Hello Tildes!

There's an open-source app I would like to work on and contribute code to, but it uses a toolchain that I'm not terribly familiar with (Deno), and I'm not a huge fan of letting tools like this have full access to my system and files.

Do any of you use a system to containerize different development environments for software development? I could definitely use a standard Docker/Podman container to run the app, but I'm not aware of a good system where you can edit a program's source in an IDE, make changes, build the app, open a local port, and save your new code, all within a sandboxed environment.

If anyone uses a system like this or something related, I would love to hear about it and share ideas.

First, I am emphatically not talking about LLMs.

Just a shower thought kinda question. For most people, the primary issue is anthropomorphizing too much. But I think programmers see it differently.

Let's say someone comes up with something that seems to walk and talk like a self-aware, sentient, AGI duck. It has a "memories" db, it learns and adapts, it seems to understand cause and effect, actions and consequences, truth v falsehood, it passes Turing tests like they're tic-tac-toe, it recognizes itself in the mirror, yada.

But as a developer, you can "look behind the curtain" and see exactly how it works. (For argument's sake, let's say it's a FOSS duck, so you can actually look at the source code.)

Does it ever "feel" like a real, sentient being? Does it ever pass your litmus test?

For me, I think the answer is, "yes, eventually" ... but only looong after other people are having relationships with them, getting married, voting for them, etc.

Who is this book for?

For almost anyone who is afraid of viruses, trojans, greeks, or lefthanded satanistic poodle pruners who want your data. For those cipherpunks who know that The Man is out to get 'em. For those who realize that masking their identity when they buy dog food online is imperative to democracy and freedom as we know it.

Now, the author recognizes that people vary in skills. Consequently, the steps increase in skill level as they progress. The skill level is neatly placed in the margin next to each step.

[BEGINNER] Step 1. Turn off your computer

If you don't know how to do this, you can yank out the power plug from the wall. If you don't know how to do this, just stop paying your electric bills. NOTE: If you take this latter approach, this will take longer than 30 seconds.

Once the computer is off, you're 80% of the way there. The computer is secure from all but the most insidious of blackbag attacks. Anything beyond this step requires an advanced knowledge of computers. (And some biceps. Eat your wheaties!)

[ADVANCED] Step 2. Smash monitor, case, hard drive, ethernet cable and (why not?) mouse with C and XML 1000-page doorstops, er, textbooks.

Now the computer is completely secure from all attacks.

[GURU] Step 3. Go outside, away from computers. Become a lumberjack or something.

Why are you still reading this? You're supposed to be outside. Some guru you are. Can't even read.

Found this while browsing through the first ever wiki hosting the "WikiWikiWeb" over at C2. As the site and content changes, I am submitting this as a text post. Community is still around, and it has an excellent layout and its just full of very funny and old school (and informative!) things. The site comes to mind on occasion and I just get lost browsing and seeing the amount of information hidden within those pages. I might finally get around to working on a spiritual project.

I'm a graphic designer. I've been working in the field for nearly seven years now, two of which in an actual agency. One afternoon I started on a project that was born of more or less pure spite - I love the annual art trading game Art Fight, but absolutely loathe how the game is run, how it comes completely crashing down every year due to people trying to access the site all at once and them not having any contingencies in place, and how the leadership there is apparently only concerned with donations and little community outreach. If you're unfamiliar, artists get sorted into one of two teams, upload their original characters with reference sheets and then draw characters belonging to the opposing team's members. It's great fun, and I tried volunteering for them, but the fact that I'd've to sign an NDA just to be a moderator is just a step too far. For those unaware, the Art Fight team was also caught embezzling donations in one of the last fights, 2022 if memory serves.

So I did what I do best. I started drafting user stories, did UX research, sketched, drew and designed what I'd think would solve all the problems with Art Fight. The result I called PICTOCLASH, and while the process to make and prepare the design took me about four weeks from start to finish, I knew I couldn't actually make the thing work. Disregarding the fact that the Art Fight platform is anaemic and runs on outdated PHP, has no optimisations for image storage or user content and does not buffer or queue database interactions, it's still a massive lift. We don't have numbers on how large AF is, but suffice it to say that it's far larger than any hobbyist project can be without VC involvement.

I was convinced, though, that if one just... approached the problem differently, maybe with modern technologies, the Next.JS I kept hearing about from my web design peers, maybe a shiny new database like Postgres, state management, all the things I know next to nothing about, this could work. My project could work. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be impossible. With a team of developers, all believing and contributing to the project in an open-source way, that's doable. Eminently realisable, even.

So I started. I began reading documentation for TS, Next, React, Prisma, Postgres and all the other things I'd need to read up on. This was maybe half a year ago. But damn, programming got hands. Even the Me-ChatGPT-Dream-Team wasn't enough to have me wrap my head around so many concepts here. I'm a front-end guy, that's for sure. I got my ass handed to me, and in a month, I barely have a login system, and looking at GitHub I could have just went with any of the many pre-rolled solutions.

Which just led me back to my original point. I have three hundred-odd lines of barely functional typescript that holds up an incredibly slow login system. I'm not cut out for this project, and I need to accept that. I'm a designer, I know PHP, I can write valid JavaScript, but... application development? That'll forever be a realm locked off to me.

And of course, the easy way out would just be to look for developers. But I can't do that, at least not without significant risk of falling into the "I had an idea for an app, you wanna make it?" brand of parasite. I'd feel dirty doing that, even if I know that I could more or less to front-end and every visual component by myself. In fact, I have done that. It's just the app part that's missing, and that's unfortunately the major lift.

How do you people cope with this? Because it's not been the first time this happened to me. I keep putting off learning 3D modelling out of exactly that reason, that I could just hit a wall no matter how hard I try. It's frustrating, and looking back how easily I picked up other disciplines in university it really makes me wonder if there are some things my brain just can't learn. I don't think I'm ready to accept that.

Edit: For anyone interested, I uploaded the abridged design document to my website.

I'm a work from home software engineer, I spend most of the day at my desk staring at my dual monitor setup. There are some specs I'd like to upgrade based off what I've read online, but I want to hear if any tildes users have strong opinions about the hardware.

My primary display is a Dell S2719DGF (1440 144hz), and my secondary display is a Dell P2719H (1080 60hz). My primary display is for programming & gaming, and I want to upgrade to 4k 144hz. My secondary display is my primary display for work, only used for programming. I want to upgrade it to at least 1440, maybe 4k if it's as good as they say. I also need 100x100mm vesa mount support, though I think most monitors have that these days.

A few points that I'm not certain about:

• I've read that 4k is better for reading and writing code because the higher pixel density makes text sharper. I definitely prefer 1440 over 1080, but is the jump from 1440 to 4k as noticeable? I've never used a 4k monitor.

• My current primary display has a low response time. I don't play fast-paced PvP games anymore, is this something I can give up and not notice?

• I think IPS panels are the move for both displays, for better contrast and to avoid burn-in, but I'm no longer well educated on the current landscape of panels. MiniLED? QLED? QD-LED? What'sNextLED??

• Both of my displays are 27 inches. I'm hesitant to upgrade to something larger like 32 inches and lose pixel density. Is the difference between 4k@27in and 4k@32in negligible?

• I just moved my office into a loft with poor lighting. I read that dark rooms require better contrast but I'm not sure what good or poor contrast looks like.

• Is my fps going to take a hit from increasing the resolution of my secondary display? I don't know if there's a lot of extra overhead from the increased resolution. AMD GPU/Gnome/Wayland btw.

If you're a programmer/gamer with a hill to die on regarding monitors please share it with me!

This is my cry for help.

I'm a newer programmer who just got hired for my first actual programming job a few months ago. Before now the only things I really made were simple python scripts that handled database operations at my last job. I live in an area with no opportunities, and so this new job I got is my saving grace at this point. For the first time in my life I can have actual savings and can actually work on moving to an area with opportunities. However...

Everything is falling apart. I have no idea how this place has survived this long. There is no senior dev for me to go to. There are no code reviews. There is no QA. There is a spiderweb of pipelines with zero error handling or data-checking. Bugs are frequent and go undetected. The database has no keys or constraints, and was designed by a madman (so it's definitely not normalized whatsoever). I already have made a bunch of little scripts handling data-parsing tasks that are used in prod, and I've had to learn proper logging and notifications on errors along the way, and have still yet to learn how to do real tests (I ordered a book on pytest that I plan on going through). I am so paranoid that at any moment something I made does something unexpected and destroys things (which... kinda actually happened already).

We're in the long and arduous process of moving away from this terrible system to a newer, better-designed one but I'm already just so lost and... lonely? There's a few separate dev "teams" but one is outsourced and the other is infamously unapproachable and works on a completely different domain. There's no one there to catch me if/when I make mistakes except myself. The paranoia I have over my programs is really getting to me and already affecting my health.

I guess I just want advice on what I should do in this situation. Is this a normal first experience? I care deeply about making sure the things I make are good and functional but I also don't have the experience to forsee potential issues that may come up due to how I'm designing things. And how can I cope with the paranoia I'm feeling?

EDIT: It takes me a while to write responses, but I want everyone to know that I really appreciate all your advice and kind words. It does mean a lot to me! I'm doing my best to take in what everyone has said and am working on making the best of an atypical situation. I'm chronically hard on myself, but I'm gonna try to give myself a bit more grace here. Again, thanks so much for all the thoughtful replies from everyone. :)

As the title suggests, I am looking for a free chrome or firefox plugin that can locally scrape data from multiple URLs. To be a bit more precise, what I mean by it:

• A free chrome or firefox plugin
• Local scraping: it runs in the browser itself. No cloud computing or "credits" required to run
• Scrape data: Collects predefined data from certain data fields within a website such as https://www.dastelefonbuch.de/Suche/Test
• Infinite scroll: to load data that only loads once the browser scrolls down (kind of like in the page I linked above)

I am not looking into programming my own scraper using python or anything similar. I have found plugins that "kind of" do what I am describing above, and about two weeks ago I found one that pretty much perfectly does what is described ("DataGrab"), but it starts asking to buy credits after running it a few times.

My own list:

• DataGrab: Excellent, apart from asking to buy credits after a while
• SimpleScraper: Excellent, but asks to buy credits pretty much immediately
• Easy Scraper: Works well for single pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
• Instant Data Scraper: Works well for single pages and infinite scroll pages, but no possibility to feed in multiple URLs to crawl
• "Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping" / dataminer.io: Doesn't work well
• Scrapy.org: Too much programming, but looks quite neat and well documented

Any suggestions are highly welcome!

Edit: A locally run executable or cmd-line based program would be fine too, as long as it just needs to be configured (e.g., creating a list of URLs stored in a .txt or .csv file) instead of coded (e.g., coding an infinite scroll function from scratch).

I've been a computer scientist in the field of AI for almost 15 years. Much of my time has been devoted to classical AI; things like planning, reasoning, clustering, induction, logic, etc. This has included (but had rarely been my focus) machine learning tasks (lots of Case-Based Reasoning). For whatever reason though, the deep learning trend never really interested me until recently. It really just felt like they were claiming huge AI advancements when all they really found was an impressive way to store learned data (I know this is an understatement).

Over time my opinion on that has changed slightly, and I have been blown away with the boom that is happening with transformers (GPTs specifically) and large language models. Open source projects are creating models comparable to OpenAIs behemoths with far less training and parameters which is making me take another look into GPTs.

What I find surprising though is that they seem to have only experimented with language. As far as I understand the inputs/outputs, the language is tokenized into bytes before prediction anyway. Why does it seem like (or rather the community act like) the technology can only be used for LLMs?

For example, what about a planning domain? You can specify actions in a domain in such a manner that tokenization would be trivial, and have far fewer tokens then raw text. Similarly you could generate a near infinite amount of training data if you wanted via other planning algorithms or simulations. Is there some obvious flaw I'm not seeing? Other examples might include behavior and/or state prediction.

I'm not saying that out of the box a standard GPT architecture is a guaranteed success for plan learning/planning... But it seems like it should be viable and no one is trying?

Let's share our favourite mono fonts and maybe we can find some new favourites. I used to use whatever was inbuilt with Visual Studio and JetBrains' IDEs, but since JetBrains released their JetBrains Mono, I've started using it everywhere. I override the monospace font on every website with it. Never was a huge fan of Fira Code, Consolas, or the other popular ones. Personal taste. But somethings about JB Mono just speaks to me!

Are you a ligatures person? Personally, I love them :)

This is gonna be kinda of a personal mess.

My background is in film. In Bahia, Brazil.

I understand this is a very personal question with numerous factors to take in, some on which I'll absolutely not be able to convey.

I'm not looking for any definitive life advice because I know that's impossible. I just wanna hear perspectives from some smart people that might help me understand my situation. I've recently been through a (kind of a) life and death situation. I'd be dead or with severe neurological trauma without a helmet.

This made me rethink a lot of stuff about my goals and my life in general. I feel I can confide on Tildes, you people are usually caring and smart and awesome. I'm also a bit emotional, so please be gentle. Spending 24 hours on a hospital bed contemplating death and incapacitation kind does that too with you.

I won't change many details because fuck it, I don't thank there are a lot of people in the world wanting to dox me. And Google already knows everything about me anyway.

I have two very serious psychiatric diagnostics that impart my life in serious ways: bipolar disorder (type II, thankfully) and ADHD. I'm also suspected to be on the autism spectrum but I don't have the means to achieve this diagnostic. It would be useful anyway. These conditions seriously impact my ability to sustain a job for long periods and I have a hard time working with teams bigger than three (sometimes not even than).

I live for free in my mother's conformable apartment, while I she actually spends most of the time on another continent. It's a pretty good deal. But I wanted to be independent.

About two years ago I decided that work in film (my original major) would never provide me the financial independence I needed. Working in film means traveling a lot, infrequent hours, absurd exploration (its common to sleep 4 hours a day), and rampant drug use. I love film and do have a talent for it, but the environment is simply not conducive to my mental health.

Of course, now I realize that computer science may also not be conducive to mental health issues at all. The thing is, really like. When I'm lisping, the real illogical world becames more bearable, and I feel in a wonderland of logic, reason, and calming predictabilidade. This doesn't happen as much with other languages such as Python. I also suck at it. So much that's not even funny. I'm addicted to Linux, Emacs, and the command line, but that's kinda it. I became a Vim/Emacs semi specialist. I don't see myself ever doing anything complex. It this my mind, really!

I've been trying to program for almost 3 years and, beside my super awesome machine, I have nothing to show for myself. I try focusing on using things like Java or Python but I always get sidetracked trying to do some cool shit on Emacs.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just assume that I won't be able to concentrate on anything else and just learn Emacs Lisp for real. It's frowned upon by a lot of people, but Emacs is a wonderful learning environment and at least I would be doing something. Maybe an interesting package that some people would like to use.

Right now my choice seems to be between failing to study things that make me miserable (like OOP), but have clear professional possibilities, or focusing on something I actually like that might make a better programmer in the future.

An important detail: I'm 38 years old and unemployed. My region is not very economically active in that area but I'm afraid to leave it because then I would lose my support network. And the mere notion of being with other people on a daily bases causes me panic attacks.

And, as a reminder, studying programming with bipolar disorder ADHD is hard as fuck. My ADHD is so severe that I constantly forget what I'm doing withing seconds. That's probably why I like Lisp, which is more regular than other languages and I can get things more easily from context.

On the other hand, I'm super charming (and not at all modest hahaha) and interesting at parties because my scattered interests make it possible to contribute meaningfully (and sometimes witty) to pretty much any conversation. My success with women is indirectly proportional to may financial troubles.

Anyway, I know I said this was not about advice, but I kinda lied: what's your advice? Should I keep trying on something I'm not really talented at just because I like it (and it may bring financial rewards in the future).

Or should I just give up and, try my hand at some shorts and even a novel? (I'm currently on a severe writer's block though, but I do have some talent for it).

Maybe I could work from home, be some kind of sysadmin (in which case, what would be the quickest and cheapest way to do so?). I absolutely don't wanna create huge complex products, but managing thinks remotely would be awesome.

I also love philosophy and logic, and, if became suddenly rich, that's what I'd do for the rest of my life. Oh, well.