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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I’ll admit, as neat as this is, I’m a little unclear on the use case? Are there really situations where it’s easier to get a command prompt than it is to open a webpage?

    The CLI side I can see more use for since that does expose a lot of actions to bash scripting, which could be neat. But on the whole I can’t say I’ve ever really found myself thinking “Man, I really wish I had a UI for managing Radarr, a program that already includes a really good UI.”

    I know it’s shitty to hate on something just because you’re not the target for it. That’s not my intent, it’s more that I’m just fascinated by the question of how anyone has a burning need for this? It feels like there must be something I’m missing here.



  • Better to say that Google claim they want to use private nuclear reactors because that will allay any fears about the climate impact of their products. In reality the SMRs they’re purporting to invest in basically don’t exist outside of a pipe dream. They’re a less viable product than genAI itself. But just like the supposed magical “good” version of genAI, Google can claim that SMRs are always just around the corner, and that will mean that they’re doing something about the problem.


  • I think it’s mischaracterising the argument against AI to boil it down to “AI is useless” (and I say that as much as a criticism of those who are critical of genAI as I do of those who want to defend it; far too many people express the argument reductively as “AI is useless” when that’s not exactly what’s really being meant).

    The problem is not that genAI is never useful for anything. It is sometimes useful for some things. The problem is that being sometimes useful for some things does not remotely justify what the technology costs. I mean that both on the macro scale - untold climate damage, vast amounts of wasted resources - and on the micro scale; OpenAI alone loses $2.35 for every $1.00 they make.

    That is fundamentally unsustainable. If you like genAI for whatever use cases you’ve found for it, and you really don’t care about the climate toll and other externalities, then you can look forward to paying upwards of $50-$100 a month to actually use it, once we’re out of the “Give it to ‘em cheap/free to get’ em hooked” phase, because that’s what it’ll take to make these models profitable. In fact that’s kind of a lowball estimate.

    I know plenty of people who find this tech occasionally useful as a way of searching for the answer to a question or producing a small snippet of code, but I can’t imagine anyone who finds those uses so compelling that they’d throw “Canadian cell phone contract” levels of money at it.





  • The reason major businesses haven’t bothered using distributed blockchains for auditing is because they fundamentally do not actually help in any way with auditing.

    At the end of the day, the blockchain is just a ledger. At some point a person has to enter the information into that ledger.

    Now, hear me out here, because this is going to be some totally out there craziness that is going to blow your mind… What happens if that person lies?

    Like, you’ve built your huge, complicated system to track every banana you buy from the farm to the grocery store… But what happens if the shipper just sends you a different crate of bananas with the wrong label on them? How does your system solve that? What happens if the company growing your bananas claims to use only ethical practices but in reality their workers are effectively slaves? How does a blockchain help fix that?

    The data in a system is only as good as your ability to verify it. Verifying the integrity of the data within systems was largely a solved problem long before distributed blockchains came along, and was rarely if ever the primary avenue for fraud. It’s the human components of these systems where fraud can most easily occur. And distributed blockchains do absolutely nothing to solve that.



  • In this particular case, I’m really not sure it’s a loophole.

    Antitrust laws exist to constrain companies so large and powerful that they have become, or are becoming monopolistic forces

    What Twitter successfully proved to the EU court is that Musk’s management of the company has been so spectacularly incompetent that Twitter/X no longer has enough reach or cultural relevance to be in any danger of being a monopoly.

    This is, objectively speaking, a serious L for Twitter. They just proved to a court that they’re no longer even close to being the best place to spend your advertising dollars. The major spenders will take note.


  • Please don’t use Portainer.

    • It kidnaps your compose files and stores them all in its own grubby little lair
    • It makes it basically impossible to interact with docker from the command line once it has its claws into your setup
    • It treats console output - like error messages - as an annoyance, showing a brief snippet on the screen for 0.3 seconds before throwing the whole message in the shredder.

    If you want a GUI, Dockge is fantastic. It plays nice with your existing setup, it does a much better job of actually helping out when you’ve screwed up your compose file, it converts run commands to compose files for you, and it gets the fuck out of the way when you decide to ignore it and use the command line anyway, because it respects your choices and understands that it’s here to help your workflow, not to direct your workflow.

    Edit to add: A great partner for Dockge is Dozzle, which gives you a nice unified view for logs and performance data for your stacks.

    I also want to note that both Dockge and Dozzle are primarily designed for homelab environments and home users. If we’re talking professional, large scale usage, especially docker swarms and the like, you really need to get comfortable with the CLI. If you absolutely must have a GUI in an environment like that, Portainer is your only option, but it’s still not one I can recommend.