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creesch

1,005 karma · joined November 4, 2012

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creesch··on How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
> I am mostly pushing back on the notion of dismissing software as low quality just because the author used LLMs.

Its not that hard to imagine that apps made with heavily LLM involvement suffer in quality. The article already goes into it a bit. I get the strong feeling that you are failing to approach this from anything else than your own perspective and how you use LLMs. Which, given the setup you are describing is already far from the norm.

Zooming out a bit further I think we can generally break up LLM usage in roughly two distinct ways of using LLMs. Or maybe more accurately there are two sides of a spectrum with a lot of area in between them:

1. Let LLMs do the majority of the heavy lifting and generate the output. Providing an LLM with some basic info, what you are looking for and let the LLM do most of the work for you. 2. Using LLMs as a tool external to the process where you are still doing most of the work.

The first way of using LLMs using agentic workflows, code harnesses, etc *can* produce good quality. As long as there is still a human in the mix who a) has the prerequisite knowledge to validate what the LLMs have generated b) takes their due diligence at key points in the process to actually make sure input is of high enough quality and validates the output.

You have decades of knowledge and experience you are now applying to rigidly structure how these LLMs work. Which, yes again, I believe gives you personally pretty good results, no doubt about that. But, many people do not have that experience to begin with. And even for those that do, using the first method comes with a risk that boils down to simple psychology, our minds are wired to take the easy approach wherever they can. Which turns the first way of using LLMS from a efficient way of using them to a lazy way of using them.

In my personal experience a lot of people who start using LLMs sort of drift to the lazy approach very easily. Because it is very convenient and easy to slowly hand over more thinking to an LLM. The latter I have seen happen all too often around me. An alarming increase of lazy non critical use of LLM tools by people who should know better. People who might have been a bit slower before but delivered excellent results now have started delivering trash. Code spanning dozens of line trying to solve something that should only take one line. Code that completely ignores and conventions or design paradigms put in place. Code that goes directly against security practices. Suddenly downgraded dependency versions (because the models training data doesn't include the latest version).

As I said, I see this as a spectrum and the more someone leans towards the first use case combined with "lazy usage" the more signs there will be in a repository that this is the case. The amount of commits, the release cadence and various other things. Which, again, the article also makes a case for and is again why your repository is irrelevant to the whole discussion. Why? Because your repository doesn't show these signs.

creesch··on How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
F-droid doesn't simply distribute build apps. It requires the source to be open and will build the apps itself. This does not guarantee there will be no bad actors trying to slip in malicious code. I do believe they also do initial audits before an app is allowed in their repos. It also often takes a while for an app update to show up in F-droid, I am not sure if that is due to auditing updates or something else though.

More here:

- https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/

- https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Security_Model/

creesch··on How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?
Cool, but I fail to see how it is relevant in the context of the article? You clearly have the knowledge, expertise and discipline to incorporate LLM in a workflow that, taking your word for it, delivers a very good result.

That makes you a) more unique than you realize b) not all that relevant in the context of the article.

a) Because a lot of people tend to lean towards use that absolutely leads to atrophying of skills and knowledge. b) well the article does explain the criteria it used fairly well and your project would not show up there. Well, also because your project isn't an android app.

creesch··on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
> Do you suppose it's just that it's aping humans who say too much without saying anything

Considering how much of the input must me nonsense SEO bullshit articles and blogs that only serve to promote a person or company that might be a factor.

I also often have wondered if it is also targeting those same people. Certainly with tools like deep research options (not just Anthropic's offering) the result report seems to be aimed at management, aiming to look impressive while talking around the results.

creesch··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
> Setting up and maintaining a server is easier today than it was decades ago, A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing, reproducibility wasn't a goal, versioning was confidential, documentation was scarce and often outdated, out of the box security was lower, ties to the OS were higher. Managing virtual hosts was clunky, updating OS/PHP was risky. I would not go back for anything.

You are speeding past my point by a mile or two. With a shared webhost you get a ready lamp stack. In the late 90s early 2000s you could fairly easily get a wide array of software running that way. All you had to do is create a database in the hosters control panel, upload the package and you'd be on your way. Later in the 2000s one click installers came along for popular packages making it even easier. In fact, they are still around these days making it extremely easy to install a wide array of lamp based applications to these days.

There are very few options these days to get started as easily these days with modern non lamp tech stacks. The only thing I am familiar with (other than the product presented to us in this post) is pikapods, [which only offers a limited selection of available applications](https://www.pikapods.com/apps). There are a few others, also catalog based, though they more seem to focus on deploying on other platforms for you. Other than that you start to quickly move to more complex hosting solutions aimed at business and scaling. Or platforms that are cloud platforms with all the added complexity to navigate and figure out before you can deploy docker containers. Not to mention ridiculous situation that a few of the ones I know about have pivoted to being "agentic compute providers" whatever that means and certainly will confuse a novice. Which means that the "practical" advice given is often to "just" set up a VPS. And yes, many VPS providers will provide an image with docker enabled, but that is just the start.

> Rootless being the proper way to setup Docker is a highly controversial take. You will mostly get added complexity and a false sentiment of security from it.

That, in fact, is another layer of complexity people will then have to figure out. Most information I am aware of these days does claim that it is better to run containers rootless or at the very least make sure the user in the container is non root. The fact that we are both convinced of the opposite tells you how confusing it must be for a novice.

The overall point I am trying to make isn't even about the exact details. It is that for hosting something these days there is much more required surrounding knowledge required before you can get started in most cases.

creesch··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
> How does being docker compose based make it inaccessible?

Because it requires people to also have knowledge about the ins and outs of docker and docker compose. If we are talking about web applications it is yet another layer that has been added over the years. It used to be that you could fairly easily host most things on a old fashioned lamp host (I am talking decades ago) and all you had to know was basic file transferring.

Of course, this was on shared webhosts in a time when VPSes were not really a thing yet or affordable. But, even on a VPS setting up a LAMP stack is relatively straightforward.

Once you add modern dockerized application to that mix you are now still looking at some sort of ingress to do the reverse proxy bit. So while it likely will not be Apache or nginx there will be some sort of layer there in addition to now having to setup docker properly (rootless and all that) and then also making sure your docker compose setup is in order.

It is not difficult *once you know how to* but it is another layer of knowledge and experience people need to acquire. That does make it less accessible for novices.

creesch··on What liberal arts education is for (2024)
> a STEM field if they care enough and aren't the sort who are just doing the bare minimum to get the sheepskin.

That's the thing though, part of it is about caring. Part of it is being exposed to other things in order to realize there is more out there. I honestly think that STEM field education would benefit from including Liberal Art related courses exactly because of that. Basically as a way to broaden students world view and the way they might interact in it.

The same is probably true the other way around as well btw.

creesch··on The development pipeline is a production system
> CI run pulls from npm, PyPI, Docker Hub, a distro mirror and a handful of third-party, none under your control, none with an SLA to you.

To be honest, they shouldn't do so directly. For the obvious reason you stated, they don't have a SLA to you or your company. But also because it is a shitty thing to do as a company. Companies should have their own proxies and mirrors for any repository they pull from. Both to be in control of the dependencies you as a company rely on and to not unnecessarily put load on free third party repositories.

Had not heard of your solution. More often than not I come across Harbor, Nexus or things like GCPs internal stuff.

creesch··on The development pipeline is a production system
Different country probably, here QA is still often part of the team. More often than not as part of a team with a title like "test automation engineer".
creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
> The missing part is the propulsion system capable of doing that.

That is a pretty big missing part. Not as big as the galaxy, but still huge.

creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
> Def not rockets. OP said hundreds of years.

Yeah to reach it with current tech. No shifting goal posts, thank you very much.

> In hundreds of years from now our rulers will definitely have that kind of tech, whatever tech it is.

Also, I should point out that technological progress isn't linear and guaranteed. Also, "our rulers" what ...?

creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
> I want to know what future technologies could accelerate an object to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

With all due respect, this has been extensively debated online and is extremely easy to look up.

> Could those breakthroughs be achieved in the next 2 or 3 centuries?

Any predictions on future scientific breakthroughs are wishful thinking. Even directions that seem promising at some point can end up being dead ends and we simply don't know what we will or will not achieve.

With current technologies, even hypothetical ones we can't get there in a time period that is under a few centuries at best and over a millennium at worse. Even for the centuries figure we'd require technologies we haven't been able to crack yet.

creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
I mean, even there they pretty use the Astrophage as a plot device to fill in the huge gap in technology needed to cover those distances. They make it clear that they would have no chance to cover those distances without the Astrophage, but it is very convenient.
creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
You are not wrong, but it still wouldn't make a whole lot of difference. First of all with any technology we currently have, including hypothetical proposals, we can't even get close to 1c. The best we can do, and this assumes purely hypothetical unproven ideas, is accelerate to a fraction of the speed of light. Acceleration itself will take up a significant amount of time and even then we are nowhere near the speed of light. Project Orion would in theory be able to do 3% to 10% of the speed of light. That's about the only proposed propulsion we actually have the technology for in the sense that we might be able to build it this decade.

So let's be optimistic and assume we can reach 10% of c (unlikely), that is 10 years for one light year, meaning that it takes about five centuries. Practically speaking 10% of c is unlikely, it takes about a month to accelerate to those speeds you'd need an insane amount of mass in the form of bombs to explode to just get up to speed. Which is why 3% is more "realistic". Oh, did I mention that there is no realistic way to slow down either? In theory it is just detonating the same amount of bombs in front of the craft, but in order to take that mass on your journey you'd need a lot more mass to get up to speed and the numbers get silly rather quickly.

So "realistically" at 3% of c we are talking about roughly 1500 years to just speed past our target.

Also, the original remark was about sending probes, not humans. But at 3% or 10% of c time dilation isn't much of a factor either so you'd need a generational craft if you want to send people.

Again, space is big, really big.

creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
Just going to recycle this comment I made in reply to an almost identical comment as yours. I don't think you folks realize how big space actually is.

The speed of light is 1079 252 848 km/h, the fastest space craft ever made was the Parker Solar probe (using a sling shot) clocking in at 692 000 km/h. So at that speed it would take, 1559 years to travel one light year.

This planet sits at a distance of 48 light years, so it would 74 832 years to get there. Just for good measure, when it gets there it would also take 48 years for us to know that since radio travels at the speed of light.

Note, that the speed of the spacecraft I mentioned was the peak speed. Space is big, really big.

creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
> Yeah, if your username is any indication of your age

You might want to look up what the unix epoch is based on ;)

creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
Try 74 832 years actually.
creesch··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
The speed of light is 1079 252 848 km/h, the fastest space craft ever made was the Parker Solar probe (using a sling shot) clocking in at 692 000 km/h. So at that speed it would take, 1559 years to travel one light year.

This planet sits at a distance of 48 light years, so it would 74 832 years to get there. Just for good measure, when it gets there it would also take 48 years for us to know that since radio travels at the speed of light.

Note, that the speed of the spacecraft I mentioned was the peak speed. Space is big, really big.

creesch··on Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
Also worth considering is that it is part of a broader ideology of Anthroposophy which sometimes aproaches semi cult status in how people identify with it. A lot of the principles of Steiner schools are actually pretty cool, but sending your kid there, depending on the school they will also be dealing with the more esoteric bits of all of this that have very little to do with didactic or pedagogic sound principles.

Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.

creesch··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
If you are not even here in good faith I can imagine some people do consider that a good thing yeah. No argument from me there.
creesch··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
You reply is what we in the game call "moving the goal post".
creesch··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
Is that what I said in your mind? I honestly had to chuckle at the extreme hyperboles you decided to use. Surely having a less favorable view of hyper capitalist economics is on the same level as torture and genocide. Yup, that is a totally reasonable and measured response that just exemplifies acting in good faith.

Anyway, thanks for genuine chuckle your response got out of me.

creesch··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
Lol, okay bud. Lets go all in on the extreme hyperboles.
creesch··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
Economic growth doesn't mean much if the benefits are concentrated in a small percentage of the population.

And while I can't disagree it has benefited tech wages historically that is just one industry. Then there are also the recent mass layoffs.

creesch··on GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands
> Unlike the US, Europe has no California-level VCs.

Some would consider that a good thing. There is a lot to be said for VC in recent years not being beneficial for the economy, certainly on an individual level, other than "number go up".

creesch··on The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
That might be because of translations from Arabic. The article was also posted on a different website where the author responded

> the Kashida section was contributed to this post from a talk in Arabic of Nawal Hadeed, which she translated and added to the post herself. Although I'm unsure of LLM usage in the translation process, looking at the original Arabic I felt some change in tone while editing the post. I could have either declined the translation and never have this documented, procrastinate in translating it myself (which has been ongoing for a while), or publish as it is. I found the last least damaging.

creesch··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
While purists will disagree, a little bit of javascript is fine. Having said that, you are talking about a personal website. Most companies will have a backend of some sort anyway.

Also, here is a little secret. If you want something that is future proof, try something that has been around for decades and still runs large parts of the internet. People will scoff at this, but PHP is actually really neat for personal websites and has been for decades.

A while ago I also found myself looking at static site generators, workflows from github to my host, etc. Eventually I realized I don't update things nearly enough, don't blog, etc.

For similar reasons as you I didn't want to go completely static as that is just too much hassle when doing multiple pages. So I decided to utilize that good old lamp stack to basically do something like this.

    <?php
    $pages = json_decode(file_get_contents('pages.json'), true);
    $page = $_GET['page'] ?? 'home';
    if (!isset($pages[$page])) {
        $page = 'home';
    }
    $pageData = $pages[$page];
    $contentFile = basename($pageData['file']);
    $contentFilePath = "content/{$contentFile}";
    ?>
    <html>
    <head>
        <title><?= htmlspecialchars($pageData['title']) ?></title>  
    </head>
    <body>
        <main>
        <?php include $contentFilePath; ?>
        </main>
    </body>
    </html>

Slightly more, but the base principle is the same. Just 10 lines of php code, and now I can just add pages by uploading their contents and adding them to the json file for whitelisting. For your use case it would be trivial to add a menu based on the json file and I'd be confident that it will still work in 10 years with minimal adjustments.

As a bonus I also rediscovered PHP in itself works really well as a templating language (as you can see) so no need for extra stuff like handlebars. As an extra extra bonus, I can just go to any shared webhosting party and get it running with no issue at all.

I am not saying you'd need to go down this road. But I just want to illustrate how stupidly simple a website can be with "old" basic technologies even if you want some form of backend.

creesch··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
I feel like there is some context missing in your story here. There is a lot of middleground between heavy SPA frameworks and creating everything from scratch. More importantly, I am left wondering what sort of functionality was your team trying to build that requires that much interactivity? At least that is what I assume with "rich user experience"?
creesch··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
Sure, but they aren't exactly widespread or even close to mainstream.
creesch··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
> I wonder why there isn't a mobile OS that simply lets you build apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and gives you reliable storage without all this effort.

There is! You just have to time travel all the way back to 2009 when webOS was launched by Palm. Time travel is the easy part, you then also need to somehow prevent Palms demise and webOS fading into obscurity as a smartphone OS.

If 2009 is too far back you can try your luck in 2012 with Firefox OS.

Joking aside, people and companies have given it a go. But a combination of bad timing and various other events never made that reality happen in our timeline.

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