e-topy

"that Vibed coded replacement is trash IMO" is referencing ArtCraft.

I think the author was saying that the UX has to be good for it to gain wide (non developer) adoption.

Most of the non developers I know don't want to write prose, let alone a .ini file

oh wow, this is cool! I managed to reverse engineer a BS120 led display[1], we ended up hooking it into our hackerspace's[2] home assistant instance, displaying everything from static messages to when trams are departing. I enjoyed the challenge of REing it by hand, but the ESP32 firmware to connect it was vibed by a fellow member.

[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~e-topy/bs120 [2]: https://base48.cz; feel free to come by anytime

SourceHut is actually from Amsterdam, and has both unlisted and private repo visibility.

It's also self hostable, but I'm on the $2 tier and damn is it good.

Well I've done everything you're saying, but I got stuck after that. I've tried claude code, I've been using OpenRouter, but after that it just seems like a million different options.

Take tools, there's a million different options, and I don't know how to choose between them. Or the general mentality of treating it as an assistant vs the pilot. Or the massive ecosystem of skills and MCP. It just feels like a massive unexplored ocean to me. But I guess I'm just getting analysis paralysis.

I have been using OpenRouter for a while now, and my Uni is self hosting Kimi K2.7 and Qwen 3.5, so I do know my way around chat completion. I've tried Claude Code with Kimi but it just felt confusing to use (probably cause I didn't know what I was doing) and the results were bad (probably because the codebase I've inherited is a mess, and it can't comprehend the web server logs actively lying (and neither can I)).

I've heard Claude Code alternatives can be better for non-claude models, but again, which ones? How can I tell if a tool is good or bad when everyone has the same LLM'd readme? How can I avoid security nightmares like OpenCode when they seem so popular?

I'm curious on your opinion, as a professor, how should universities (not individual professors) adapt to LLMs?

As an undergrad, I hope schools move to educating students to use LLMs in a more responsible way. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and resisting progress is futile, might as well use the tool we now have to help students learn even faster and better (e.g., making feedback instant and not answers, helping digest or split up material, checking answers).

I know opinions about AI at (not only at) my faculty are very mixed, but I think the answer is going to be in the rational mean, just like how technorealism reacted to the internet[0].

In our last program board sitting, some teachers said that they think programming as a job will be completely irrelevant in two years, while other pushed for more adoption. And meanwhile I know of some students that are basically only passing because of LLMs, and it's bad, like "leaving claude output in markdown files and finished source code on the faculty server in /tmp because opencode did so" bad. And our first year classes completely prohibit even sharing tests or talking about the solutions, which in my opinion a) makes people extremely asocial and atomized b) doesn't prepare students for real life c) promotes dishonesty.

Still, I think our university's thinking is in a stalemate, not wanting pure AI output and useless students, while also wanting to move with the times, and I doubt it's the only one.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081009111415/https://artefaktu... (absolutely amazing read, recommend it)

Maybe the best anti-scraper/LLM protection is going IPv6 only. I'd do that on my website, but I'm afraid some clients might not connect.

Oh yeah I've made some designs for a custom Eurorack style synth, but I quickly realized how expensive it would be to make a full rack. A synth scales exponentially, to get even some usefulness requires getting a lot of modules. Maybe one day.

hell yeah, I have tailed my T-shirts before but nothing else, making my own sound like a nice challenge.

How do you source materials? I'm usually very picky about the material, especially if it touches my skin, and usually the heavier the better. The best T-shirts I ever owned was a military surplus made from organic cotton, and was more than twice the weight of my other T-shirts, but I couldn't find anything like it anywhere.

Oh wow that's getting really interesting, we have a bunch of old and new young apple trees on our field, it'd be really cool making tree mutants.

Do you know any good first resources about this? I'd like to give it a try.

This sounds like a cool mix of genetics and gardening, I like that. Maybe I should ask some local non profits whether they need help with IT infra, because I don't exactly think "google drive and onedrive folders" is going to be an outlier.

also I came back here after three days, how did this get 713 comments all of a sudden???

What you're doing is interesting but those are side-projects. I have plenty of random side-projects, just now after reading Gibson's Burning Chrome, I'm making an OpenBSD server where you can only log in using SSH keys in my implant, and logging in makes you a completely new but very restricted user with 1GB of free storage. Kinda like Johnny Mnemonic.

But I feel very disorganized when most of my attention is on distinct one-off side projects, I want to work on something novel and big. But thanks for your suggestions. It is true that most industries begin when passion oriented people finally meet money oriented people, but most time they are separate.

This reminds me of [0], basically just inviting the most interesting people I know (also transitively the most interesting people they know), and just getting to meet people. I would really like to do this, but half the most interesting people I know are PhD professors I rant with because I'm next to them in a lab. Maybe once my network gets bigger. But I would still like to know more about how you do this, as other people doing this accidentally made me some good friendships, and I'd like to repay this favor to others

[0] https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/this-might-be-oversharing

I do boxing as a form of cardio so I'm not weightlifting all the time. So I've just invited a friend for a 1v1 and he accepted, time to start training both properly I guess.

I do want something related to computers because that's where I'm skilled the most, but it being mixed with something else is fine (i.e., biohacking). But computers generally are becoming stale, considering how much money has been poured into everything digital, it's going to be hard to find something novel. Maybe the next frontier is becoming an electrician?

No, but they are replacing bad ISPs. I have a relative in Brussels, while there is 10gig fiber on a nearby street, he's stuck on 100/10 coax, and to add insult to injury, Starlink is cheaper.

I don't know how to put it into words, but this aesthetic of computers just looks sooo good. Makes me want to try making my homelab/experimental hardware look like it. Any ideas how to source parts that look similar in low quantities?

You can. GitHub is about to hit zero nines of uptime[0]. But feedback like that is far too late to be useful. Maybe (principal or senior) engineers should be the ones to judge, and be trusted by management that their foresight is worth pushing the deadline?

[0]: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

> Git provides file versioning services only, whereas Fossil adds an integrated wiki, ticketing & bug tracking, embedded documentation, technical notes, a web forum, and a chat service [...]

I like the idea of having all of those within the actual VCS, mostly because with Git you need centralized services like GitHub to provide that.

But I have to ask: Is it really a good idea? Seems like feature creep motivated by the wants of a single project (SQLite).

All of those could be (albeit awkwardly) backed with a git repo and a cron job. Wiki? Just make a repo with a bunch of Markdown or this-week's-favorate-markup-language files. Ticketing & bug tracking? Again, just a Markdown file for every ticket. Embedded documentation & technical notes? Those are just special wiki pages with different attributes. Forum and chat service? Do you want your VCS to do that? I get being able to hyperlink between files and conversations, but still.

I really like the idea of making your company's office a publicly accessible coworking space. It does fit Kagi's slogan of 'Humanize the web', imagine if you could go into Google and chat with Larry Page.

This works in RustRover as well! Super useful.

European here. I've been to the US and holy mother of Jesus, you put sooooo much sugar into everything. I had to buy 'European' bread because your normal bread made my gums hurt, and even then that was the sweetest bread I've ever eaten.

Seriously, when your one large oreo shake has 2600 calories, no wonder your obesity rate is 35% and isn't slowing. Driving to the toilet instead of walking also doesn't help. Then your hospitals get overrun with preventable diseases and healthcare gets expensive. This isn't a 'caring' problem when getting fat is the only option for most people, the way most people life is specifically designed to make you obese.