[–] 4 points 7 hours ago

You seem to be making a huge deal out of one person on the internet saying that they stopped programming in Rust because they felt that rust projects were getting dominated by LLM output

I didn't make a huge deal out of it; I made one short comment (sincerely) asking if they were serious, and replied because it turned into a longer comment chain. I don't think it's a big deal. I am surprised that they weren't joking and find their rationale ridiculous. And I separately take issue with the chauvinism expressed in another comment, but I don't think the original comment is a big deal.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

    How did English become the most widely spoken language? Most certain through far more bloodshed than anything to do with the production of AI systems. If Rust's association with AI is a reason to avoid using Rust, then yes, the social conditions surrounding English usage are sufficient grounds for a movement away from English as the lingua franca.

    Anyway, like I said in my comment, you can replace "English" with any other language that LLMs speak fluently. I gave English as the example language because that is the language this forum is in. There are much less widely spoken languages that LLMs are also fluent in. Should users of those languages abandon their languages? I was responding to that person's ridiculous reasoning.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago

    That wasn't my point (though you're wrong about that too). My point is that you're suggesting there's a contradiction between being opposed to killing one party but not to killing another party. There is no contradiction. If you take sides then it is consistent to support violence against your opponents but not violence towards your own class.

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  • [–] 4 points 12 hours ago

    You're adding negative connotations to words that have none. That's like saying that we should rename piracy to "downloading media from alternative sources" or whatever just because corpos are anti-piracy. We use these words because they are precise and concise. Big tech is anti those words. We are pro those words. The word itself is neutral. "Sideloading" is a meaningful category because big tech makes it so by forbidding it, or making users have to use workarounds to do them. "It's not sideloading; it's just installing apps onto the phone you own"—well, that would be lovely, but that's not currently the case.

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  • [–] 13 points 12 hours ago (1 child)

    Eza isn't a reimplementation... it's its own program. The name of the binary is also eza not ls. What OS are you using that uses eza instead of ls? I have both installed and have ls aliased to eza because I find the coloured output to be easier to read (much like syntax-highlighted code is easier to read), but I've never seen eza pre-installed on a system, not does it conflict with ls. Package managers let you install both. They're different programs.

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  • [–] 5 points 15 hours ago (1 child)

    I feel like "I built" has a level of pompousness implied that I think is correlated with AI bros. I'd normally use a verb like "made". I know it's a synonym but it seems less tooting-your-own-horn in connotation. I don't think I've naturally said in a sentence that I "built" a tool.

    Before I get strawmanned, no I don't think there's anything wrong with saying you built something. I'm mentioning that there's a minor difference in connotation that leads to one verb correlating with vibe-coding. That's all.

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  • [–] 62 points 15 hours ago (6 children)

    It does make me sad that Rust is getting so strongly associated with slop. Personally I find it a really fun language to actually program in. The language being expression-based is actually quite handy, and is a concept I wish existed in other languages too. But it is also unfortunately the most sensible language for vibe-coding too because of the performance and guardrails.

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    Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

    In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

     

    Is there a daemon that will kill any processes using above a specified % of CPU? I'm having issues where a system is sometimes grinding to a halt due to high CPU usage. I'm not sure what process is doing it (can't htop as system is frozen); ideally I'd like a daemon that automatically kills processes using more than a given % of CPU, and then logs what process it was for me to look back on later. Alternatively something that just logs processes that use a given % of CPU so that I may look back on it after restarting the system.

    The system is being used as a server so it's unattended a lot of the time; it's not a situation where I did something on the computer and then CPU usage went up.

    Edit: Thanks to the comments pointing out it might be a memory leak instead of CPU usage that's the issue. I've set up earlyoom which seems to have diagnosed the problem as a clamd memory leak. I've been running clamd on the server for ages without problems so might be the result of an update; I've disabled it for now, and will keep monitoring the situation to see if earlyoom catches anything else, or if the problem keeps occurring I'll try some of the other tools people have suggested.

     

    I'm going to be delivering an online intro to programming session to a non-technical crowd who will be "following along at home". Because it's online, I can't provide them with machines that are already set up with an appropriate development environment.

    I'm familiar with Linuxes and BSDs but honestly have no idea how to get set up with programming stuff on Windows or macOS which presumably most of these people will use, so I need something I can easily instruct them on how to install, and has good cross-platform support so that a basic programming lesson will work on whatever OS the attendees are running. Remember they are non-technical so may need more guidance on installation, so it should be something that is easy to explain.

    My ideas:

    • C: surely every OS comes with a C compiler pre-installed? I know C code is more platform-specific, but for basic "intro to programming" programs it should be pretty much the same. I think it's a better language for teaching as you can teach them more about how the computer actually works, and can introduce them to concepts about memory and types that can be obscured by more high-level languages.

    • Python: popular for teaching programming, for the reasons above I'd prefer not to use Python because using e.g. C allows me to teach them more about how the computer works. You could code in Python and never mention types for instance. Rmemeber this is only an intro session so we're not doing a full course. But Python is probably easy to install on a lot of OSes? And of course easy to program in too.

    • Java: good cross-platform support, allows for teaching about types. Maybe a good compromise between the benefits outlined above for C and Python?

    Any opinions?

     

    I have a server with a bunch of services just as Docker containers. I see that Proxmox is popular among the self-hosting community. I was wondering why?

    I understand that running things in a VM provides better security than running them in a container. But is the difference so important given the relatively low risk that an exploit happens inside a container that leads to doing damage to the host machine?

    There's also obviously the additional overhead of using Proxmox. It wouldn't be an issue for me as I should have enough resources to, say replace all my Docker containers with VMs. I'm more wondering if the security difference is so massive, or if there is another reason I'm missing why people use Proxmox.

    Or am I misunderstanding how people use Proxmox? I was assuming people would use it like how you use Docker, i.e. different services get their own VM/container. If you have a different kind of setup I'd be interested in hearing it.

    Edit: I would appreciate if people stop being pedantic and actually read the post. Obviously I am aware that you can run containers in VMs, or containers on bare metal alongside VMs. That's not what the question is and you know it.

     

    The issue with Google's personalised search results is, imo:

    1. Not only is it not opt-in, but you can't even opt out of it. Personalised search results should be opt-in and disabled by default.
    2. The data kept on you is used to sell you ads
    3. The data kept on you will be handed over to state entities fairly easily

    Given those three problems, how feasible would it be to self-host a search engine that personalises your results to show you things that are more relevant to you? Avoiding issues 1 & 2 as you're self-hosting so presumably you have made the decisions around those two things. And issue 3 is improved as you can host it off-shore if you are concerned about your domestic state, and if you are legally compelled to hand over data, you can make the personal choice about whether or not to take the hit of the consequences of refusing, rather than with a big company who will obviously immediately comply and not attempt to fight it even on legal grounds.

    A basic use-case example is, say you're a programmer and you look up ruby, you would want to get the first result as the programming language's website rather than the wikipedia page for the gemstone. You could just make the search query ruby programming language on any privacy-respecting search engine, but it's just a bit of QoL improvement to not have to think about the different ways an ambiguous search query like that could be interpreted.

     

    I've finally started having some free time lately and have been working through my Steam library, most of which is Windows games I'm playing with Proton.

    I wanted to install some mods, and wanted a mod manager for this. Nexus Mods has Vortex, which is not available for Linux. In any case, running Windows games on Linux through Proton on Steam is fairly specific; the game files will be at certain locations on a Linux filesystem, not at the same locations as they would be on a Windows filesystem. So I think I would need software that has specifically been designed for this use-case (Windows games from Steam running on Proton).

    Are there any such mod managers out there? What do other people do when playing games on Linux? I can't be the only person who wants to play video games with mods.

     

    One example is bread. I was baking bread the other day, and obviously the cost of the ingredients I put in the loaf are less than the cost of buying a loaf at the supermarket, but that doesn't include the cost of putting the oven on.

    Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?

    I know that everyone's energy costs are different so it's not possible for someone to do the calculations for you, but I've never bothered to do them for my own case because bills I get from the energy company just tell me how much I owe them for the month, not "you put the oven on for 30 minutes on the 17th of June and that cost you X". It sounds like a headache to try calculate how much I pay for energy per meal. But if someone else has done that calculation for themselves I'd be interested to read it and see how it works out. My intuition is that, in general, it's cheaper to make things yourself (e.g. bread or beans like above), but I couldn't say that for sure without calculating, which as I said seems like it would be a pain in the ass.

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