Mii

Oh look, YouTube managed to circumvent uBlock for like two hours again before someone figured out a fix, lol.

Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours. There’s no way this is profitable for them or gets a sizable number of uBlock users to buy their subscription.

They have a CLI app though which you can hook up to dmenu or rofi or whatever to get global shortcuts.

https://github.com/firecat53/bitwarden-menu

Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway. I just use the CLI and the Firefox extension and it’s working solid.

I use Posteo for mail and calendar now (they’re not encrypted between users like Proton but you can just hook it up to any mail client and PGP your shit) .Mail is IMAPS, calendar is CalDAV, contacts are CardDAV, etc. Depending on where you fall on the security-convenience sliding scale, that might be an option. I’ve decided that I care more about portability and standards than super-thick encryption which made me choose them over Tuta, because Tuta offers no way to access the mail over IMAP whatsoever, not even an optional bridge like Proton, and that was a total dealbreaker for me. Posteo also claim they’re 100% green energy which is a nice bonus.

For drive I use Filen.io now. They’re relatively new so I can’t make any assumptions about how long they’ll be around but the price is fair and they offer lifetime payments too. Also their Linux client is pretty solid and doesn’t fucking eat my RAM for breakfast. They’re also in the process of adding support for rclone as per a GitHub issue I’m following.

VPN I pretty much don’t use because I’ve never felt I needed it, so no recommendations there from me.

I’m a senior software engineer

Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don’t think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don’t have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn’t mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

Let’s be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don’t think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label “potentially useful” on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold–kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.

You lost, buddy? Points at the sidebar.

That’s gotta be one of my favorite Zitron piece to date. Ed managed to articulate some points which have been floating around in my mind for a while which I did not have the words to explain. Especially how using any form of out-of-the-box computer these days is just a completely user-hostile pile of steaming horseshit, and why I am anal-retentive about what software gets installed on my devices and how exactly my window manager has to work, &c.

I mean, it’s probably because I’m an obsessive nerd, but the fact that it makes me feel in control when I can rip shit of the source code that bugs me (or put shit in that I miss) is a major factor, too.

Jfc, when I saw the headline I thought this would be a case of the city being too cheap to hire an actual artist and instead use autoplag, but no. And the guy they commissioned isn’t even some tech-brain LARP’ing as an artist, he has 20+ years of experience and a pretty huge portfolio, which somehow makes this worse on so many levels.

[…] placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

If this turns out to be another case of “research” where they told the model exactly what to do beforehand and then go all surprised Pikachu when it does, I’m gonna be shocked …

… because it’s been a while since they’ve tried that.

Yay, day 3 with Regexp magic.

open(FH, '<', $ARGV[0]) or die $!;
my $sum = 0;
my $sum2 = 0;

my $enabled = 1;

while (<FH>) {
    while ($_ =~ /(?:mul\((\d{1,3}),(\d{1,3})\)|(do)\(\)|(don\'t)\(\))/g) {
        $enabled = 1 if $3;
        $enabled = 0 if $4;
        $sum += $1 * $2 if $1 && $2;
        $sum2 += $1 * $2 if $enabled && $1 && $2;
    }
}

close(FH);

print "Part 1: $sum\n";
print "Part 2: $sum2\n";