@HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org

member since 4 Apr 2025 21:35

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c/technology@lemmy.world · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 6d ago

Don't Take the Black Pill (Text Adaptation) - Andrew Kelley

andrewkelley.me

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cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/35625610

cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/35625554

About programming and using computers as a liberating piece of magic, in a time that faces growing coercion and attempts to reduce freedoms by software and computing systems.

I’ll leave you with one final message, addressed to people of all ages, whether you are younger than me, a peer, or my elder.

We don’t have to take it lying down.

Next time you’re feeling alone, count your allies: VideoLAN Organization, Blender Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Linux Foundation, Signal Foundation, KDE e.V., the PostgreSQL Community, the Debian Community, and so, so many more.

Just look at how eager people were to come together, even from places as far away as Greece, for the inauguration of a conference with a manifesto as simple as “software should work”.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The battle against Coercionware is only beginning, and we find ourselves on the frontlines whether we like it or not, because we are the ones who make computers do what they do.

But we are not alone, and computers truly are magic. Do not mistake lost ground for lost hope. We can win this thing if we collectively choose to believe it and bet on it.

c/europe@feddit.org · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 9 Sep 2026

We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego

the Guardian We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego

c/technology@lemmy.world · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 6 Sep 2026

Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

dustycloud.org

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cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/35091193

About the limits of reviewing and understanding code:

Ka-Ping constructs a model voting machine, and decides to see how hard it would be to verify that we know it behaves correctly. To push that exploration to its furthest, Ka-Ping Yee and David Wagner try an interesting experiment:

David Wagner and I decided to insert three bugs into Pvote to see if the reviewers would find them. We inserted what we thought would be an “easy” bug, a “medium” bug, and a “hard bug” to find, and chose each bug individually in such a way that an insider could conceivably exploit the bug to influence the results of an election. […]

We decided to insert all of these bugs in a 100-line region of a single file, lines 11 to 109 of Navigator.py, and told the reviewers to look in this region. We did this both because the navigator was the most interesting in terms of the program logic and because we knew the reviewers would have limited time. The new version of the code that we gave the reviewers contained all three bugs, but we did not tell the reviewers how many bugs there were.

Yoshi Kohno, Mark Miller, and Dan Sandler participated as reviewers on the third day of the review. Dan was very familiar with Python and found the “easy” and “medium” bugs quickly, within about 70 minutes. Yoshi Kohno and Mark Miller found the “easy” bug after about four hours of reviewing. None of the reviewers found the “hard” bug.

The reviewers spent a total of about 20 reviewer-hours focused on the task of finding the bugs in this 100-line section of Navigator.py.

[…]

If some of the best programmers in the world struggle to find bugs they even know must be there within a 100 line program, there is simply no hope for humans to review the volume of output from LLMs.

And so there is only one thing to do: don’t bother. At each step, remove yourself. You tell yourself you won’t, but you do. You give in to the chute and the shape of the vibe tunnel, and down you go.

c/europe@feddit.org · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 6 Sep 2026

Oil Lobbyists, Anti-Abortion Groups, and Tech Giants Flock to Reform Conference

DeSmog Oil Lobbyists, Anti-Abortion Groups, and Tech Giants Flock to Reform Conference

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cross-posted from: piefed.social/…/oil-lobbyists-anti-abortion-group…

Nigel Farage’s party is welcoming polluting interests and radical pressure groups to its annual gathering.

Corporate titans including Google, Meta, and TikTok will be appearing at Reform UK’s annual conference this week, rubbing shoulders with fossil fuel interests, far-right politicians, and Christian rights groups.

The conference, designed to showcase the party’s policies and politicians, will be attended by figures from some of the world’s biggest tech companies – several of which have donated to funds and projects associated with U.S. President Donald Trump.

They will be joined by the likes of Fuels Industry UK, a trade group for the oil sector which counts BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil among its six members. Reform, whose senior figures frequently deny climate science, advocates for the dramatic expansion of fossil fuel production in the UK.

It’s no wonder Reform is slumping to third in the polls

c/technology@lemmy.world · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 4 Sep 2026

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cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/50320770

Temporarily closing residential streets to allow kids to play and socialise safely outside has proved beneficial for both children and adults.

c/europe@feddit.org · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 27 Aug 2026

Porto introduces free public transport for all city residents

eutoday.net

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cross-posted from: ani.social/post/35731509

cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/41596092

The measure came into force on 10 July 2026

[…] the annual financial requirement is likely to be between €20 million and €25 million.

[…]

The policy is intended to encourage more people to leave their cars at home and use public transport for journeys within Porto and the surrounding urban region.

[Mayor] Duarte has cautioned that abolishing fares will not, by itself, resolve Porto’s congestion problems. He described the programme as part of a broader mobility strategy that must also include faster services, better connections, increased capacity and more reliable journey times.

Porto currently has about 16 kilometres of dedicated bus lanes. The municipality plans to increase this to approximately 22 kilometres by the end of 2026, giving buses greater priority over private vehicles on some of the city’s busiest routes.

The mayor said public transport would need to become more convenient and dependable than travelling by car before a substantial change in daily habits could be expected. The municipality’s objective is for public transport to become the main means of travelling around Porto, with private cars taking a secondary role.

The scheme is unusual because Porto is paying for its residents to travel across the entire metropolitan network rather than offering free journeys only inside the municipality.

The Porto Metropolitan Area comprises 17 municipalities, each of which remains responsible for its own spending decisions. […]

c/europe@feddit.org · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 27 Aug 2026

Japan tried to build an operating system for the entire world, then the US government intervened

XDA Japan tried to build an operating system for the entire world, then the US government intervened

c/technology@lemmy.world · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 19 Aug 2026

The AI Bubble Warning Just Came From Europe’s Central Bank

gadget review the ai bubble warning just came from europe’s central bank

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Passive investing turned everyone into a tech investor without anyone asking permission. That’s the uncomfortable reality your pension statement won’t spell out. Concentration risk isn’t theoretical — it’s sitting inside the funds you forgot you owned, quietly indexed to the same seven companies the ECB just flagged as the core of a potential AI Infrastructure financial stability problem.

c/technology@lemmy.world · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 14 Aug 2026

The Rust programming language project is adopting an LLM policy

blog.rust-lang.org

c/technology@lemmy.world · HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org · 14 Aug 2026

AI: Considerations for people who make decisions (Bert Hubert)

berthub.eu

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There is a company called CompuGroup Medical which is all-in on “AI” (LLM) and with a CEO funding far-right propaganda portals (Nius).

on OpenAI agent hacks Australia's Medicare in world's first known AI breach of government body in c/technology@lemmy.world · 24m ago
Why? For example, XING just got sold and with it all personal information. This is why they didn’t.

on ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked, Discord says (2025) in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10h ago
Oh, the solution is pretty easy: Ban social media access for this vulnerable group! If it works with kids, it should work with other endangered members of society, too! Won’t it?

on Social media addiction affecting boomers, BBC hears in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11h ago
Translation: We will close plants, and we have found something to blame: Rising costs of fossil fuels!

on Mercedes official warns of German plant closures if costs do not fall in c/europe@feddit.org · 2d ago
Here Andrew Kelley’s YouTube talk version of the post: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZwpH5lCD4

on Don't Take the Black Pill (Text Adaptation) - Andrew Kelley in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
Here you go:

geminiprotocol.net

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini

(This protocol does not have to do anything with Google’s Gemini thing. It was created and named a bit earlier!)

on ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6d ago
So, their fix for spying is gaslighting?

on LG responds to TV spying allegations in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Sep 2026
I don’t want to be funny, but that’s not mutually exclusive.

on Microsoft Patches a Record 974 Security Flaws in Biggest Update Ever in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Sep 2026
1. Given known empirical numbers of bugs per per one thousand lines of code (which is between a few and about 25) … and the size of Microsoft products, how many bugs do they probably have in total?
2. Given how “productive” LLMs are at adding lines of code, how many new bugs are there likely added per month?
on Microsoft Patches a Record 974 Security Flaws in Biggest Update Ever in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Sep 2026
Please send the representants this:

berthub.eu/articles/…/ai-for-decision-makers/

on Finnish government AI plan puts thousands of public sector jobs at risk - Nordic government estimates huge cost savings and productivity gains through public sector AI plan in c/europe@feddit.org · 15 Sep 2026
They can’t go public.

I think that rising interest rates (e.g. by the ECB) because of more expensive oil and empty national reserves wouldn’t make that easier.

on Sam Altman says OpenAI will not go public this year as AI fears grow in c/technology@lemmy.world · 14 Sep 2026
The “extinction warning” was marketing.

Funny that it works well to distract from the real extinction we are facing, an absolutely serious, scientifically proven threath to all of humanity: Accelerated climate change if we do not get away now from fossil fuels. A world with 3 ° C warming, which is the path we are on, will not be survivable for technical civilizations. And time is running out. A problem to which AI data centers are only contributing to.

on EU tech chief backs global AI rules in wake of extinction warning in c/europe@feddit.org · 13 Sep 2026
Let’s make one thing clear: The “extinction warning” was marketing.

Funny that it works well to distract from the real extinction we are facing, an absolutely serious, scientifically proven threath to all of humanity: Accelerated climate change if we do not get away now from fossil fuels. A world with 3 ° C warming, which is the path we are on, will not be survivable for technical civilizations. And time is running out. A problem to which AI data centers are only contributing to.

on EU tech chief backs global AI rules in wake of extinction warning in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
Even more gain! Do you know what prozac does cost? Its family will need to pay the pharmacy bills if it doesn’t want their loved one ending up homeless.

on I'm not trying to emulate my capitalist landlord, but how can I impose rent on the spider that seems to have moved in to my network rack? 🕷️🕸️ in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 12 Sep 2026
Indoctrinate the spider that it will catch many more bugs by using AI tools, and then let it pay.

on I'm not trying to emulate my capitalist landlord, but how can I impose rent on the spider that seems to have moved in to my network rack? 🕷️🕸️ in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 12 Sep 2026
In a way, LLMs are kind of strange medium for texts, as are books. Books are a medium for written speech; they transport words written by intelligent beings. Nobody who understands books would claim that books themselves are intelligent. Or that a photograph of a persons robs them of their soul.

But what is characteristic of LLMs is that it disowns the intelligent content from its creators. This is what makes coorporations salivate avout money. The theft is built-in and foundational how this technology works. Compare to an online encyclopedia.

on AI Didn't Steal the Mathematician's Work, Sam Altman Did in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
And by-golly are they pushing AI.

What, you mean this fantastic enthusiasm isn’t entirely organic?

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
Another thing is I think one can analyze binaries (decompiled or not) to extract control structures in machine code or byte code to control flow graphs. Using some classical pattern matching, that should not be too difficult because the number of ways compilers transform code like loops are limited. Allowing some degree of fuzziness, I’d often expect these to be very characteristic for the original source of a code piece. That source might often be FOSS code; often an old, vendored version not updated in years.

One could then use standard graph search/fuzzy matching algorithms and graph databases in order to find out which GPL’d open-source code e.g. some proprietary product has included. This would give away potentially vulnerable versions. And it would not necessarily need a lot of computing resources.

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
I think it was Edward Snowden who used the description “turnkey dictatorship” for the systems that were built.

That seemed odd in 2013. Now, it is scarily prescient.

on Three reasons Europe learned to distrust Big Tech before America did in c/europe@feddit.org · 12 Sep 2026
Eh, I now have witnessed two cases where I asked a software team lead of a project I was working for for a precise interface or API for a planned function and they looked at me as if I had talked about going on a giraffe ride with a bunch of alien Martian schoolkids.

(And subsystem interfaces is really a subject I was taught in 10th grade by a math professor who himself had been a student of Niklaus Wirth. Maybe if you stand on the shoulders of giants, you should not be pissing on them…)

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all.

This tool is however not neutral but has a lot of steering and bias built in. Like an advisor who optimizes heavily for personal gain. For example, it constantly tells you that it knows it all and also that your ideas are the best thing since sliced bread. A lot of stuff around them is engineered to increase engagement and make you dependent on them. Precisely like social media which is full of “brain hacks” - no, this isn’t hyperbole, this is the name that engineers at Facebook gave to their creations. As social media, commercial LLMs are “addictive by design”.

Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn’t ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code.

Stack Overflow is a really good example. I am programming over 40 years, since 35 years as hired programmer, since 25 years on PhD level and I used Stack Overflow a lot to find interesting new angles on issues with seemingly obvious answers. Like “what is the most portable, clearest way to efficiently serialize message data in a C struct, given that type punning is only defined for some compilers and can lead to undefined behaviour”.

Stack overflow has typically various opinionated commented answers here, which gives you different angles and you can decide what is best in your case. This is crucial since a lot - one could say, almost all - of software engineering is about trade-offs.

ChatGPT is the know-all of stack overflow responders: It gives you a single smart-allecky answer and is purposefully built so it tries to take decisions out of your hands. It currently also makes a ton of suggestions of which some have a point, some might apply in other cases but not yours, and some are bullshit. If you let it run free you will easily get ten times more code than needed. And ten times more code means ten times more bugs - this is well-established.

So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it’s results blindly is silly and dangerous.

The thing is that commercial LLMs in practice are engineered to short-circuit your judgment and decision-making.

There’s a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source.

First: These companies will siphon off open source code anyway, be it legal or not. That is outside of the influence of single open source developers or projects. Maybe a matter of high courts and civil society lawsuits to decide. And these will have to fight an uphill battle against the current political climate around favouring large companies in general and that kind of exploitative AI in particular.

But what projects do have influence over is the quality of their code base and what ingresses into it.

Further, it is to expected that the quality of commercial code bases continues to degrade at a rapid pace and also that companies will depend even more on open source infrastructure and libraries - and FOSS developers training the LLMs they use on anything that is new. Because the average commercial project or github project just will turn to shit. Companies will soon wistfully remember old times where Sturgeon’s law was a thing and when only 90% of all public code was shit, and not 99.999% . (Congratulations to that future five nines!).

There is an asymmetry between open source code and proprietary software: Open source code is protected by copyright law. Which GenAI vendor companies practically do ignore. Proprietary software is usually protected by copyright law, and also obfuscation by it being binary or behind server APIs. Currently, this works in favour of companies: They get to use GPL-proteced public code, but are not exposing their own, uh, creations. (And of course, LLM vendors will make the solemn pinky promise that they never ever will publish commercial code their customers are working on as LLM output (ask top-notch mathematicians how that worked out).)

But will this stay like this? Because another issue is that the same methods can be used to decompile binary code, and LLMs can also be trained on decompiled proprietary code. Which will, for example, make its many hidden security issues much more acute.

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026
The fact that it isn’t perfect is the grey.

And the fact how it is used in practice, actually, in reality, is the very dark grey that some people call “black” for better clarity. The fact that you can use a large butchers knife for practical things does not mean that entering a primary school with one is the right thing. What are the actual intentions for grabbing that tool?

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026
There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.

I am not talking about the Linux kernel or the Rust project - they have stabdards way above average commercial projects - but generally “using ai” in practice means to use it for code generation. Then, programmers are expected to review the output but are not given extra time for it. This creates an extremely slippery slope leading to mostly unsupervised code creation. Also because reading and understanding buggy third party code means more effort than writing new code.

Then there is the idea to get rid of the bugs by “debugging”, but debugging is frankly not a software engineering strategy, because you can always just recognize a fraction of the bugs that your process created in the first place. Debugging is also more expensive tha writing good code.

Then, what makes the process between product managers and software developers very often a bit friction-loaded is that good developers always want to have clear specifications what they are supposed to build.

LLM code generation largely replaces clear specifications with plausible assumptions. That appears to make the process fast, but the result is often wrong. At times obviously wrong, and at times subtly and catastrophically wrong.

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026
We have lots of tools to put metrics on that, and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics.

You mean more lines of code?

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026
Ron Popeil

“Popeil received the Ig Nobel Prize in Consumer Engineering in 1993.”

For sure.

on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026
you might genuinely wonder why the CEO of a company is openly admitting the shit his company makes is so dangerous.

Exactly this. If it would not be an advantage for the company, they absolutely would hide it. Example: The Volkswagen Diesel emissions scandal (which has surely killed way more than 10,000 people).

on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@piefed.social · 10 Sep 2026
They are simply not in the same league as Einstein, Oppenheimer and Russel.

on ‘The People Building AI Earnestly Believe That It Could Kill Us All’: Anthropic Researcher Quits Dramatically in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026
@bekkaboo@girlcock.club Linux itself is heavily using AI models.

For security analysis and uncovering bugs.

on GrapheneOS defends use of AI for coding in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Sep 2026
Heat waves are a problem, no doubt, but you don’t solve it only thinking to big cities, like for pollution.

No, like the OP The Guardian article, I was talking about larger cities which have decent public transport. They are also hotter than their surroundings which makes relief more important.

Though specifically ozone is also problem in suburbia; it is formed there during the day by photochemical smog, but decomposes way slower than in the direct city areas.

on We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego in c/europe@feddit.org · 9 Sep 2026
Works already fine for cities like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen and so on. Driving a ptivate car for transportation is for max comfort, not for need.

And also, heat waves are catastrophic emergencies which kill thousands of people. Wishes for mere comfort cannot have priority then.

Reasonable, few exceptions for really important things - I have no problem with that. But getting some bread rolls from a shop 1 kilometer away? Leave your Benz. Take the bike.

on We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego in c/europe@feddit.org · 9 Sep 2026
So who’s paying for the lost wages and companies’ income?

I’d suggest fossil oil and gas companies. The causal link was clearly shown by science, and everyone is liable for damages he or she causes. Including companies. Why should it be different this time?

on We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego in c/europe@feddit.org · 9 Sep 2026
We also need policies that ban all ICE cars - including Diesel cars - except emergency vehicles during and just before heat waves. They cause photochemical smog, which contains ozone, a highly toxic gas which in heat waves is deadly for people with pulmonary problems.

on We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego in c/europe@feddit.org · 9 Sep 2026
About Phoenix:

Landlords are required by law to maintain a safe indoor temperature (28C/82F or lower), and companies that contract with the city must implement heat safety plans to keep workers healthy and comfortable.

We must have that law in Europe. Now.

on We’re the mayors of Paris, Milan and Phoenix. The heat crisis has us all facing the same question | Emmanuel Grégoire, Giuseppe Sala and Kate Gallego in c/europe@feddit.org · 9 Sep 2026
There is also Knoppix, designed for rescue purposes.

on Microsoft announces Project Zenith, a clutter-free Windows experience meant to entice developers - Engadget in c/technology@lemmy.world · 8 Sep 2026
Like for example selecting Linux distro, downloading it and saving on an USB.

Using an USB thing is the somewhat decadent newfangled way to do things. The more classy way was to download the whole distro to an 1.44 MB floppy drive. \installation was by dd … of=/dev/fd0. Yeah, it required 16 megabytes of RAM. It was possible to boot it on an 386 PC. Though kernel compiles were a bit lengthy.

on Microsoft announces Project Zenith, a clutter-free Windows experience meant to entice developers - Engadget in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
64GB of RAM to use it.

Does that mean it does not run on my beloved Thinkpad X220 with 4GB?

Looks like I am stuck with running Debian 13 on it.

Fun fact, at $currentwork there are two true believers in AI and somehow they managed to procure me a laptop for home office which weights in roughly 9 kilograms - a bit more than six times as heavy as my 12 year old X220. Must be the battery which is needed to power the NVidia graphics card.

on Microsoft announces Project Zenith, a clutter-free Windows experience meant to entice developers - Engadget in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
As far as I know I’m the only person who uses the term “vibe bobsled” and, well, I doubt it’s a term that’s particularly likely to catch on, but I find it personally useful.

Bobsledding, if you are unaware, is a particularly strange and interesting sport. It’s a lot of fun, but you don’t have a lot of agency in it. You sit in a bobsled, you go down an icy track, and really, there is only one way to go.

[…]

The vehicle is the LLM, you are the passenger. And I think the amount of agency people have over their journey is greatly reduced from what they feel like it is. More than just a slippery slope, it is a pre-crafted journey.

At the top of the chute, people tell themselves they’re going to use these tools as a kind of fancy autocomplete. As they descend, they say they’ll spin up some agents to explore ideas, but they’ll write the code themselves. Next their agents are generating the code for them, but don’t worry, but they’ll review all the output. Soon they’re plummeting downward and well, they don’t actually review the code being spat out much anymore, but they trust the agents, heck maybe the agents are actually better coders than they are they say. And where does it go from there? From “I don’t even code anymore” to “I don’t even prompt anymore”?

At every stage of the process, the coder in question removes themselves from the process of producing code, and gives in towards a faith-based initiative of code production, that the LLM knows and does a good job of what it’s doing. But what is the source of gravity pulling the sled along this icy chute?

It’s simple. Generation is not the slow part of coding. Theory-building and review are. And plausible-enough things are extremely hard to debug and understand. But the machines are so fast at producing things. If you are going to review their work, you aren’t really taking advantage of their most powerful property, which is speed. But theory-building and review are also the programmer’s most important role.

on Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled -- Dustycloud Brainstorms in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
Maybe, but wholesale prices are still more expensive in Germany.

Yeah, I already said that households pay higher prices than companies.

And: Are you saying that nuclear power is cheaper than other sources? really?

on German ministry mulls ramping up coal-fired plants to cut energy costs in c/europe@feddit.org · 2 Sep 2026
Energy taxes are higher in Germany too

For households, yes.

Not for companies - they profit far more from the cheap renewables.

Especially companies which need a lot of electricity.

on German ministry mulls ramping up coal-fired plants to cut energy costs in c/europe@feddit.org · 2 Sep 2026
Lowering energy costs would mean more renewable power plants because they are cheaper. Fossil power should be merely backup for intervals where there is not enough wind, solar, battery, and hydropower.

on German ministry mulls ramping up coal-fired plants to cut energy costs in c/europe@feddit.org · 2 Sep 2026
Thankfully, it takes still zero cloud services to make my breakfast, ride my bike, and open my door.

And you can bet on that I’ll keep it that way.

on It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell · Bit Nebula in c/technology@lemmy.world · 1 Sep 2026
I mean, has this man ever told a single lie?

on Trump says Russia is 'not going to attack' NATO territory in c/europe@feddit.org · 28 Aug 2026
i don’t like non-standard software for use-cases where existing software can already do the job well.

Well, then there the normal web is for you, which certainly does its job well to flood you with ads and track you at every step.

on current status of the web in c/technology@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026
if the protocol allows data transfer, then it also allows distribution of ads.

You do not know what you are talking about.

Ads are almost never displayed by choice of the reader. People have limited resources of attention, they know attention is precious, and they are not fond of things leeching it.

To see an ad in Geminispace, you would need to deliberately open a page with an ad. This is by implementation. There are no embedded ads. There is also no support for tracking in the Gemini protocol, and no JavaScript and such. You don’t need ad-infested libraries, the Gemini space is not centralized so that big corporations can’t inject ads into it, and running a Gemini server is so cheap that you don’t need ads to pay it - costing a few dozens Euro cents per month, if you count the cost of a Raspberry Pi B and perhaps 9 kWh of electricity per year.

But to make it more concrete and practical:

Here is a Gemini-to-HTTP Gateway which shows a page which lists, in section 2.2.1, Gemini aggregators. As an entry point to geminispace:

portal.mozz.us/gemini/…/faq-section-2.gmi

You can start there and search.

Gemini has maybe ten thousand pages.

Now, show me a single Gemini page with an ad.

on current status of the web in c/technology@lemmy.world · 28 Aug 2026
so i need to download a custom client or a browser plug-in, and i don’t like it.

The slight technical ceremony is, a bit tongue-in-cheek, needed to keep the umwashed masses away.

And the technical and media limitations are - and here I am totally serious - needed to keep boundless greedy corporarions away which sooner or later destroy every living or creative thing they touch.

on current status of the web in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
An important point is that advertising, tracking, all the junk which the OP link demonstrates, is technically not possible in the gemini protocol. It is designed to be minimal and serve text and single media files.

The gemini client is not a site-specific app, but a very lightweight browser for this protocol. All available clients are free and libre open source programs.

on current status of the web in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
An auto-playing video that automatically goes full screen, loudly advertising hemorrhoid medication.

And then an ad that covers the screen so that controls are not visible, and follows on scrolling.

Also, it should mention that my browser is too old.

on current status of the web in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
That reminds me in the Apple II and its manual. An open system with the assembly code for the BIOS printed in the handbook.

on An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
Interestingly, there is a “small web” or “frugal” tech alternative which goes back to the basics:

geminiprotocol.net

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini

With a client/browser like Amfora or Rosy Crow, this “small web” is very pleasant to read! (And easy to set up an own server on a Raspberry Pi).

(Note: It’s not related in any manner to the Google AI stuff.)

on current status of the web in c/technology@lemmy.world · 27 Aug 2026
sure nuclear WAS fine, french power plants are getting old, can’t handle oncoming increasing heatwaves and regularly have major accidents.

Plus: Building nuclear power plants requires huge amounts of concrete. And making huge amounts of concrete requires extremely huge carbon emissions.

on France’s nuclear fleet gives it one of the world’s lowest-carbon electricity grids in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Aug 2026