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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: January 27th, 2026

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  • Yep, I set mine up last weekend.

    Used a nice Racknex rackmount kit to put a Raspberry Pi with SDR in the rack, and a little LCD display on the front that cycles through the details of aircraft currently in range - so it also serves the important purpose of Blinkenlights.

    I’m fortunate to live close to two international airports (one small, one big) and under a reasonably busy flight corridor as well, so plenty of planes to spot - light aircraft, helicopters and military all the way up to A380s.



  • You can subnet logically with IPv4.

    If you go IPv6 on the internal network you ‘win’ not having NAT, and exposing all your intrrnal services to the net (which… just why?), but lose the ability to do redundant ISPs/failover/loadbalancing, policy based routing, VPNs… Unless you do IPv6 address translation. Which puts you back to “IPv4+NAT, except more complicated.”

    IPv6 inside the firewall is more or less entirely pointless.


  • I wouldn’t have an objection to paying them for that.

    I did object them to them trying to charge me to stream from my server to my TV in the same house without touching any of Plex’s infrastructure at all, because their license-check is too dumb to understand some of us use things like “subnets”. (I objected even more that their “support” teams are evidently staffed by obnoxious jerks trained only to say “give us money”.)

    Fortunately I found the switch to Jellyfin incredibly easy, and so far it’s actually been more reliable than Plex ever was.


  • I was contributing to Open Source almost certainly before you were born, so wind your neck in kid. But, even if we suppose you are right and the GPL somehow restricts the use of licensed works for AI training (although a quick refresh on the license shows no evidence that it does) - while GPL fanatics make the most noise, it is absolutely not the most popular open source license.

    GPL variants covers roughly 20% of the licensed work on Github. The vast majority of such work is permissive open-source licensed, with the MIT license covering almost 50% alone. That’s because the vast majority of open source contributors are not in fact wannabe Citizen Smiths, but rather people who want, without restriction, to contribute to the advancement of computing.


  • Have you ever read an open source license? They gave away those rights, voluntarily.

    If you have evidence that AI is being trained on world licensed to the contrary then by all means get exercised about those “workers” rights (right on, man,) but given the vast quantities of code released under permissive open source licenses, it’s not going to change anything.




  • That seems unlikely; trust me, there are services running behind Cloudflare tunnels that are doing more requests per second than whatever you’re hosting does in a year.

    The only times I’ve had performance problems with Cloudflare tunnels it’s been intermediate network kit that didn’t like IPv6 or didn’t like QUIC (or both). You can try disabling both in cloudflared to diagnose (at least, you used to be able to disable them/switch to HTTP/2+IPv4, it’s been a very long time since I’ve needed to so I’m just assuming it’s still an option.)


  • That’s an “advantage” of IPv6; your local IP addresses now belong to the ISP, so the router can’t do anything like policy based routing. If your device is using a Starlink IPv6 address, the only route to it is Starlink. If both ISPs are giving you a delegation, your devices need to get IPs on both networks and then it’s up to each device/OS to implement any policy you want, not the router.

    This is, of course, a massive pain in the arse. It breaks VPNs, policy based routing, and high-availability/failover, unless you do address translation at the router - but in that case, you might as well just use IPv4, since address translation is the great bear you’re using IPv6 to avoid. All for the highly dubious benefit of exposing all your internal infra directly to the Internet.

    IPv6 is great for public traffic, but way more trouble than it’s worth for internal networks.


  • Since imgur was blocked in the UK I was searching for an alternative way to occasuonally share photos on a Usenet group I’m in. (Text group, not binary, of course.)

    I ended up just settling on a Hugo static site. It’s not quite drag and drop, but close enough for me - I just drag the photos into a content directory, run a build script and push the repo - argo deploys it.

    Because it’s just plain old httpd serving static files, in a container, it’s about as safe/stable as I can make it.


  • I mean, I haven’t argued with an AI for 2.5 hours straight, because I know how to use them. And I don’t expect them to think for me, because I know they’re not capable of it.

    I was writing assembly language for embedded controllers where the memory is measured in bytes not megabytes, professionally, before half of you were born. I’ve developed preemptive multitasking OSes for 8 but microcontrollers, by hand, for money. These skills ceased to be particularly useful decades ago, but I didn’t sit down and sulk because optimising compilers and ludicrously cheap memory had ended my career, I moved with the times.

    Practically everyone who calls themselves a “programmer” has never had the training wheels taken off since the invention of managed runtimes, you don’t now get to complain about what is or is not proper programming. The actual software engineers, who understood that the code was always just a side effect of their real job - understanding and solving problems - just have a new, and really cool, tool to learn how to use. The ones who aren’t up to it will spend 2.5hrs arguing with their AI, and then go back to coding for a hobby. And that’s fine - but if you refuse to learn AI as a tool, you no longer have a career in this industry. Any more than I would’ve if I had refused to accept that memory is basically free now and compilers can write assembly better than me.


  • Warning, anecdote:

    I was unexpectedly stuck in Asia for the last month (because of the impact of the war), turning an in-person dev conference I was organising into an “in-person except for me” one at a few days notice.

    I needed a simple countdown timer/agenda display I could mix into the video with OBS; a simple requirement, so I tried a few from the standard package repos (apt, snap store, that kind of thing.)

    None of them worked the way I wanted or at all - one of them written in Python installed about 100 goddamned dependencies (because, Python,) and then crashed because, well, Python.

    So I gave up and asked my local hosted LLM model to write it for me in Rust. In less than 10 minutes I had exactly what I wanted, in a few hundred lines of Rust. And yeah, I did tidy it up and publish it to the snap store as well, because it’s neat and it might help someone else.

    Which is more secure? The couple of hundred lines of Rust written by my LLM, or the Python or node.js app that the developer pinky-promises was written entirely by human hand, and which downloads half the Internet as dependencies that I absolutely am not going to spend time auditing just to display a goddamned countdown clock in a terminal window?

    The solution to managing untrusted code isn’t asking developers for self-declared purity test results. It’s sandboxing, containers, static analysis… All the stuff that you are doing already with all the code/apps you download if you’re actually concerned. You are doing those things, right?




  • Personally, I run them on my own hardware, and am trying to learn to use and supervise them appropriately. The things they are good for they are amazing at. And yeah, they are also often mendacious and unreliable with the possibility of going rogue - but no more than any junior developer or intern. If you can’t manage an AI, you can’t manage hires either - which for a hobbyist is just fine of course, but if you’re a professional it’s not a good look.

    You either learn to ride the wave, or you let it drown you. Shaking your fists at the tsumani though is a sure fire route to involuntary early retirement.


  • You’re exactly right.

    I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.

    AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.




  • find . -name LICENSE.md -print

    There, arduous search complete.

    I thought it was well known/understood that the server component was how Joplin pays their wages, and thus being under a different license is hardly a big shock; it’s entirely optional, and the fact they’re still sharing the source seems like a good thing rather than bad.

    As for “they could just keep adding licenses!!!” Well, yeah, but so could any project. Apache could stick a proprietary license deep in a folder of httpd tomorrow and unless you were looking, you’d never know. Even a GPL project could incorporate a proprietary licensed component tomorrow provided it wasn’t linked into the binary/was a separate piece of software - like, say, the server component of Joplin. You just trust that they won’t, and/or properly check changes whenever you pull a new release like you were supposed to be doing anyway for security (hahaha, ok, no you weren’t,) or trust that if they did pull shenanigans it would be ‘news’ and you would hear about it.

    That Joplin is open about it, and they retain the original licenses of FOSS they have incorporated instead of deleting/hiding the original license is a good thing. I wish more did it.