Read / Rethought
Gas Town & AI toolsets vs toysets
Most of us might not imagine how far vibe coding has progressed, and it’s just a beginning! We already witness emergence of vibe-coded advanced tools for vibe-coders. Have peek at this, even if you won’t use - it’s a long but fascinating read, full of self-depreciation and humour:
Gas Town is an industrialized coding factory manned by superintelligent robot chimps, and when they feel like it, they can wreck your shit in an instant. They will wreck the other chimps, the workstations, the customers. They’ll rip your face off if you aren’t already an experienced chimp-wrangler. So no. If you have any doubt whatsoever, then you can’t use it.
I think dev tooling revolution will be massively relevant to tech industry in long term, and other areas won’t surprise us for long time with leaps similar to recently witnessed, but time will tell.
Also, I hope that “art” a.k.a. AI-slop, image-generation, and other shenanigans which are shoveled by metric ton to market for general public use - will hopefully wear off their novelty-effect and be understood as waste of time, similar to 3D home cinema. Why would I invest my time in reading your grammatically-perfect email/post/story/whatever, if you haven’t invested your time creating it? Nota bene, this proto-blog and webpage is not tainted by AI-generated content.
Naturally, I admire usefulness of all new tools in my own, twisted way, with limited experimentation and remaining autonomous, as I never want to become dependent on products controlled by Californian broligarchs or other pedo muppets. Tim is predicting bleak scenario for AI-powered economy, with some deep-dive materials linked in his post. 1
Self-hosting
Last week I mentioned my quest for more space on homelab server, so I’m sharing notes from array re-creation process - proven ZFS recipes. Added value of this migration was setting encryption, and great small setup in my NixOS reaches for decryption key to another machine in my Tailnet, so system reboots don’t need any supervision or manual steps!
Death to Standard Keyboard
QWERTY keyboard layout should not die, it’s useful to have similar basic shape of the keyboard wherever we go, also - fastest typists are not necessarily using Workman/DVORAK/whatever-new-fancy-layout 2 3. My pet peeve is something else. It’s about how many other function keys are placed on our keyboards. Example of the worst case: not only our right hand is placed on some symbols rarely used by natural languages, but also the key responsible for corrections – backspace – is as far as practically possible from your pinky! Who thought this is a good idea? Who got complacent with it and not changed it for decades? Today I un-mapped my delete/backspace. Temporarily having its role placed as one of the functions of button which used to be CAPS LOCK (another WTF-atavism…), will report soon how this panned out, maybe pairing with short section with other unorthodox recommendations/recipes.