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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2025

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  • To be fair all it takes is for enough entities to exchange it between other assets. If you are in Europe, most stores won’t sell you anything for your USD unless you exchange it into euros (except some edge cases), so it does feel kinda similar in that sense except cryptos don’t really have a “home” country where they’re universally accepted (bar some nations whose own currency has so throughly failed they adopted it).

    There are some services which allow you to spend crypto by simply doing the exchange for you at the point of purchase into whatever currency the store uses (similar to visa/MasterCard/your bank doing this if you pay by card abroad).

    I’ll say ultimately though it doesn’t change a lot, the idea of crypto is great and there are some where the implementation actually yields something that could be a better money (truly yours, not controlled by a government or a company necessarily, low fees, near instant transactions), but in the end there are just too many of them and they rock the boat too much for the well established financial institutions that they’re just doomed IMO.

    However, the technology itself I expect will end up being used against us by the ruling class in the coming years (i.e crypto currencies controlled by the government where they can set whatever rules they want on it).


  • The title reads like they’re attacking revanced. Based on the DMCA request, they’re claiming (with proof) that revanced is copying their code into the revanced repository without attribution to them, which is illegal under the gpl3 license the projects are under. Their request is to either provide user facing attribution, or remove their code.

    I don’t use either project and didn’t follow the drama, but it seems like a reasonable request.


  • The thing I’ve found best to get people talking is asking intentional questions. As in, ask a question that you expect an answer for which might allow you to deepen the conversation on the topic.

    For a concrete example, imagine you meet someone taking photos in public and you talk to each other. Asking a question like “so you like photography then?” Is probably gonna get an answer like “yeah sure”, unless the other person is keen to provide you more details. Instead, asking a question like “what is your favourite photo you ever took?” Or “what kind of photos do you enjoy taking most?” Helps the other person give a concrete answer with some prompt for detail. From the answer, you can then pick what is the part you find most interesting or most likely to be able to talk about and ask another question with the same mindset.

    Hopefully they’ll also ask you something in return. If they don’t, you can attempt to share something voluntarily that’s on topic, but if they don’t engage at all it may just mean they don’t want to talk to you. In which case, end the interaction on your terms while it’s still positive and count it as a win.



  • I’ll also say 5 but I have my gripes with it. Mainly with the “review from any other engineer” aspect that usually comes with it… I have met so many engineers whose review seems to just depend on who created the MR, as opposed to what’s in it. When an MR with 500+ lines changed gets reviewed in about 10s after requesting it, it’s kinda obvious that the system is broken.

    The people I’ve worked with who are good at their job and I’d probably be okay with them merging their changes without reviews would always ask for a review, even when it’s not mandatory or enforced. And their MR would already have comments by themselves around bits I might have a question around, and they’d even come with prompts of what they want input on. Whereas the people I wish wouldn’t even be allowed to approve anything would usually ask for an approval instead (even the wording seems telling). Sadly, often these 2 groups will have the same job title and HR will dictate that they should have the same permissions and say in things, which is what usually breaks the system IMO.

    And lastly, the amount of people who seem to treat reviews as currency/favours and just rubber stamp each others MRs without looking…sigh.


  • AI is great, LLMs are a waste. This has been the case for years before LLMs.

    LLMs which the current hype calls AI are the equivalent of a scammy car salesman. To your example of have AI teach you to code - AI is awful at coding. It produces code that is the average of a junior developer’s output. It will look awesome from the outside because it will often mostly work at first, but in reality it’s going to be an unmaintainable mess. An experienced engineer could use one and produce a good outcome, in some cases may be faster than without and in others slower - but the experienced engineer requirement is a must. What this means is your AI teacher by itself is a junior engineer, whose output wouldn’t be trusted by themselves. That’s the level you’ll reach and may even learn and pick up terrible habits that’ll set you back.

    It will do all that and consume a ridiculous amount of resources for it compared to following a YouTube course.

    I imagine a similar case is true for most industries, people who work in the industry see the absolute garbage coming out of it in large quantities and have to listen to people from the outside who don’t know what good looks like in that context keep saying “oh you are now redundant cuz look how good ai is”.

    Meanwhile, it is trained on data stolen from the people who are now losing their jobs because the idiotic decision makers are on the side of believing how good the output looks like. AND there is more, it’s doing it wasting a massive amount of resources, which drives up the prices for everyone (think all electrical devices needing computers, electricity prices). But what what money are they using for it? Oh yes! The money generated out of thin air by the corporations generating this massive AI bubble, which is most likely going to end with a crash that will decimate the market (and therefore the investments and pensions of people). And if the past is any indication, the government will prop the companies up with tax money - so people will pay for it twice.






  • I don’t follow your reasoning, you support the current laws enacted by the government in this area (age verification, proposing ban from social media) but you end your comment saying you disagree with the government nannying kids as they do a poor job of it. Those seem contradictory?

    Also, you don’t need a VPN to get around the current set of age verification crap. All you need to do is to look at smaller providers, which the government ignored because it’s unfeasible to regulate them. Or providers from different countries who just straight up don’t care. It’s not even hard to find these, pretty much just page 2 of Google.

    The point being, any of these laws are unenforceable in reality. Preventing access to porn is not feasible in today’s world. It was not feasible 30 years ago when the internet barely existed, except then yes it was magazines (and porn was still popular then because sex has always been popular in the history of humanity). In today’s world if it came down to it I imagine it’d be SD cards or usb sticks. You seem to imagine it like walking into a store, in reality it’d be the 1 kid who got his older brother to download him porn and then sells it in school to his classmates for a few quid.

    These existed for pirated movies and games ages ago when access to them was harder. There is no need for this today because it’s easier to get it from the internet. If the government magically managed to change that (which is doubtful), these would just re-appear because there’d be money to make. Same story as drugs.

    Regarding your last point, you phrased it like you were disagreeing with what I said, but basically just suggested the same but with concrete examples (re: better support for parents and the education system). I’m not sure what to make of that.


  • There is no way the kids who grew up with technology in their lives from the start won’t find ways to work around it, especially when pitted against the people coming up with these legislations who struggle to understand the basics of technology.

    Even if kids were to be completely banned from the internet and it somehow magically was enforceable, they’d just end up buying physical porn.

    If they actually wanted improvement, they’d fund support for parents and the educational system so kids grow up in environments that teach them good values and feel safe in. But instead, we get this meaningless duct tape that’ll still probably cost a fortune for us, and will be unenforceable for anything but the biggest porn providers/distributors.



  • Yes. I have tried various agents over the last ~1.5 years on multiple occasions on a bunch of different kinds of engineering type tasks. So far there has been a total of 1 time where the output was reasonable enough that I could build on it and not feel ashamed of the result (and that time probably saved me like half an hour). All other times, I wasted a bunch of time debugging crap and then just wrote the thing from scratch myself.

    The closest I’ve come to somewhat consistent success with them is when I struggled to come up with a good search query for an issue I was having and after asking a longer prompt to an LLM it either gave me a close enough answer that I could figure it out from there, or the answer included some keywords that helped me come up with a query that got the results I needed.

    By and large, I consider them crap for anything beyond the basics. On the other hand, I absolutely understand why they may look great in cases where the person using them doesn’t have an idea of what the output should look like. They’re a minimal productivity boost at best, at an insane cost.



  • I agree with what you’re saying but to credit them, they’re offering to a bit beyond that.

    Reduce strain on the grid. We’re investing in curtailment systems that cut our data centers’ power usage during periods of peak demand, as well as grid optimization tools, both of which help keep prices lower for ratepayers.

    As much as I hate them, I think this decent from them - I only wish it was the government and the electricity providers which did this, but I bet if they were doing it, it’d be people’s power being turned off…