LibreOffice, because it is local. If I want to collaborate, I’ll share the file in whatever way is most convenient for the other parties. Since most people I collaborate prefer editing locally, this works out quite well.

If any of those end up interacting with me, or I otherwise see them on my timeline, they’ll get treated appropriately: reported, blocked, or in extreme cases, served garbage interactions to. Serving garbage to 500+ bots is laughably easy. Every day I have over 5 million requests from various AI scrapers, from thousands of unique IP addresses, and I serve them garbage. It doesn’t make a blip on my tiny VPS: in just the past 24 hours, I served 5.2M requests from AI scrapers, from ~2100 unique IP addresses, using 60Mb memory and a mere 2.5 hours of CPU time. I can do that on a potato.

But first: they have to interact with me. As I am on a single-user instance, chances are, by the time any bot would get to try and spam me, a bigger server already had them reported and blocked (and I periodically review blocks from larger instances I trust, so there’s a good chance I’d block most bots before they have a chance of interacting with me).

This is not a fight bots can win.

Personally, I do not have any automatism to detect LLMs larping as people. But I do review accounts that follow or interact with mine, and if I find any that are bots, I’ll enact counter measures. That may involve reporting them to their server admin (most instances don’t take kindly to such bots), blocking their entire instance, or in extreme cases, start serving them garbage interactions.

Most GenAI was trained on material they had no right to train on (including plenty of mine). So I’m doing my small part, and serving known AI agents an infinite maze of garbage. They can fuck right off.

Now, if we’re talking about real AI, that isn’t just a server park of disguised markov chains in a trenchcoat, neural networks that weren’t trained on stolen data, that’s a whole different story.

Our twins jumping on my back. Unlike an alarm, I can’t turn them off and go back to sleep.

Invent a time machine. Go back in time. Study.

Failing that, learn from your mistakes, and next time… well… study.

Lie to myself, and chug another cup of coffee.

In our kids’ elementary school, the rule at the start of year was that kids tell the teacher they have to go, then they simply go. Notifying the teacher is mandatory, 'cos they are responsible for the kids, they need to know where they are.

This was slightly changed since, because of bullies. While the vast majority of kids can go to the bathroom whenever they want, bullies don’t: they can only go alone, or supervised. So if there’s anyone else out, from any class, they have to wait. If it is urgent, a teacher or another adult will go with them, and stand by the door, close enough to intervene if need be.

My bank app does not function under Graphene, because my bank is doing anything in its power to force using a stock Android. I have friends, who use the same bank, and while the bank app works under Graphene from time to time, it is broken often enough to render it unusable.

But it doesn’t matter, because Graphene does not support my phone anyway. As I wrote: most alternative operating systems for phones support only a very limited set of phones. Mine’s not one of them.

I did that, it did not make my phone experience any better.

On desktop: Linux since late 1996. It is the only operating system that I can perfectly tune to adhere to my - often weird - ideas, and can run all the software I need. I’m a developer, mostly working on free and open source software, so Linux is right there to assist me with that. When I play games, I play them through Wine/Proton, have been since I started gaming on Linux some two decades ago. If a game does not work under Wine/Proton, that’s simply not a game I will be playing.

For portable gaming, I have a Steam Deck. Surprisingly, that also runs Linux.

My phone is running stock Android, and I hate it, because the way I function, and how Android imagines I would are not compatible, and the system does not let me bend it to my will, there isn’t enough flexibility built in. Like… I can’t uninstall a bunch of applications I’m never going to use, because my phone came preinstalled with it, and they’re not removable, unless I jailbreak it. Unfortunately, I can’t jailbreak it, because then my bank’s application would stop working. Which would be fine, since I don’t do banking on the phone. Except the application is required for mandatory 2FA. FML.

Thankfully, I can go days without touching my phone, so I can live with it being a piece of crap.

(The rest of my family is also on Linux: both parents, wife, and eventually the kids too.)

I use Rust mostly because I am comfortable working with it. It hits a sweet spot of often letting me write in a functional style, at often zero or very low cost. It has a lot of high quality libraries, for almost any purpose. And the language itself comes with great things too. Traits, Option, and Result are all things I miss when working in other languages like Go.

It’s also a memory safe language that is also fast, approachable, and has a ton of good documentation. What’s not to like?

Anything and everything, really.

I wrote an idle inhibitor in Rust, a GUI WiFi connection manager for my wife, an API client for WriteFreely, I contributed to a Wayland compositor (niri), wrote a library & CLI tools to talk to Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards. I wrote the frontend of my personal search engine in Rust too.

But I also built a Tauri application where the backend and the frontend were written in Rust too. No HTML or JavaScript in sight, not in the sources at least.

Professionally, the answer’s the same: if I am allowed to write it in Rust, I will write it in Rust, whether it is a low-level library that talks with hardware, a GUI application, or some web related thingy, or anything inbetween.

If I’m working for someone else (company or otherwise), I’ll write comments and docs in whatever language I can speak that they want me to (which pretty much means I write comments in English, because I rarely work for Hungarian companies nowadays, and even the ones I did work for preferred English, and these are the only two human languages I can write :().

When working on my own projects, it is always English, because Hungarian doesn’t have good translations for many of the technical terms, so half my comments would be English borrowed words anyway. Might aswell write the rest in English too. Also makes it easier for others to chime in, because there are a whole lot more people speaking English than Hungarian.

It was harder in the beginning, when my command of the English language was far worse, but even then, half-Hungarian/Half-English comments just looked weird, and more jarring than full English, even if that English was kinda bad.

Possibly. But if you - say - use a programming language that allows unicode identifiers, you can encode such emojis into the code, and if the model strips them out, they’ll get absolute garbage to train on.

( ͜ₒ ㅅ ͜ ₒ)ლ(´ڡ`ლ)

I think that comes pretty close. Seeing as LLMs seem to avoid the topic of sex and female presenting nipples, I doubt they’d be able to recognise this picture, and thus, it might be a decent way to poison their training set. Sex talk and cursing should also drive a scraper away quickly, but… horny emoji art? That might just get through and poison the training set.

At least if I understood the question correctly, and the goal is to scew with an ML trying to scrape and learn.

IT years are similar to dog years, an IT year is multiple normal human years, so 14 IT years is certainly IT decades.

algernon nods sagely

Sadly, that’s not code Linus wrote. Nor one he merged. (It’s from git, copied from rsync, committed by Junio)

There are no bugs. Just happy little accidental features.

It’s about 5 times longer than previous releases were maintained for, and is an experiment. If there’s a need for a longer term support branch, there will be one. It’s pointless to start maintaining an 5+ year branch with 0 users and a handful of volunteers, none of whom are paid for doing the maintenance.

So yes, in that context, 15 months is long.