I don’t feel comfortable telling anyone to go into software engineering right now. I think the future is really uncertain. That said, I’m also not convinced this is a bad time.

The need for software engineering isn’t going away. LLMs are actually not very good at thinking and solving problems at a high level, so we still need people for that. LLMs are more of a performance multiplier than a replacement for human software engineers.

That does mean that fewer engineers will be needed to do the same work. But also, I think there’s a chance it’s a Jevons Paradox situation, and maybe if the cost of software drops we’ll see even more demand for it - like how we found tons of new uses for electricity when prices dropped. Maybe we’re entering a golden age of bespoke software. Unclear.

No one should gerrymander.

I think there would be a lot of support for passing laws requiring specific non-partisan or bi-partisan redistricting though. There are a bunch of states with systems in place like independent commissions that can prevent the worst abuses. I think preventing the worst abuses can only really help the Democrats.

Now, what we could and should ask for is for every democractic legislature to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I’m pretty sure we have enough states now to make this happen.

This is pretty off-base for what OP is asking about.

React and C# are open source.

WebM, WebP, and AV1 are open standards that have mature and well developed open source implementations.

Literally every item OP asked about is already OSS. OP just doesn’t like that they originated at Meta, Microsoft, and Google.

Not everything made by big tech is bad.

React is great. It’s open source. The governance is reasonable. Why should we replace it?

WebP, WebM and AV1 are great open technical formats. We should use them.

If a standard is truly open, then you should judge it on its technical merits, not some weird purity test about where it came from.

castle-nathan.gif

I don’t know why, but I always assumed that image was from Firefly. It’s the same color shirt and everything!

I’m not saying it’s great.

I just don’t see this ending without a bunch of people having their lives ruined, so whatever we can do to pull the bandaid off faster is the best we can hope for.

You know, this might not be for the worst.

People really need to get used to the idea that everything you see online, and especially on Facebook is fake. Maybe it’s for the best if they don’t moderate things well enough to let people pretend otherwise.

I don’t have any personal experience with self hosted webmail. I know there are a bunch out there and definitely both options that can sit in front of a maildir and options that can sit in front of a POP/IMAP server like Dovecot.

I did a little googling, and if I wanted to set this up, the first thing I’d check out is something like imapsync -> dovecot -> Roundcube.

Dovecot provides a really reliable maildir -> IMAP/POP conversion layer, and once you’ve got that, most things should work.

You can use imapsync to keep a local synced copy your email in maildir format. That, along with a domain you own, solves the “I own my own email sycned to my server” problem pretty much completely. Switching email providers is just syncing to the new server (which imapsync supports) and updating your MX records on your domain.

Some email clients (like aerc) can just operate on the maildir directly. That’s what I do, but there are lots of ways to do this.

One option is to just keep using your email client the way you are now talking directly to your mailserver, and just rely on the imapsync side to be your owned backup/migration path.

Alternatively you can run your own local IMAP or POP server like Dovecot backed by the local maildir. So that’s imapsync -> dovecot -> thunderbird (or similar). It’s a little more software to set up, but once it’s set up it should be very reliable and gives you total control over what email client you use and full ownership of your data.

What I’m trying to say is that you should choose the programming language that will make your learning and early projects easiest.

Learning a new language later is not hard. Trying to use the wrong tool for the task when you’re just learning is hard, and will teach you the wrong lessons.

Learning more programming languages isn’t the hard part of becoming a decent programmer. You’re optimizing for the wrong thing here.

You should choose a language that works well for the specific projects you think you’re going to do in the near term. Depending on exactly what sort of projects you want to do, Python, Typescript, C++, and Rust are all languages I might recommend. I wouldn’t recommend raw Javascript for anything other than doing some tutorials before learning Typescript.

Without more information, I’d recommend Python.

The moment you start allowing limitations on who can or can’t be president you open the door to politicians shifting the requirements to fit their political needs. The legislature would immediate start the game of updating the requirements in a way that seems benign but is primarily calculated to hurt their opponents. Within 2-3 election cycles you’d have bills up specifically targeted to exclude their most popular opponents.

100% agreed, though I’m in the “neither is ideal” camp. My favorite language, by a long way at this point is Rust.

It’s not functional, but borrows a lot of functional idioms while avoiding the pain points functional language usually hit in exchange for losing the purity of functional languages.

Is France… ok?

I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.

So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!

They really want people scared, ehh?

Right. Fair. Trump was always Ukraine’s enemy.

Right now America is betraying Ukraine by letting Trump do this.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing our political system can do about it at least until the midterms, but hopefully we’ll see some real change after that.

Probably though, in 30 years, reactions towards the current automation of certain jobs will be seen similarly as frivolity.

Honestly, it already looks ridiculous.

To be clear, I think the automation of jobs is, at least in the immediate, a serious problem, with real consequences. The problem is real. The issue is that objecting to the technology itself is idiotic. That’s not a fight you’ll win. The technology exists. People are going to use it. And in the long run we’ll all be better off for it.

There’s serious conversations to be had about how we use AI, and how we deal with the consequences of its use, and especially how we manage the transition. But you can’t have those conversations with someone who insists that AI is the devil and that we need to stop it, and who gets mad at you when you suggest otherwise.

note that you probably need to trust the remote household with your data

Probably not actually. Borgbackup (and any sensible encrypted backup system really), does client side encryption. So the data should be encrypted before it’s even sent down the wire. The remote household shouldn’t be able to access the data without the encryption key/password.

I mean, they will have to trust the remote household not to destroy the data, but that’s pretty much an unavoidable limitation.

You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.

Actually, right now, the western AI companies desperately want regulation.

An unregulated environment is one where they’re forced to compete on price against the Chinese companies and startups running open-weight models. All signs point to them losing that battle.

OpenAI/Anthropic’s wish list right now is a bunch of regulation to prevent the use of foreign models, and to require expensive to implement “safety” requirements that make it hard for startups to compete.