems first, if that’s solved, you push towards the next challenge. AI in contrast is remarkably good at some highly complex tasks, but then fails at basic reasoning a minute later.

The closest one is about a trip over the Atlantic away.

It’s absolutely opaque to me, especially the non-big-name brands barely get any reliable reviews and especially given the silicon lottery, I can’t tell if every chip is like the reviewed ones.

If I just happen to get the bad module that craps out after 6 months, the positive reviews are not that helpful.

Honestly, that is the typical self-righteous stackoverflow response that is helping no one.

You know exactly what I mean, you know exactly how to treat the question, but you chose to play captain obvious of the second arrogance division and posted this.

Of course devices will fail at some point, what are you even trying to add here?

The problem I see is mainly the divergence between hype and reality now, and a lack of a clear path forward.

Currently, AI is almost completely unable to work unsupervised. It fucks up constantly and is like a junior employee who sometimes shows up on acid. That’s cool and all, but has relatively little practical use. However, I also don’t see how this will improve over time. With computers or smartphones, you could see relatively early on, what the potential is and the progression was steady and could be somewhat reliably extrapolated. With AI that’s not possible. We have no idea, if the current architectures could hit a wall tomorrow and don’t improve anymore. It could become an asymptotic process, where we need massive increases for marginal gains.

Those two things combined mean, we currently only have toys, and we don’t know if these will turn into tools anytime soon.

The clear answer is: don’t use subversion. There’s really no reason not to use git, since you can use git just like subversion if you want to.

Absolutely. I barely touch code anymore, but I talk about how to touch code a lot.

Yes, I forgot that, it was a long day.

In general, one should check how much power actually costs versus buying a new device.

Even in Germany, having something draw 1W 24/7 costs something like 20 cents. It’s really not worth the hassle or money to micro optimize and buy something like an SSD.

Very little substance or conclusions. While technology is improving, you’re not reading into account AI investment is a bubble.

AI can certainly help, but not a single one was able to consistently deliver good results. A technology that needs constant supervision by an actual expert isn’t really all that useful. And this is not just a problem of scale. It’s a limitation of the current approach. Throwing billions at a problem to save a few millions just isn’t worth it.

You can’t tell, unfortunately.

Jellyfin on a NAS plus a cheap little box attached to the TV should be fine.

An old RPi3 could be enough. Only complications might be transcoding. If the player can’t handle the format, you might need to transcode, which could be taxing on the NAS.

How exactly is SSL terminated in your setup? Usually, you’d use something like nginx or apache for termination, but I don’t see that in your description?

So who exactly has the private key?

It’s a raspberry pi 1. Those things have 256mb of RAM and you simply won’t do much porting around pihole.

Containers do have limitations, and this is one.