paffdragon

> is there any proof that slop matters beyond our sensibilities as developers?

I've seen a few papers recently on the topic in terms of LLM, here is two I found by quick googling

* "Does Code Cleanliness Affect Coding Agents? A Controlled Minimal-Pair Study" https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20049

"Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents."

* "Code for Machines, Not Just Humans: Quantifying AI-Friendliness with Code Health Metrics" https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02200

"Our findings confirm that human-friendly code is also more compatible with AI tooling."

"Investing in maintainability not only helps humans; it also prepares for large-scale AI adoption."

> If the code is ugly, but defects are low—does it matter? > If the code is hard to read, but clients are happy—should I care?

For you who wrote it and are the sole developer, maybe not. But if you want to have other contributors or hand it off, then it can be a problem. New devs joining the project may not want to work with it and will push for a rewrite that will cost money or need to spend extra time on working with code that is hard to work with for them which will cost money. And from the papers above it seems this also affects LLMs as well as they seem to work more efficiently with "cleaner" code.

I didn't see in the post, but have you considered also Btrfs if you are on Linux?

Currently, I use Btrfs on Synology, mainly because snapshots and checksums are nice, but I never really did the work to do benchmarks against other FS. In the past my choice was Ext4 or XFS with LUKS/LVM, then Btrfs matured and since then I moved to it. So far I had no issues, but YMMV, some people consider it still not entirely reliable, but I do backups. I'm setting up a FreeBSD server where ZFS was the natural choice, again snapshots, boot environments, native encryption and just maturity/reliability. I haven't considered OpenZFS yet, mainly because my Synology does not support it, but your benchmarks have some interesting numbers, when I'll have again enough money for some new HDDs I may give it a try.

It's not how it works. You suppose to contract a consulting company that contracts some offshore company to connect you to SAP.

We also used to run spyware and adware scanner and removal tools, but now the ad/spyware rebranded and became mainstream...

I often click accept, at least for site banners that get through ublock. But my browser blocks 3rd party cookies and then it clears all cookies on close (except for trusted sites). I also use private browsing for random sites where I dont bother rejecting cookies usually.

I really think this cookie consent concept should have been a browser functionality, so I can make my default choice for all sites and be done with it.

Well, maybe not everybody

  $ ls -ld /tmp
  drwxrwx--x. 2 shell shell 40 Jan 15  2022 /tmp

edit: sorry, I should have added this is termux :)

I also ditched Google years ago for DuckDuckGo, but its not without problems for sure. Often times still full of obviously fake sites in results, that I try to report them. Many times it just returns nothing where Google still manages to give results. And I still have to scroll through their ads when I am on a machine without an adblocker (like Firefox Focus/Klar on Android). But I still rather use them than Google, if I don't find something it is usually not the end of the world and I just move on. Recently, I switched all my browsers to their noai site, on some I still have the lite version, I think.

Awesome, it definitely helps. I realized I have your blog already bookmarked, I subscribed to the RSS feed now as well :) I am new to FreeBSD and these kind of practical articles are really helpful. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge with others.

If it works for you, it works. I just see the same phrases used repeatedly so frequently nowdays - including my own LLM conversations.

Regarding the use of LLM for picking infra. The issue I usually have with such task is that they frequently omit things - either from the list of options or the features compared. And depending on my familiarity with the topic, I might never notice, which might steer my decision making into a different direction. Basically a certain bias. Sometimes prompting it to repeat reveals more, but ultimately I end up hitting the search and doing my own research, then I might use the LLM again with now more knolwedge and data. Did you run into this too? What was your process?

I was kind of interested in the content, but I am so overloaded with AI slop by now, that reading this generated text gives me nausea.

I was looking to see why they landed on this stack, but there are no alternatives or evaluation criteria listed - given the generated article, I wonder how much of the infra was selected by an LLM.

Hah, what a coincidence, just started to look into yesterday how do I setup LDAP/OIDC on FreeBSD and today I was going to try FreeIPA or Keycloak. Thanks for sharing.

I belive even for gluetun I had to add the WG kernel module. I think I used this to compile it for myself https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard

I know there are userspace implementations, but can't remember the specifics rn and don't have my notes with me.

> kernel modules for iptables-nft

I think you meant nftables. The iptables-nft package is meant to provide iptables interface for nftables for code that still expects that, afaik. I didn't run into that issue yet (knock-knock). According to docs nftables is available since kernel 3.13, so in theory it might be possible to build the modules for Synology.

However, I don't think I will be buying another Synology in the future, mainly because of other issues like they restricting what RAM I can use or what I want to use the M2 slots for, or their recent experiment with trying to push their own drives only, etc. I might give TrueNAS a try if I am not bored enough to just build one on top of a general purpose OS...

I have a fairly recent DS920+ and never had issues with containers - I have probably 10+ containers on it - grafana, victoriametrics/logs, jellyfin, immich with ML, my custom ubuntu toolboxes for net, media, ffmpeg builds, gluetun for vpn, homeassistant, wallabag,...

Edit: I just checked Grafana and cadvisor reports 23 containers.

Edit2: 4.4.302+ (2022) is my kernel version, there might be specific tools that require more recent kernels, of course, but I was so far lucky enough to not run into those.

Thanks for mentioning this, I am just beginning my FreeBSD journey and wanted to setup a small pre-boot env with mfsBSD[1], didn't know FreeBSD has a tool already to do something like that.

[1]: https://github.com/mmatuska/mfsbsd

You can run a container on Synology and install your custom services, tools there. At least that is what I do. For custom kernel modules you still need a Synology package for something like Wireguard.

If you have OPNSense, it has an ACME plugin with Synology action. I use that to automatically renew and push a cert to the NAS.

That said, since I like to tinker, Synology feels a bit restricted, indeed. Although there is some value in a stable core system (like these immutable distros from Fedora Atomic).

Sublime maybe?

I think it still works if you set your user agent to something like lynx. I had a custom UA set for Google search in Firefox just for this purpose and to disable AI overviews.

Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors.

Are there also similar studies on short-form text like Tweets, HN comments, etc?

It is also hard for me to understand this angle. While in Russia at the moment and China the "they" is pretty much constant, it is not the case in EU. Why would be in their interest something that can be used against them the moment the tide turns?

Algolia can also be used as an alternative for the front page, it shows this at #6 for the past 24h

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=fals...

I love this, and so many good projects mentioned in the comments too. My son just turned three and we still have a real CD player that we use, sometimes, but now often it's streaming from Spotify or NAS. I was just thinking about how to do something similar, thanks for the inspiration ♥

This is so cool. I'm using BirdNET on Android for a long time and that is awesome, but running continuous monitoring on a Pi is really interesting. I saw there was also a Home Assistant integration for it.

I rarely buy from Amazon, but some small things I find only there. I ordered some phone accessories last week and needed a little more for free delivery so I added a shampoo. They dropped the shampoo without packaging in a paper bag with all the other stuff, when I opened it, of course, the shampoo was all over everything.

Their packaging and delivery quality is one of the worst. But they are still responsive to customer requests, although that is going down the sewer as well. I get often responses that look LLM/chatbot generated and often not answering my question. Or they try something like, sure I'll get you the refund as soon as you place the order again. Then I insist they refund now and so far I always got my money back.

So, basically their advantage for me is their sortiment (but you need to navigate through a lot of fake and garbage products), free returns and quick refund (often even without a return). But this is not a very strong one and I very rarely open their website - the pile of low quality listing is so off-putting that I generally avoid.

Sorry, I'm not an Apple user, so I'm not 100% sure if this is about forcing Apple to avoid/break E2E encryption (E2E in the true sense like Proton Mail) in the UK or to give them the keys they already can obtain themselves?

Maybe the package that requires lazy can somehow declare that requirement, so another package that tries to force not lazy will fail early and realize it needs to replace this dependency with something compatible or change its ways. It definitely adds complexity, though.

For sending in Mailbox.org webmail there is a thing called alternative senders where I can add email addresses to send from. I have something similar on my Android K9 app, where it's under Manage identities where I can also add the allowed senders.

I set it up a long time ago this way and I'm unsure of I had to somehow configure Gmail to be able to send from my other account. But I have the same also for @live.com and @zoho.com as I was trying different providers. This allows me to easily reply to forwarded emails with the old email addresses.

Edit: I think you got with the alias, didn't know this is what is called in Google https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en#zippy=%2C...

Sorry, my laptop where I had evolution got a new OS installed and I haven't configured it yet and just started mutt, but my original setup had a local archive folder, with sub-folders per year (I think, I even had a higher level grouping of 5 or 10 years). Unfortunately, I don't have setup right now to check, but I think it was semi-manual, like Evolution was archiving to a local folder automatically, then every new year I just moved the mails from the previous year into a folder).

Re offlineimap, just looked into isync/mbsync suggested here by others, it seems better from the description, I'm probably going to try it when I have some time: https://people.kernel.org/mcgrof/replacing-offlineimap-with-...

On one machine I have offlineimap.py[1] (with mutt), on the other laptop Evolution[2] that archives my mail locally that I can also export and back up regularly.

[1]: https://www.offlineimap.org/

[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/wikis/home

I also have an old Gmail account that I don't use directly anymore. Instead of POP, I set it up to forward everything to my mailbox.org account. It works for me this way for several years now. The only issue is that I don't get the spam forwarded, so you can't see if there are false positives. You can still see it in Gmail if you occasionally log in. For me, since this is a rarely used account, the spam I get is usually indeed spam, so I don't miss it. It might be different for a more active account, though.