yallpendantools

This reminded me of a conversation I recently had at work. Someone was turning over a project to me so he was explaining the context and history of the technical design decisions they've gone through. One stage of the project was basically linting through someone else's source code, evaluating possible code branches.

"So, we want to know all the possible states this could go through. We gave that task to OpenAI with the following prompt."

He shows me a sample prompt they would've sent to OpenAI. It started with the premise "You are a senior Ruby developer with ten years experience. Read through this source file and give me a list of all the code paths which involves global variables".

"Really?" I said, amused. I knew ahead of time that this project they were turning over is LLM-heavy. I have misgivings about LLMs but I try to keep an open mind so it was really impressive that it was used at this stage. "How well did it work?"

"It didn't. Instead we parsed it to a syntax tree and just performed static code analysis."

(Usual disclaimer that details of the anecdote were changed/obfuscated but the spirit of the interaction has been preserved.)

My hot take in this forum: this attitude is a sort of damn-if-you-do-damn-if-you-don't Catch-22 clause for traditional media which, among other things, has lead to over-cynicism towards these sources which, in turn, has allowed the rise of fake news ("alternative facts" heh).

I'm not saying don't ever be critical of the media you consume rather be nuanced in doing so. Do realize that the decision which to produce/what to report on/what counts as "news-worthy" is an opinion in itself. Deciding which headline to use is an opinion in itself. Choosing your lede down to your last sentence is an opinion. You can't ever "just report the facts"

"US Olympian ends Moscow campaign with silver" could be the same news item as "Russia takes gold at home vs US rival" but you can see they are expressing very different opinions already.

To be clear I can't agree more with "less but better" but that act is inherently---you guessed it---very opinionated. I can already read the "Hey BiasBroadCast, why you report on this war but not this other war?" all the way from here.

I think the question is how efficient is ChatGPT in providing economic value. I don't want to get in a game of anecdotes because I don't want to deny that there are use cases well-suited for LLMs and you might be in such a field. The efficiency question is thus: of all the queries LLMs serve, how many of those are hallucinations (which then need to be reprompted), how many of those are simple queries that could've been solved with more traditional search methods, and how many of those are queries which only LLMs could've solved?

I don't really have an answer to my own efficiency question and will likely never will. But for every company like yours, there are companies who blindly introduce LLMs into their product for no other reason than hype. Spotify, your recommendations ("DJ") are no better because you used LLMs; collaborative filtering worked just fine for music. Meta/FB, your value prop to me as a social network hits rock bottom if my friends are not even sharing real-life experiences. Google, you're already on thin ice with all the SEO spam but your value decreases even more if you give me hallucinations for summaries. Hence, sorry but my outlook isn't rosy.

TFA:

> Many data centres use water-based systems to cool the plant with towers evaporating the heat, like a huge perspiration system, which means that the water is lost.

> All of these companies have schemes to put water back into nature using projects that help river flow, capture rainwater, recharge aquifers and modify dams. They have all pledged to become “water positive” by 2030: returning more than they consume.

> But where are they putting back the water? Quite often it’s not in the same place it was taken out, which can be in areas of “water stress”.

It's not about whether or not the water is gone for good after cooling. It's about allocation of resources. The water cooling ChatGPT servers right now is water not delivered to households or the larger ecosystem. Data centers are, in effect, in competition with the rest of us for who gets to use the water right now.

>> ChatGPT is useful. This article is not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html please:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

I know the whole debate around systemd but I never knew people even considered it to be along the lines of malware. I checked Devuan (which I also just learned from your comment) and they say

> Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd that allows users to reclaim control over their system by avoiding unnecessary entanglements and ensuring Init Freedom.

which, okay, points towards that direction but I can't find what they exactly consider "unnecessary entanglements" nor what exactly means "Init Freedom".

I'm genuinely curious, what exactly are people saying about systemd being "malware"?

I have a tangential question, especially to the native Germans in this thread.

I've been living in Germany for a while now and have been trying to understand German politics in that time, including this whole concept of coalition governments and the crisis the Ampel is facing. Due to the latter, I came across this: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-could-face-snap-election/a-704...

In this article are statements such as (emphasis mine):

> Brandt called for a vote of confidence in the Bundestag with the aim of losing it, so that his chancellorship could be reconfirmed by voters in fresh elections.

> [Kohl] called for a vote of confidence, which he, too, deliberately lost on December 17, 1982.

> Schröder called for a vote of confidence, which he deliberately lost on July 1, 2005.

I just can't wrap my head around these in so many levels. The easier of these questions would be, how can a chancellor deliberately lose a vote of confidence? What makes the action deliberate exactly?

Brandt is a more complicated case to the point where I am, honestly, having a hard time putting my bewilderment into words. I'll try nonetheless: How can a chancellor expect voters in fresh elections to bolster their chancellorship, just right after losing a vote of confidence? I can only interpret this as some kind of political flex, basically telling the Bundestag that "I may not have your confidence but I still have mandate from the people".

(If it is, then, well, weird flex but ok, as we used to say a few years ago. It is a reason after all, even if I find it a bit absurd.)

Perhaps what adds to my confusion is, in Kohl's section we read: "Because Kohl's coalition of the CDU/CSU and FDP came to power through a vote of no confidence and not a general election, Kohl wished for additional legitimacy through a general election" which to me implies that Brandt's strategy would not have consolidated his position as strongly; indeed, the article notes his maneuver was fiercely criticized at the time.

I know I'm an idiot when it comes to German politics so I'd be glad if someone can make sense of my bewilderment. I know there is a lot of subtlety and context I am missing here and I'm sure I'm confusing one thing for another. But I strongly feel like this would go a long way to helping me understand the current machinations of the Ampel.

> If the work (i.e. the exercises) are important to grasp the material, they should be done in class.

I'd like to offer what I've come to realize about the concept of homework. There are two main benefits to it: [1] it could help drill in what you learned during the lecture and [2] it could be the "boring" prep work that would allow teachers to deliver maximum value in the classroom experience.

Learning simply can't be confined in the classroom. GP suggestion would be, in my view, detrimental for students.

[1] can be done in class but I don't think it should be. A lot of students already lack the motivation to learn the material by themselves and hence need the space to make mistakes and wrap their heads around the concept. A good instructor can explain any topic (calculus, loops and recursion, human anatomy) well and make the demonstration look effortless. It doesn't mean, however, that the students have fully mastered the concept after watching someone do it really well. You only start to learn it once you've fluffed through all the pitfalls at least mostly on your own.

[2] can't be done in class, obviously. You want your piano teacher to teach you rhythm and musical phrasing, hence you better come to class already having mastered notation and the keyboard and with the requisite digital dexterity to perform. You want your coach to focus on the technical aspects of your game, focus on drilling you tactics; you don't want him having to pace you through conditioning exercises---that would be a waste of his expertise. We can better discuss Hamlet if we've all read the material and have a basic idea of the plot and the characters' motivations.

That said, it might make sense to simply not grade homeworks. After all, it's the space for students to fail. Unfortunately, if it weren't graded, a lot of students will just skip it.

Ultimately, it's a question of behavior, motivation, and incentives. I agree that the current system, even pre-AI, could only barely live up to ideals [1] and [2] but I don't have any better system in mind either, unfortunately.

Okay, first of all, mind spelling out what "DL" is?

> journalism & editorial standards keep getting lower.

> it used to be that journalists had the self-respect to not make up a 'trend' or 'era' before they could cobble together at least 3 anecdotes

Ironically, these claims could use the support of "at least 3 anecdotes" itself. Granted, this is HN, we are not journalists, that's not part of our standards.

> OP can barely even manage 1

Aside from Pear, TFA also mentioned the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI pin. Which brings it to a grand total of...three.

Also has the following:

> [TFA] Funding for AI firms reached $23.2 billion in the second quarter of the year—the highest level on record, according to analyst firm CB Insights.

> [TFA] Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google’s AI research team, told the Financial Times earlier this year that he worries that the cash flooding the AI space “brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting.” Hassabis, who cofounded DeepMind, compared the present AI space unfavorably to crypto.

The latter quote was followed by the sentence mentioning Rabbit and Humane.

Honestly, I try to have a healthy amount of cynicism for what counts as "news" nowadays but being critical of a news item for the heck of it strays from the constraints of the operative word "healthy". If I'm being generous, I'd call the article's title sensationalist in its confidence but all things considered, the text provides ample evidence to support the thesis of the title no? We can debate the merits of the evidence the author presented but for us to do that we need to actually---ahem---read the article in good faith and start it from there.

> The original meaning of the word computer was a person who calculates.

Was that ever so?

According to Google Ngrams, "computer" was not really a term until, predictably, around 1950, even though the verb "compute" has been in use throughout history (it comes from the Latin "computare", apparently).

That tells me "computer" was never a person, always a machine.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=compute%2Ccomp...

> They dragged the term through different phases, but that’s just projection of will.

In other words, that's just the normal lifecycle of words in a language with an active speaker community. In any stage of history, the meaning of words is just the speaker community's projection of will.

Best I can do now is acknowledge that what counts as "theft" is a complicated topic and can't be decided by a binary "is said object still there after alleged theft has occurred?". I've benefited from some digital theft, naturally, so I might be biased to uphold my own morality but the kind of theft contemporary AI tech has enabled is something else entirely. Somewhere there is where I draw the line.

Recently, I introduced a few friends to the works of digital artist wlop. The immediate reaction was "Is that AI?". I can't help but feel offended in behalf of wlop. It doesn't help that they have made LoRAs out of his work. It's not so much the "theft" of techniques/concepts/etc. that enrages me but rather, the theft of credibility that a human is capable of this output. I imagine Jeff Geerling (and, to a lesser extent, maybe ScarJo) is enraged along similar lines. In this AI summer, other people are fighting for their livelihoods, other people are fighting for their credibility. And, of course, there's an intersection of people whose credibility is their livelihood.

Note that in reframing it as theft of credibility, the owning party has been definitely injured to an extent. As in, said object (credibility) is no longer what it once was after alleged theft has occurred.

And I'm not trying to state some Universal Truths that I will debate to death. Again the whole point is that what counts as "theft" is a complicated topic. I'm sure if you spend a bit more brainpower, you can find analogies that will make me look like a hypocrite. I'm just seeing this community lately strongly signal towards preserving some "original" meaning of words in the belief that it will solve some problem or another and I'm tired of it; I have similar linguistic thoughts about the whole uproar on the term "hallucination" but that's for another comment thread essay.

> People have to adjust expectations, not laws.

I know this thread is about theft but this attitude is downright dangerous in general. People should expect laws to adjust, lest they become irrelevant. Quick example: it's not fair to tell workers to adjust their expectation in light of the emergence of the gig economy. Should they just expect their labor to be exploited then, moving forward? I say, absolutely not. Legislation should catch-up to uphold/strengthen labor laws. Replace "gig economy" with "AI" and we are sort-of back on topic.

> The fourth hold from the top in the right hand lane was off by one with respect to its counterpart in the left hand lane.

I don't watch this event but, coming from other sports, I think there's more to this than sheer muscle memory. Humans are not machines. Sometimes you compete with ongoing or lingering injuries. Conditioning changes even for the most disciplined of athletes. All of these mean that a different approach might be warranted for each event depending on your "set-up".

Not to mention other variables outside of the human body. Perhaps the type of rope could matter in your performance. The age of the holds could matter too; even when the governing body standardizes on a replacement period for holds, I'm sure competitors would have strong opinions about the difference between a hold at the start of its service life versus one about to be replaced.

Also, the one thing I love seeing in physical contests is how competitors eke out the last bit of performance advantage with sheer willpower. Muscle memory takes care of the actions but performance and willpower is a conscious effort.

In short, no, I don't think competitors can literally turn off their conscious brain and just let muscle memory take over. If a field has jargon, there's a hell lot to geek over it.

Err, why do you need a GPT for this stunt? For a quarter of the price of a 2010s mid-range HP laptop, I have a Python script for you.

From one Hamburger to another...just where, please?

I could swear I saw a drinking fountain once, somewhere along that long corridor connecting the gates but I never found it again and, to this date, I've never drank from it. (I mostly fly Eurowings to other Schengen destinations.) If it really exists, I'm sure there is only one such station past security, or maybe one per airport wing.

And look, in a pinch I'm ready to drink tap water from the airport toilet faucets. I'm ready to entrust my life to that dice roll. But, as a matter of human dignity being inviolable and all that, I would much rather shell out money for an expensive bottle of water.

Honestly, I'm rather frustrated by the HN discourse on this topic.

TFA (with emphasis added):

> Brazil’s national *data protection* authority determined on Tuesday that Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, cannot use data originating in the country to train its artificial intelligence.

> The decision stems from “the imminent risk of serious and irreparable or difficult-to-repair damage to the fundamental rights of the affected data subjects,” the agency said in the nation’s official gazette.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/meta_eu_privacy/ (with emphasis added):

> The decision to halt AI training using EU content follows complaints to *data protection* agencies in 11 European countries – and those agencies, led by Ireland, telling the Facebook giant to scrap the slurp.

While there is no shortage of IP, licensing, and copyright moral quandaries in training LLMs and their ilk, Meta/FB is not getting regulated on those grounds! They are getting regulated on privacy issues. It's even there on The Register path.

I'm seeing a lot of comments in these threads about IP, copyright, and licensing---which, please do take note, are well-defined legal terms and are not to be used interchangeably---but all that is irrelevant because that is not the question Meta is being made to answer for.

Even more frustrating are threads/arguments to what "irrevocable (copy)rights" you give FB per their TOS without even bothering to cite the relevant bits of the TOS to prove their point. Exercise to the reader: prove/disprove that [a] FB users retain copyright of their content even when posted to FB and [b] you are merely licensing FB to specific (not universal!) uses of your content posted in their platform and [c] said license is revocable any time. The astute reader is referred to the Berne Convention but Facebook's TOS will also do just fine. Standard question, one point per answer.

Bonus point question: if you have proven the points above, what action allows you to revoke the license you have granted FB?

(Of course, end of the day, I'm again playing lawyer in an online forum. I'm no better than anyone else here what do I know.)

I sincerely regret that when I went to Vienna, I only knew it for the music; where greats like Mozart, Strauss and Beethoven (among others) plied their trade and not to mention _The_ Vienna Philharmonic.

But since I'm more into visual arts anyway, I naturally checked out the vibrant (pun intended) art museums too. That's where I learned of Gustav Klimt and the Secession movement. That's where I started to become intensely fascinated with Art Nouveau/Jugendstil.

(When I was there, the Albertina had a contemporary art exhibit for the art duos Hauenschild Ritter and Muntean/Rosenbloom. It was a personal religious experience seeing those works. I won't write an essay here as to why because it's tangential to the topic. I accept maybe a lot of people will say "religious experience" is hyperbole (it's not). But the point is Vienna's cultural footprint is not just classical music.)

Unfortunately, I didn't have time anymore to visit the Secession building when I was there. But the plus side is that I have a reason to return.

Sorry for the pedantry. I agree wholeheartedly with the thought of your comment but your timeline rubs me off.

> Internet was still an alien thing to a lot of people throughout the 2000s

I agree but...

> and if you think about it - that’s only 14 years ago

14 years ago is 2010 which is no longer 2000s. It could be the end of 2000s, but that's pushing it.

And it bothers me because by 2010 I don't think the Internet was "new" or "alien" at the time to anyone other than business bureaucrats or out-of-touch politicians[1]. The algorithmic news feed has been recognized as a problem by then[2].

I'd say 2010 was the time when the Internet was starting to become ubiquitous, the transition period between the good old days and the age of walled-garden platforms we have to day. For more context, the iPhone---whose form factor, at least, put the Internet in everyone's pockets---was released in 2007 and in 2010 Google released the Nexus line for Android.

[1] In 2013, Angela Merkel was ridiculed for calling the Internet "uncharted territory".

[2] https://archive.is/m8pjM Article written in 2017 but the pertinent part is "Facebook says its own researchers have been studying the filter bubble since 2010".

Rest in Power. I always said DBZ has single-handedly saved thousands of nerds from early-onset diabetes/arthritis, obesity, an unhealthy lifestyle in general. I count myself among them. That's not to mention the other benefits that just go with working out and staying healthy.

We'll raise our hands for the Spirit Ball, Toriyama-sensei.

Just to add to the list of "fb.me" head-scratchers:

> ako.pinaka.gwapo.sa.ph.corner.static.fbcdn4.com.line.naver.jp.fb.me

> ako.pinaka.gwapo.sa.ph.corner.static.tlcdn4.com.line.naver.jp.fb.me

Everything before "corner" is Filipino and translated it means "I [am] the most handsome in Ph(ilippines)". Hard to explain how this comes across culturally. It's not particularly edgy, more cringe, the kind you'd find in someone's Friendster wall (MySpace never really for big there).

Really curious about `fb.me` now. Haven't seen a good-enough explanation in this thread and I can't be bothered to sleuth them up myself. I'm tending towards this list being not particularly well-curated.

I'm gonna have to play advocate here for The Institution over The Individual. The jobs you mentioned (pest control, basic car maintenance) exist because a lot of people can't be bothered to learn how to do it properly.

(Or, to put it more cynically: a lot of people are idiots. Like, a lot. Cue the quote about the average man and the thought that half of humanity is dumber than that...)

A lot of things can go wrong with the $10 spray you bought from Home Depot. You could end up spraying it where you're not supposed to and at best you end up poisoned in the ICU, at worst you contaminate your area's water supply. You could spray it on a lazy Saturday afternoon but you forgot about your dog who loves to lick the floor; at best you end up with a very expensive vet bill, at worst your dog then licks your kids in the face and you end up with a dead dog and a dead kid.

To be clear, I'm not saying your gut feeling is wrong; I'd probably do the same, honestly. But it most certainly doesn't apply to everyone.

Further, oil and filter changes might be super easy, barely an inconvenience but you could end up not resealing and tightening a valve or a nut enough and the worst time to find that out is when you're doing 100KPH on a highway. Don't even get me started about people who think they could save money by using olive oil where they are supposed to use a specific type of coating grease or lubricant; after all, they buy olive oil from the grocery once every month so, as a car maintenance item, it's "basically free".

These people are not only a danger to themselves. They are a danger to everyone they share a road (or a residential area) with.

Of course, having an industry around these tasks doesn't eliminate the possibility of these dumb outcomes but having "professionals" who are have read the fabulous manual and are regulated put them head and shoulders above J. Handyman Smith when doing said job. Emphasis on regulated, we give that far less credit than it deserves. You might have also read the fabulous manual but if you are not regulated, not beholden to a specific standard or process, how do I even check you didn't cut corners? If you mess up somewhere, how can you and everyone else even begin to assess the magnitude of your fuck-up and thereby respond appropriately?

I've personally considered doing something along these lines but one thing simply stopped me on my tracks: moderation.

I feel like twenty odd years ago you can just open the gates to a web community and get by with little moderation; you can still cultivate a community from which participants derive some value. Nowadays, moderation would have to be no less than someone's full-time job. And I believe this has been the case for a good few years #before# generative AI came into the scene. Maybe for a good while you can hold down the fort with technical moderation solutions like fail2ban or Captcha but I bet you will run into problems within your first half a million users or so.

Maybe projects like Mastodon have more robust solutions to this but, still, moderation will be a problem if and when you make it big, just like your server costs.

Finally, don't even get me started about CP, which is a whole other level of low and rotten. Maybe if you restrict your community to niche topics it would (a) deter malicious outsiders and (b) be self-moderating to a degree. The thing is, a niche discussion forum old Facebook ain't.

> I can't imagine how jarring the transition between _The Magician's Nephew_ and _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_

> Nephew feels more like Lewis' earlier science fiction novels, while Wardrobe has a fairy-tale quality

Will vouch for this. I started Narnia in my early teens. I knew Wardrobe to be a classic but the edition the bookstore carried had Nephew labeled as the first book. Honestly? I felt kinda short-changed at what I got. Nephew set-up this expectation of being a myth-heavy story, something in between Harry Potter and LOTR/Earthsea in terms of world-building. Jackson's LOTR was at peak popularity at the time too so I really lapped Nephew up.

Honestly though, I loved every book in the series. I can understand why people might have issues with Caspian---maybe the weakest book in the whole Chronicle IMO---and looking back now the Christian imagery might be heavy-handed at times. But as children's/early teens' fantasy series, the stories and the world are entertaining. Which, as a teenager, was all I really needed of the books. Maybe Lewis' only fault is that he peaked too early with Wardrobe, setting up expectations for the rest of the series.

Git and HTML both deal with the (let's face it) complicated data structure we all know as trees.

The difference: You can fuck up an HTML tree and most browsers can still display your page[1], you can still get your message across. You fuck up a git history tree and you can somehow summon Cthulhu.

Not to mention, even if you can manage to stay away from branch confusion, just dealing with diffs is already a huge barrier for newbies.

[1] See "Where HTML 'beats' C" - Computerphile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-csXdj4WVwA

THIS! I've been maintaining a Neocities website for almost three years now. While, being a software engineer at heart, I still ultimately versioned the offline copy of my website via Git(lab), it's liberating to not have to wrestle with a git workflow just so I can hide my works-in-progress.

Also, in my case, a matter of branding. While I'm not trying to promote my content (a bunch of short stories and illustrations) so heavily, it just felt wrong for them to reside in Github/Gitlab subdomain. The closest I would've considered Git* pages is if I was doing sci-fi stories and that is still a "maybe". At the time I started my project, I was also worried I might run afoul of some content policy these Git platforms might have given that my website is not exactly for their demographic.

Cool find! I'm trying to post a content-focused side project in as many grassroots platforms as I can. My main site is already in Neocities, for example. I think I could work with this too!

That said, I wish they featured some random pages or categories from their homepage. I'd like to see what communities already exist around the topic of my project.

Let me throw-in my 2c worth. I started my career in consulting with an in-house but Spring-inspired framework. I hated it, turned to other jobs that used other tech stacks; nowadays I largely consider myself a Pythonista. Lately, after about a decade from that first gig, I've finally decided to learn Spring properly and I've made good progress with it. Mind you, I decided to do so only because it seems like a good career move to know Spring in this economy.

So, my honest evaluation: learning Spring is frustrating and not an enjoyable experience at all. Just the sheer verbosity of things hurts my Pythonista soul. It's not just that Java is inherently more verbose than Python, it's just that "the Spring way" forces you to create three classes with little to no shortcuts around it; even the most opinionated Python/Node frameworks I've encountered wouldn't be that draconian. Coming from Python/Node/PHP/serverless, the framework's philosophy seems incomprehensibly monolithic.

All the layers of abstraction (and their resulting stack traces) make for an extremely confusing debugging experience especially for noobs.

*BUT*, I admit, judging a technology for its learning curve is not fair. I just had to vent my honest opinion on the experience.

I'm now at that point where I think I've grokked "the Spring way". That is, my Google searches on how to do X in Spring/troubleshoot a problem are smarter now. I've actually grown to appreciate it. (I'm pretty sure the Spring Gods would make me pay for the sheer hubris of this statement and will make me eat my words in the next feature I come up with in my side project.)

JpaRepositories are powerful magic. If Spring has any advantage over the frameworks I've come to love, it's this. JpaRepositories compensate for what Spring/Java lacks in brevity. Oh, also, not a Spring-specific advice but Lambdas and method references have made Java easier to write and has definitely deflated the number of classes I've had to create otherwise. Some would say that's just lipstick on a pig but I prefer to see it as an oasis in a desert.

Lastly, don't take this as advice for the backend you are building for a new start-up but I really see Spring's strength in that consulting CRUD-software market. If I can define specs in a legally-binding contract before writing a single line of code, if I can bang out a schema at the start of development and not worry about migrations, I would actually choose Spring. All the "corporate-rep" of Java won't hurt for these types of projects either.

But on the other hand, for environments where I need a lot of flexibility and lack the leisure of time almost always, I feel like Spring would be a development death march.

Misc notes:

1. I'm not actually learning vanilla Spring. I'm using Spring Boot alongside Vaadin. Overtime I've come to distinguish better between the two but maybe some percent of my frustrations in the learning phase is on Vaadin, not really Spring.

2. I made extensive use of ChatGPT in learning Spring. Even for such a boring/common tech, it's hilarious what ChatGPT gets wrong. But it also gets things right, giving advice in a level of clarity that blog posts and SO posts couldn't have provided. I would recommend anyone trying to learn Spring (or maybe any other framework/technology) to give ChatGPT a shot too. Even when it gets things wrong, the feedback loop that resembles actually talking to someone helps with the rubber ducking.

Again, all 2c worth of opinions from someone not even a year in this framework. Caveat lector!

Can someone actually read the image? I'm on desktop and I can't get it in a readable resolution. https://miparnisariblog.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/aws-netw... is still a web page and the image is, sure, larger, but no more legible. :(

I'm a developer by profession and I almost didn't switch from LastPass after their breach last year.

Simply put, after all the reports of last year's breach, I assessed how vulnerable I am. First, my LastPass settings were such that I shouldn't be too affected by their breach; among other things in their self-assessment report, I had the "new" healthy default of 600K iterations. Also, the three most important accounts forming the basis of my online identity were never on LastPass and had unique passwords.

(And yeah, I understand that the security issue isn't purely on technical merit but also a social question of LastPass' reputation as a company. But on a personal level, I didn't really care that much. Moving on...)

Hence, on a personal basis, I didn't see much reason to switch out. The alternative would be the hassle of evaluating a new password manager, exporting data from LastPass, setting up the new password manager on my devices, importing my pre-existing vault, tweaking the new password manager so it behaves as I expected, etc. I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin with this grievance but that's really how it was. I think there was also a confluence of other factors why I didn't want this hassle on my plate at the time (e.g., I remember this was end of last year and I'd rather focus on my holiday arrangements).

I did reach out to family members whom I might've recommended LastPass to in the past though, and advised them to switch out. I didn't believe they could make the same self-assessment that I did.

In the end, I did switch to Bitwarden though. I did go through the hassle as I thought I would but articles like this make me glad I did. The decisive factor for why I did it anyway was that I realized that I might have some passwords/keys in my vault that I use professionally so, out of professional prudence, I switched. Were I not a developer, I might not have had this factor at all.

Awesome! Now that I've seen this framework, it tempts me though...

I have this personal side project which in the wee days of me career I wrote in CherryPy; I love Python and have been exploring frameworks. I didn't really get a lot written in it because eventually I realized the project is frontend-heavy and I was never in the mood to write the JS for it.

Recently I had the need for this side project again so I thought, why not rewrite it using a framework that would avoid me having to deal with the madness that is the Node.js ecosystem? For one reason or another I ended up with Vaadin.

I've nothing against Java. If it works, it works. I got over the initial bump that is Spring and I got a "core" backend running, with tests too. My grievance with it is the usual Java fault of needing to write a lot of boilerplate just to shoehorn my app into the framework's philosophy. (Man, part of my initial consideration was even the tooling, editor, autocomplete, and all that, because damn me if I try Spring without these modern conveniences!)

And this...this is all the things that attracted me to Vaadin---but in Python! I am so tempted to rewrite again. My experience and your documentation should make this a two hour job, right? Right?

("Haha, I'm in danger," my side project chuckles like Ralph Wiggum, staring blankly at https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/25/west-side-project-...)

> I see no reason why editing his image with AI-assisted tools should automatically disqualify the artist, unless the contest terms prohibit that, of which I see no mention in the article.

He didn't edit an image so much as generate it. His work is closer to a digital painting (from a Wacom tablet, say), than a color-corrected, cropped, then filtered photograph. Everyone else started their process with capturing light from a camera.