stego-tech
As an example, I’m juggling multiple projects at work and home. I have a finite amount of time, and access to AI. One camp would tell me to use AI for all of it to move faster, but that increases the risk of Cognitive Surrender. The other camp would tell me to do it all by hand, but I don’t have the time available for that; I must pick and choose.
So, I choose to cognitively surrender on the SEO task for our website because that’s a set of skills I don’t want to acquire and are better handled by AI anyhow. This leaves me more time to focus on learning more about Apple’s configuration profiles and improving our MDM suite, which are valuable skills that will still pay out in an AI-first world.
You have to pick and choose where to fight, otherwise you’ll expend all your energy on losses.
> “A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008…”
Letting Lehamn fail was the right call, because it allowed the Fed to bulldoze TARP through and save the wider economy as a result. If anything, I would say the subsequent bailouts were too generous in letting the companies retain controls and returns; the government should’ve kept a permanent, partially-nationalized control of those shares and added them to a sovereign wealth fund instead of selling them back on the market. “You fucked up so bad the entire system almost failed, so clearly you cannot be trusted to self-govern” should’ve been the unambiguous messaging from the Fed.
We must let them fail, no matter how many jobs it costs, no matter what the harm looks like in the short term, to send a clear and unambiguous signal to others that the government won’t backstop your shitty bets.
The Culture still had businesses, they just didn’t have to turn a profit or operate on fixed schedules. They still had soldiers, diplomats, traders, workers, teachers, scientists, researchers.
The difference was that the exchange was on their terms, generally. They wanted to do this, money be damned. So they opened a bar, or taught youth, or explored the universe, or fought to protect the society so dear to them.
The utopia wasn’t because people didn’t have to work anymore; it was a utopia because people didn’t have to work to survive anymore.
That made all the difference.
Everything else - and I mean everything else - is ancillary to that core function. Seeing a CEO openly throw security out the window in favor of Big Tech’s latest drug addiction is bad enough, but the CEO of a company whose entire reputation is bucking Big Tech? Inexcusable.
Already looking for exit strategies. I don’t want to give this prick one red cent of my money.
For what it’s worth, I think OP hit the nail on the head for you software devs out there in terms of post-AI changes: sure, specialists who can maintain total comprehensive and detailed knowledge of a single system’s codebase will always be in some demand, but the true generalists (who never do dives) and T-shaped (who never specialize enough) are arguably better replaced with AI in many corporate cases. Those in a position to succeed under AI are the owners who do deep dives on-demand to learn or fix things (hi!) or the T-shaped workers willing to start going on more deep dives.
It’s very similar to the reward structure of the IT industry since outsourcing and visa exploitations became the norm: nobody really has immense in-depth specialty experience in a single system, because that track isn’t often needed in work environments. Rather, specialists often end up leading departments while owners lead companies for the same sorts of reasons the author laid out: fundamentals, breadth, and on-demand depth. It’s more valuable in the marketplace knowing how to migrate off VMware to another hypervisor while also being able to fumble-write the new API calls for your sludge pipe to deploy into the new environment and also supporting the identity/collaboration/SSO stack than it is to just be an Okta or VMware guy specifically.
It also means leveraging AI effectively on-device makes you (or me, in this case) that much more valuable, because I don’t need a Claude or OpenAI or Gemini sub to “work”, I just need compute (which is cheap and plentiful). Because I’ve gone on these deep dives before, I know how to steer my agents to solutions that are adapted to product changes (like a recent Mac keychain issue); the same would apply to software devs who have plumbed problems directly when they could rather than sloughed off blindly to the agents.
Thanks for the write-up. It’s nice seeing the topic written about from the lived-in middle as opposed to the extremes.
Just look at those specs needed for accurate-ish results. You really think your 128GB Mac Studio or Framework desktop is going to be able to work in a real emergency situation? Even if it is, how long will it last? What about those precious seconds waiting for inference?
The danger here is less hallucinations and more, well, everything else about it. Instead of setting this up, take the time to make sure you have a restocked first aid kit and enough water for a week of use by your household. Stock up on meds and non-perishable food. Plan exit strategies and contingencies. Acquire and store little first aid booklets or manuals of common survival tasks in physical form (or hell, throw onto an eReader - infinitely more battery life than an LLM host in an emergency).
This is one of those “sounds good in my head” projects that folks with emergency experience would bristle at. This is a hindrance, not a helper.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
The doom was never about the tools, it was always about the shitty humans shoving it down our throats to their own benefit.
AI is trained on our data. Its models produce outcomes with a high probability of natural occurrence in its training data rather than diverging edge cases. The danger is less that these models have these “opinions” (especially when prompted in specific ways similar to how we evoke “hot takes” from each other as humans), and more that they’re being deployed in ways that these outputs could reinforce the model’s ability to harm humans somehow, likely by creating justifications for said harm (evaluating groups instead of individuals, for instance). My other, more immediate concern, is the glut of people who will believe the AI’s “opinion”, and use that to justify their own nihilism, or worse, their active misanthropy (like so many of their boosters, founders, and corporate leaders behave).
The machines aren’t the problem here, so much as the humans misusing them. Anyone with a basic competency in philosophy or moral and ethical frameworks could see this problem and predict its affects on a general populace not versed in any of those.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Now look, I’m not about to try and stop folks from finding new ways of solving problems, especially in infrastructure. Far from it, I love seeing what you beautiful diamonds come up with that works for you. They make for amazing reads!
Except 99.999% of infrastructure needs to be boring, bland, basic, and bulletproof. Most Infra folks will take the minor inefficiencies associated with object storage because we’re not a unicorn startup where solving such a problem could save us millions of dollars a year in write calls to our hypercloud provider; we’re far too busy trying to get our internal customers to stop overscheduling VMs or implement the latest executive shiny project. We need our underlying abstractions - hypervisors, storage arrays, network cores - to work, without fuss and with minimal maintenance.
So while it’s super neat that Fly.io has shared this, and they absolutely have a relevant and beneficial use case for reinventing the proverbial wheel, it’s important to note they are the edge case, not the norm.
World leaders influence planetary agendas and ideals on a daily basis, deciding who lives and dies with the flourish of a pen or the screed of a late-night tweet. That doesn’t even touch the random encounters online or in person that irreparably change who we grow into as people and the decisions we make that affect others. In fact, it has never been easier for any single person to have an impact across the planet, even if it’s as small as one-on-one.
I also vehemently disagree with happiness being infinite on a single-planet species. We have finite resources, finite materials, and finite people, all with finite time. Infinite cannot emerge from the finite, though we often mistake vast expanses as infinite because we cannot calculate or visualize limits for ourselves. It is not physically possible for everyone on the planet to live like the richest Americans, in palatial estates with private jets and dedicated servants, and therefore (material) happiness is finite and must be budgeted and balanced. In that sense, instilling a sense of “enough” in children and adults both is crucial to the balancing of our species and maximizing happiness.
You lot keep parroting the same schlock generation after generation because you hope it’s true, and yet you’re dim enough to conflate work and labor with somehow being optional to existence.
My god, man, read a book. Go outside, pursue a passion with the fire in your heart, do something with your time beyond merely pursuing empty luxuries and a hollow life of non-existence. Nothing you say to me can convince me that this time, this invention, will finally be the one that destroys work and enables utopia, because to remove humanity from existence - be it in labor, or work, or passion of pursuit - is a utopia for nobody but those cretins who abhor their fellow humans.
“Teach them to create more happiness than they destroy, for others as much as themselves. For we are a finite planet, with nowhere else to go, and thus we all have an obligation to make this sole home the best and happiest place it can be.”
It’s to not bet that tomorrow’s solution might solve today’s problems, but to fix them as they arise. It’s cleaning up your own messes rather than relying on others to clean up after you. It’s not self-sufficiency, but planetary sufficiency, and navigating the impossibly complex systems that influence and impact those outcomes.
Let the children choose their specifics, and connect them with educators and mentors who will nurture their unique learning styles and growth patterns to full blossom. Otherwise, teach them that there is a finite amount of happiness on this planet, and we must do our best to ensure there’s always enough to go around for everyone.
And most importantly of all, never let someone else convince you that you or your passions are irrelevant or replaceable. Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.
Speaking of transcodes, I haven’t had an issue with either unit despite both handling hardware transcoding on a semi-regular basis (one for Plex, one for Jellyfin). The system cranks through them pretty decently provided you’re doing one or two at a time, and I’ve had no heating issues with them jammed in a rack with my NAS and network kit. The hardest part was getting Intel’s proprietary drivers working for such a feature, and that was more a (lack of) skill issue on my end than anything else.
Hm. I wonder if I can use a RPi Zero to read the console output of a medical scale and write it to Apple Health for my profile…
My stack is currently a mix of usual end user services (Jellyfin, FreshRSS) and identity infra, and it chugs along brilliantly without issue. I’m fairly certain that I could leave it running to the heat death of the universe if I built lifecycle management into my backup scripts.
We shifted from a sole-provider/homemaker model of couples to a dual-income-required model, at the same time our choices on car dependency and suburban sprawl came back to bite us in the ass. The working from home era was great for socializing because we could agree on small group nights if we were all feeling well, knowing we didn’t have huge commutes ahead of us after work and with the extra money in our pockets from lowered work costs; RTO mandates killed that again, as did the sudden jump in real estate costs, inflation, and stagnating wages in the face of AI investment.
That’s just the average, too. For edge cases like me in unorthodox households or living arrangements, it’s even harder.
My friends who are older are pessimistic as fuck. Several have been unemployed for lengthy stretches due to ageism in American hiring practices, which has resulted in their life crumbling around them as they lack the resources for basic upkeep anymore. I see that and shudder for myself, wondering if we’ll finally get this sorted before I hit my 50s or if this is just going to be a shitty fucking thing for the foreseeable future.
Social activity is hard for middle-aged men. We spend several hours a day commuting to and from work, which eats into our social budgets. Hard to host dinners, attend game nights, or go on dates when 80% of your day is spoken for work alone in some capacity (preparing for, getting to, performing, commuting home), which leaves us isolated. Most of our peers have paired off, so they have a stronger support structure - yet they too disappear at alarming rates.
At every conceivable intersection for the past fifty years, we’ve chosen to make life more hostile and less comfortable. I’m tired of feigning surprise at what, at least to me and my circles, is so sickeningly obvious.
What I’m watching is the timeline. If China can get DDR4 kit out in volume (or even better, DDR5) faster than the AI bubble deflates or markets correct, then the future consumer compute players will be Chinese, not American, especially if they can ship kit at pre-COVID pricepoints.
Information has always been freely accessible to those who know how to search for it. Primary Education was partly about instilling those skills in the form of critical thinking, though its efficacy is varied and debatable. So to say the utility of college was information, is like saying the utility of a car is mobility: technically correct, but not remotely a robust descriptor.
No, the point of college was threefold: credentials (as a means of generating elites - and decreasingly valuable), socialization across perspectives (which is still the case today - it’s often one’s first exposure beyond their initial social spheres growing up, and where deeply held views are almost immediately challenged), and research. Through the exploration of those aspects, information is transmuted into knowledge and experience, neither of which can be solely obtained through access of information (only through its application).
Colleges have immense value at all ages and for all demographics. It’s why I’m so fervent a supporter of free higher education at public schools.
Except those don’t really fit, here, because the author is making a far more critical error in ascribing far too much to current human cognition. On the daily I see so-called “knowledge workers” failing to read basic signs, refusing to learn basic skills, and all too eager to cast off the slightest bit of critical thinking to a black box they can subscribe to - be it replacing curating a content library with streaming services and algorithms, or swapping a life of hard-won expertise for a swarm of chatbots and an API bucket. As someone with the uniquely privileged POV to be able to ingest vast sums of technical data but struggle with social data, I look at my fellow Americans and genuinely fret for what the next few decades hold for a cohort that seemingly cannot effectively communicate which direction they’re going but is all too content to hitch their accountability to an LLM they pay for.
In that sense, thinking has already become a hobby to the masses, in that it’s entirely optional to exist in current society at large. Autopay apps manage your bills, finance apps keep you on budget, fitness apps tell you to keep running, social media apps tell you who your friends (and enemies) are, video apps tell you what to watch, music apps tell you what to listen to, and cars increasingly tell you not just where to go but also to let them get there for you. I would argue that in that context, thinking is a critically endangered hobby we sorely need to sow new seeds for, lest we risk losing it entirely; AI does not seem keen to do that.
Now to be fair, so much of this is hyperspecialization knowledge overflowing into daily life and making existence a sort of cognitohazard in and of itself. We skip through hundreds of pages of legal boilerplate because we’re not lawyers, and then complain about all the rights we willingly signed away because of the volume of said agreements. Non-technical people engaging with modern computing are either addicts or miserable, unaware that this was both entirely optional and also inevitable in a populace that didn’t think for itself. Finance has become so hyperspecialized that it’s impossible for the layman to tell of something is good or bad, or even why the number went up or down on their portfolio in a given time period. LLM boosters say their tools will solve this complexity nightmare, yet the tools themselves grow increasingly complex just to eke out single-point gains on hyperspecific problems.
Which brings me to the OP again, their highly uncritical claims that AI will bring about a new revolution of thought itself, and that somehow this tool will both restore thought to an elevated pedestal while also making it nearly impossible to meter (at least on American currency; let’s not think too hard about how developing countries might be able to afford it). I don’t see any of that, but for the same reasons the OP feels it’s somehow inevitable. The only difference I can readily figure is our opinions of our fellow humans: I view us as in dire straits and able to do far better than we give ourselves credit for, while they view us as replaceable with servile digital labor for the better.
> The proposition adjusted the property tax rate, pegging it at 1% of the purchase price of the property.
That sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand why property taxes go down while home values go up, and why raising property taxes is so damn hard in so many states (it’s largely because of caps etched into law by Boomers in the 70s and 80s). It’s also why I have the strong opinions on the issue I hold today.
Tax displacement is a very real issue, but one that theoretically should be solved by a liquid property market where you can sell your home at FMV and downsize to another one you can afford. Americans, special creatures that we are, instead demanded we get the McMansions without the property tax valuations, while also deciding what housing gets built regardless of demand, while also keeping the distorted value of the home should we sell it for a retirement nest egg.
In other words: homeowners keep all the money, while paying decreasing to no taxes on it. This has been a significant contributor to the housing crisis of today, with shitbox properties in major cities selling for upwards of a million dollars but families pulling in not even a tenth of that in yearly income. The typical soundbite responses of “we need more housing” and “we need to reform or loosen regulations”, while technically correct, ignore the root incentive structure crafted back in the 70s with these sorts of inverse taxation schemes, and therefore leave the problem intact. We’d have to build so much housing, so quickly, that property values halve nationally for there to be any long-term fix to this problem, and nobody seems inclined to do this given the ponzi scheme we’ve discovered suburbia to be (just look at new developments in CA with dirt roads as an example of homeowners having to foot the bill and realizing it ain’t worth it given the thin density of suburbs).
And thus we arrive back at the beginning: we need to raise taxes on homes to reflect their high assessment values, which would displace existing homeowners who couldn’t afford said bill, which is leading to the same demographics as before demanding the same solutions as they enacted in the 70s and 80s: caps, limits, or shifting costs onto less-advantaged demographics (like renters via commercial real estate). As perverse as it sounds to most Americans, the actual solution is to finally let property taxes “float” with valuations in their entirety, no caps or cuts, and let the market sort it out. Will that lead to some folks becoming homeless? Yeah, and that’s a whole other ball of wax we’ve ignored dealing with precisely because we catered to homeowners as a political group, but that’s infinitely more solvable than trying to build our way out of a housing crisis engineered by lower taxes and controls on builds.
We gotta eat the pain up front to find a better collective tomorrow for everyone.
Build plugins for common doorbell or surveillance systems consumers use - Ring, Ubiquiti, Frigate, whatever - and have it look for official vehicles (cops, diplomat plates, government plates, etc). When detected, publish the data to an open database searchable by the general public that includes location, time, date, direction of travel, make, model, and occupants of vehicle.
After all, if this data is really not protected by privacy laws as the cops/Flock/Axon/etc claim, then obviously it’s in our best interest to keep such a database ourselves to track those who track us. We may not have the right of way or easements or budgets to build out a network like these corporate spooks, but an open community database could cover a wide swath pretty quickly.
Surely someone out there has the time and expertise willing to take the heat for such a project.
Right now one of them hosts the following:
* Jellyfin for my physical disc collection
* Ergo for an IRC server daemon
* A vibe-coded project that lets folks upload images and stick them to a canvas like stickers on a light pole (great for memes)
* Caddy as a reverse proxy
* Pocket-ID for passkey-auth
* LLDAP for crustier directory auth (like Jellyfin)
* FreshRSS for an RSS aggregator
* RSS-Bridge as a support
…and a smattering of in-progress projects. Honestly lamenting not grabbing a $5 Hetzner VPC when they were available so my public services could live out there, but I’m an edge case.
My advice is less to think about justifying it now, and more thinking “would I get $60/yr worth of enjoyment or utility from a VM in a real datacenter somewhere?” In that context, you’ll almost certainly get utility from that by year’s end - and if not, you’re only out the $60.
* H1B visas are work permits issued to foreign-born workers sponsored by a company to work in the USA. These visas are bound to a specific employer with limited ability to transfer elsewhere, and on their own have ZERO ability to convert to a Green Card
* Green Card is Legal Permanent Residency (LPR), the first real step towards Naturalization. It lets you live and work anywhere in the USA, provided you generally contribute more than you receive in benefits (though this is very fungible depending on political incentives). Obtaining a Green Card is incredibly hard to do outside of family, with employer sponsorship being one of the few other viable routes.
So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms. I suspect the goal is to discourage workers abroad from applying for H1Bs since employer green card sponsorship is off the table, but it won’t necessarily stop green cards via other routes (like marriage). It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
In other words, and assuming I’m understanding this messaging correctly (a big if), this is a nothingburger. It doesn’t stop H1B abuse, it doesn’t help American workers, and it punishes the handful of folks who deserve the Green Card conversion from their employers. It’s a packet of lies and misdirection meant to look bigger than it actually is.
This is one of those functions best handled at a national level and dispersed proportionally back to the states based on population relative to total registrations. It doesn’t have to mean the end of local or vanity plates (those could still persist with local DMVs functioning as federal tax collecting agents), but moving to a national or international scheme makes increasing sense.
This study would need to be repeated amongst cohorts, populations, and time periods where cannabis was legal and widely available to really drill down into definitive correlations or causations and remove the crime element, because of course folks engaged in the use of illicit substances are more likely to commit and/or be victimized by, violence.
The findings are interesting, but the wider context sullies their utility.
Most of my IRC users hate the persistent records of modern chat systems and their persistent “always-online” functional designs. They want to be able to log off on their terms and not have a session follow them around, which IRC respects. For those who want rich rendering for media, they can choose a client that does that rather than have it forced upon them by default in Discord or Slack.
Same deal with sharing images: why shoehorn it into IRC when we have copyparty right there? It’s faster, easier, and entirely ephemeral - just like IRC is configured on the server side.
The point isn’t a “do everything” software or platform so much as a “do what we need so we can go live life doing what we want” setup.