This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Part of my role at work is in security policy & implementation. I can't figure this out so maybe someone will have some advice.

With the advent of AI coding, people who don't know how to code now start to use the AI to automate their work. This isn't new - previously they might use already other low code tools like Excel, UIPath, n8n, etc. but it still require learning the tools to use it. Now, anyone can "vibe coding" and get an output, which is fine for engineers who understand how the output should work and can design how it should be tested (edge cases, etc.)

I had a team come up with me that they managed to automate their work, which is good, but they did it with ChatGPT and the code works as they expected, but they doesn't fully understand how the code works and of course they're deploying this "to production" which means they're setting up an environment that supposed to be for internal tools, but use real customer data fed in from the production systems.

If you're an engineer, usually this violates a lot of policies - you should get the code peer reviewed by people who know what it does (incl. business context), the QA should test the code and think about edge cases and the best ways to test it and sign it off, the code should be developed & tested in non-production environment with fake data.

I can't think of a way non-engineers can do this - they cannot read code (and it get worse if you need two people in the same team to review each other) and if you're outsourcing it to AI, the AI company doesn't accept liability, nor you can retrain the AI from postmortems. The only way is to include lessons learned into the prompt, and I guess at some point it will become one long holy bible everyone has to paste into the limited context window. They are not trained to work on non-production data (if you ever try, usually they'll claim that the data doesn't match production - which I think because they aren't trained to design and test for edge cases). The only way to solve this directly is asking engineers to review them, but engineers aren't cheap and they're best doing something more important.

So far I think the best way to approach this problem is to think of it like Excel - the formulas are always safe to use - they don't send data to the internet, they don't create malware, etc. The worst think they can do is probably destroy that file or hangs your PC. And people don't know how to write VBA so they never do it. Now you have people copy pasting VBA code that they don't understand. The new AI workspace has to be done by building technical guardrails that the AI are limited to. I think it has to be done in some low-code tools that people using AI has to use (like say n8n). For example, blocks that do computation can be used, blocks that send data to the intranet/internet or run arbitrary code requires approval before use. And engineers can build safe blocks that can be used, such as sending messages to Slack that can only be used to send to corporate workspace only.

Does your work has adjusted policies for this AI epidemic? or other ideas that you wanted to share?

What was your first programming language, what other languages (if any) do you know now, and what tips do you have for those trying to learn any of those? Whether those tips are for beginners or even advanced, to do with APIs, or if you've got a good library to share.

It just so happens that I was asked to write a paper about goals I hadn't achieved and I just thought about how I haven't touched my video game engine project in any meaningful way for around two months or so. On reflection, the main thing that is preventing me from working on it is that when I try to get back into it, I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm unorganized and can't figure out what exactly to do next because it's so open-ended. I'm absolutely terrible about writing down plans for what I should do.

I know that I'm not the only person who is trying to work on big solo projects, so I thought I'd ask: what are you doing to keep your project organized? Are you using any tools to help you? What do you find is most helpful to help you anticipate steps you'll need to address when things aren't very clear?

Most of my professional work involves the plumbing side of things (e.g. APIs, integration etc.) So I've come to front end quite late, and dabbled in HTML/CSS/JS frameworks, and tried to create a thing or two using Python GUI frameworks too.

After spending a bit of time learning about game development in Godot, I decided it might be fun to try and build a simple desktop app in the engine, and it surprised me how easy it was, it took me a day or two to build a basic git front end.

Of course, if you ever need to build something outside of GDscript, it'll require building an extension, probably in C++, but it makes me wonder if those sorts of tools exist outside of games engines? It feels like game devs get a wonderful tool that they use as a garnish on top of the real work (the game).

I'd be keen to know what people who regularly build front end tools tend to prefer to use.

ETA: I just realized the title is a poor summary of what I'm actually asking about, sorry!

My MSI motherboard recently had an audio issue and crashed/corrupted my PC.

I RMA'd it and did a fresh install of windows.

I fire up my PC - no internet. After some fiddle-fucking around, I try an Ethernet to USB-C adapter. Works fine.

I try a wifi dongle, no issues.

Okay, motherboard issue related to the Ethernet port then, right?

Except, I plug my Ethernet cable directly into my modem, and now it's working totally fine.

Hmm, router issue? But why is it working with the usb-C adapter? Why does it work when I plug it into my steam deck? Factory reset. No dice.

Drivers updated, windows updated, everything has been disabled, re-enabled, reset, turned off and back on, etc. I'm losing my mind.

I would really like to be able to plug my expensive PC directly into my router via Ethernet, but I can't seem to make it happen. Tried two different cables (which work with other devices).

When I connect, it says it's identifying network and then gives me a 169 IP address - DHPS error then? But why wouldn't that be resolved by the clean install and the factory reset?

Everything is set to auto in terms of IP and DHPS. Everything is enabled as it should be. No firewall. No security. No blacklisted devices. Why won't my router assign an IP address to my PC when connected directly via Ethernet? And why is it working fine when connected to my modem?

msi motherboard and TP-link router by the way.

Edit: Alright folks, I'm just going to squeeze in a network card. I don't want to do another three weeks with no PC and this mobo is just old enough that I don't feel like RMA'ing repeatedly unless I have to. I really tried everything and have ruled out the router and Ethernet cable. Thank you all so much for your help.

Edit: Threw a new network card in. Used my second PCIEx16 slot. Nothing will fit there anyway since it's microatx and my gpu takes up so much space. Working great. So probably the mobo having an ethernet defect - not terribly surprising considering this was just RMA'd and they sent me back the same mobo after repair. If it shits the bed again, I'll just get a new mobo entirely. it's not an expensive one luckily. Thanks again everyone!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I'm looking to better organize all the computer and electronics parts I have laying around and am looking for recommendations for software from people who are already doing this. I saw InvenTree but wasn't sure if there are other alternatives I should look at. Most of what I found so far is focused on companies and is therefore a bit more than I need. My only major requirement is that I can self-host it, or at least easily export all my data out of it. Ideally, the same software would work well for organizing home workshop parts as well (e.g. bolts, sockets, glues), though that's not a hard requirement.

Also, I'm not sure if this makes more sense here or in ~hobbies, but I figured the computer/electronics focus means it makes more sense here.

I’m wondering what software I should use to stream games from my desktop to my laptop. I’ve migrated from mostly using my desktop to mostly using my laptop in the last year. But my desktop has a substantially better GPU and I would love a convenient solution for streaming both Minecraft and Steam games to my Macbook. I’m personally not a fan of Steam’s client on MacOS as it is severely buggy for me. So any alternatives would be nice. I’d probably be happy with a low latency low compression full screen desktop mirroring app. But anything more targeted at games could be nice.

Edit: I'm using the free version of Parsec and it seems pretty good.

In the spirit of all the recent Linux posts, I feel like sharing my thoughts too. I've been using Fedora on my laptop for about ~1.5 years, and I've just began using Arch about 5 days ago. I moved to Arch because of all the Windows 11 shenanigans, and I really enjoyed the workflow of i3 on my laptop - the only thing I was unsure of was gaming. But I decided to take the dive anyway.

I installed Arch using the wiki, and it truly felt awesome being able to choose what exactly you want in your system and what you don't. After following the guide, I installed a tiling manger (hyprland), waybar, and a launcher (wofi). It was much easier than I expected (granted I had experience with Linux), after hearing all the Arch boogeyman stories. Though I did accidentally break my system by foolishly doing a `sudo pacman -Rcns ....'. But my configs were still all there and I just had to install everything back, which did not take long at all.

Everything just worked after installing, except for audio. My audio experience was bad, it was crackling and popping all the time. The Arch wiki didn't really have info on this problem, so I took to other avenues. I found a guide that said to change the 'quantums' for pipewire, to some values that I didn't really understand (nor want to tbh). But that fixed it for the most part!

My next problem was discord not picking up on audio for certain applications at all - I narrowed it down to apps that were using ALSA as the backend. So, some apps like Plexamp and Firefox wouldn't get picked up by discord. I changed the backend of Firefox to ALSA due to a longstanding bug which resets the per-app volume level of Firefox every now and then. Setting the backend to ALSA is a workaround, but I didn't know it'd prevent discord from picking up audio. I can't find a solution except to revert to the normal backend - if anyone knows a fix the tech support would be welcome haha

Also the different backends for audio (pipewire/pulseaudio/alsa) make it confusing at times. To me, this is a big hurdle to overcome before the "year of the linux desktop" ever becomes reality - I've had so many issues, even on my laptop. Other than that, the experience is really quite fantastic, the modularity and customization is nuts. I've had quite a bunch of fun tailoring my experience and creating scripts to make the system do exactly what I want.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Yesterday presented the biggest pain over my few years of using Linux that I have personally encountered. With the current prevalence of topics related to Linux, and especially ones related to new users, I figured it would be good to share and leave a place for others to share any similar stories (and ideally how to avoid them).

The problem I encountered was effectively that my machine crashed and I was locked out on reboot. I'll describe how I crashed it later and for now just focus on the locked out bit.

During startup something was failing and as a result it would dump me into emergency mode. Emergency mode is basically just a root terminal where your ultimate goal is usually to read your logs and fix whatever was logged as failing. Annoying, but not a real issue. The real issue was that I was also locked out of emergency mode! This meant that literally the only thing I could do was get into a boot cycle telling me everything is locked.

So I head off to forums on my phone looking for what cryptic wizardry I'm going to need to perform. I need to a live boot OS because it is impossible to fix from my current install. I have to live boot another image, mount my original primary partition (after decrypting it), chroot the new mount point, and then use passwd to set a new root password. If I'm smart I'll come back to this thread later, when I'm not on my phone, and edit in or reply the actual commands needed since in reality I found myself piecing them together from across the Internet and maybe I'll need them again some day.

For avoiding this: check you have a root password. You may think you have one but might not. Set it to anything. Do it now, not after you're already locked out. The reason for being locked out of emergency mode was that passwordless root is locked, but there's no way to unlock it in emergency mode. I personally encountered this on Arch, but my search for error text was also taking me to Fedora forums so I don't think it is related to distro beyond the distro supporting no root password.

The bit down here is a bit less relevant as it is specific to my case.

Ultimately, I had an invalid /etc/fstab entry for a secondary drive (NTFS extra storage, not boot-critical). The thing is that entry has been there through months of daily boots and had worked, even though it may have been giving warnings or something. It's still lost on me as to why that suddenly became a boot blocker.

I'm pretty sure the original crash was my fault, although it seems pretty insane that what I was doing can break everything to the level it does. I was working on some Vulkan code and I definitely had some bugs in it that made my shader capable of reading out-of-bounds memory, but one would think this would stop at crashing the application. Instead it was causing graphical issues across the entire machine as if I'd simultaneously broken the logical drivers for every application, desktop environment included, at once. If I was lucky Plasma would reboot the whole desktop, if I was unlucky everything was completely frozen with mouse and keyboard doing nothing at all. It was me using the power button to escape the locked machine that triggered my chain of events.

For whatever reason on reboot it behaved differently than before. I'm still not sure why. I hadn't applied any updates or anything during that boot cycle. I shut this particular machine down every night and the issue was on a reboot, not my first boot of the day.

I watch Amazon Prime Video with Librewolf, but today I got the error message below. I already have DRM enabled. Any ideas how to fix this?

Prime Video is incompatible with your current operating system or web browser. You must update to watch Prime Video titles. Review the Prime Video system requirements. If the problem continues, please contact Amazon Customer Service and refer to error 7132.

Edit:

I fixed the problem by removing Librewolf and reinstalling it.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Hey guys.

I'm trying to make the connection between my system and Sourcehut. I created my Ssh key and added pub key to the Sourcehut. Added the private key with the ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 code after the "eval" thing.

Whenever I try ssh git@sr.ht, it asks for password. I do not know what password it is and I'm entering my passphrase but it says permission denied.

On Github side, I managed everything without problem tho. Any hints?

EDIT: I removed Git and SSH keys completely. Reinstalled Git again. Followed the instructions step by step for the SSH keys and it worked this time. I have no idea what I did different this time but it works now after 3 hours of hell.. I suspect that I made a typo in config file in SSH directory. Thanks for comments guys! I love you all!

I have been planning to make the switch to Linux as a daily driver for a while and have researched many different distros. I have seen a lot of discussion online about Bazzite and other similar distros based on Fedora Atomic. It sounds like it would be more stable, and less likely for you to accidentally break something, but installing software other than Flatpaks requires running it in some kind of container such as Distrobox. Some people say it's annoying, others say it's good since you mess up the container rather than your system.

I have used SteamOS on Steam Deck, and notice that things have "just worked" more than what I have personally seen with "normal" distros on laptops or desktops. For example, I've never really had any issues installing things and running software on SteamOS, but someone I know using Mint has seen seemingly minor things cause massive glitches on their system, or they've run into strange difficulty just installing certain programs like Steam. Would one of these types of distros, especially Bazzite which specifically is trying to be like SteamOS, be closer to that Steam Deck experience?

Has anyone here tried one of these distros and had any thoughts? Anything you loved, or was anything a deal breaker?

It's been a long time since I've done any "serious" programming, but I have long held a desire to recreate an app that's been out of development for a decade, and I reckon I'd do fine if given the right direction.

Googling for this gives me either "no code" platforms, which is zero of the fun and basically what I do at work, or documentation that has skipped the first ten steps because it assumes you know the prerequisites already. Help?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

A letter to CVE board members posted to bluesky a few hours ago reveals that MITRE funding for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program is about to expire. Haven't found any good articles that cover this news story yet, but it's spreading like wildfire over on bluesky.

Of course this doesn't mean that the CVE program will immediately cease to exist, but at the moment MITRE funding is absolutely essential for its longterm survival.

In a nutshell CVEs are a way to centrally organize, rate, and track software vulnerabilities. Basically any publicly known vulnerability out there can be referred to via their CVE number. The system is an essential tool for organizations worldwide to keep track of and manage vulnerabilities and implement appropriate defensive measures. Its collapse would be devestating for the security of information systems worldwide.

How can one guy in a position of power destroy so much in such a short amount of time..? I hope the EU will get their shit together and fund independent alternatives for all of these systems being butchered at the moment...

Edit/Update 20250415 21:10 UTC:
It appears Journalist David DiMolfetta confirmed the legitimacy of the letter with a source a bit over an hour ago and published a corresponding article on nextgov 28 minutes ago.

Edit/Update 20250415 21:25 UTC:
Brian Krebs also talked to MITRE to confirm this news. On infosec.exchange he writes:

I reached out to MITRE, and they confirmed it is for real. Here is the contract, which is through the Department of Homeland Security, and has been renewed annually on the 16th or 17th of April.
MITRE's CVE database is likely going offline tomorrow. They have told me that for now, historical CVE records will be available at GitHub, https://github.com/CVEProject

Edit/Update 20250415 21:37 UTC:
Abovementioned post has been supplemented by Brian Krebs 5 Minutes ago with this comment:

Hearing a bit more on this. Apparently it's up to the CVE board to decide what to do, but for now no new CVEs will be added after tomorrow. the CVE website will still be up.

Edit/Update 20250416 08:40 UTC:
First off here's one more article regarding the situation by Brian Krebs - the guy I cited above, as well as a YouTube video by John Hammond.

In more positive news: first attempts to save the project seem to emerge. Tib3rius posted on Bluesky about half an hour ago, that a rogue group of CVE board members has Launched a CVE foundation to secure the project's future. It's by no means a final solution, but it's at least a first step to give some structure to the chaos that has emerged, and a means to manage funding from potential alternative sources that will hopefully step up to at least temporarily carry the project.

Edit/Update 20250416 15:20 UTC:
It appears the public uproar got to them. According to a nextgov article by David DiMolfetta the contract has been extended by 11 months on short notice just hours before it expired...

Imo the events of the past 24 hours will leave their mark. It has become very clear that relying on the US government for such critical infrastructure is not a sustainable approach. I'm certain (or at least I hope) that other governments (i.e. EU) will draw appropriate consequences and build their own infrastructure to take over if needed. The US is really giving up their influence on the world at large at an impressive pace.