> I’ve been running pihole for 10-15 years, don’t even remember. Will take a look at Technitium. Looks like they have a Mac build, so I can just try it before attempting to replace pihole.
Likewise. I remember setting it up first in the mid 2010s when pis went mainstream. Although I've also used AdGuard home, but I keep a pi-hole running for 'high availability.'
> Honest question: after all the reports of co-mingled inventory, plain fakes etc. being sold by Amazon - for years i might add - do you really consider Amazon being a reliable source for anything that is not some unimportant trinket?
For me, it's just physical books, basically.
Occasionally, I'll order an Anker charger or something too.
> Is this a "left brain vs right brain" type of thing? Do most HNers prefer Androids?
I can also just plug my Pixel into my Linux machine (I think I needed some other program to do this on Mac, bit it's still easy enough; can't comment on windows) and drag and drop photos, videos, ebooks whatever onto the device.
This is huge for me as I work at a location with no BYOD WiFi and poor (very low bandwidth) connection speeds so I often download YT videos for offline listening later. Also worth mentioning VLC is really good on Android and merely OK on iOS.
Also very important when you're low on storage from photos, you can unload them with no hassle.
I can't do the same with my iPhone; even when I can mount it successfully, its always an arcane directory structure in DCIM sorted by date or something.
This is HUGE for me. I cannot understate how much utility I get from this alone.
> What was the point of doing this prior to selling a subscription to unlock it?
There are/were legitimate considerations for this too--I've had a few GTIs that ended up 'tuned.'
Typical failures on tuned cars, past a certain power, level were clutches (both in MT and DSG models) and probably other ancillary components.
I'm sure there's also lifespan calculations for components at the stock power levels too. Probably a shorter lifespan/the projected failure rates only account for the stock output etc etc.
> I had heavily modified the software on mine, but it was easier than modern stuff, no encryption of the code, and even the checksum code only triggered a DTC with no consequences.
What's the vintage of the vehicle? When I was in the 'car enthusiast' phase of my life ECU "reflash/remaps/tunes" were very popular and still happen on more 'modern' cars.
> Bad from a traditionalist software engineering perspective, but great from a business perspective (which is what matters). Not everything needs to scale after all. Anyway, I do question whether the author has actually worked with LLM's a lot. I would think that the strengths failings of LLM's would get obvious rather quickly to anyone who uses them.
Few things I've seen here.
> If you're working in a field where "good enough" is fine, then I imagine that LLM's can do a lot for you.
There's some specific timesheet software used for Gov Contractors that's hands-down, the worst web "application" I've ever used. Opening devTools on one of these pages is a riot--one of the "APIs" used return HTML documents with js file extensions so the browser fails to parse, every JS file is 1K lines long with blocks of global variables with various naming conventions, using 'back' in the browser just sort of fails and returns you to the sign-in page.
Any modern web programmer would have a stroke looking at this thing. Apparently it's the standard software used for this purpose, relied on all over the industry.
At a previous employer, I had to deal with some internal site for financial transactions and billing. Same story, ancient looking and performing web 'app' that had specific incantations to get it to actually work "don't refresh the page until that loads", piles of JS vomiting bizarre errors in the console, just a remarkable piece of junk.
Anyway, short story long, there's LOADS of software that's terrible by any metric that have crucial purposes floating around that are far worse in terms of 'code quality' than any LLM would spit out.
Also, I have more experience than I like to remember dealing with 'body shop' codebases. There is no way that an LLM is even capable of generating such low quality code. I legitimately think several of the projects I saw were sabotage; there's no way a human would deliberately write such inscrutable junk. Ever seen random python runtime errors cause the type of something would change depending on which branches were hit?
I would argue that "good enough" means that it doesn't add inconvenience or significant cost, but I know what you're talking about. That is the flip-side of it though, there is already so much non-AI garbage that it sometimes doesn't even registrer with the business when something was written by a MBA and some LLM. Not because that is necessarily a good thing, but it is what it is.
Nothing we do that is user facing is created by AI (this doesn't include any of our business intelligence as that's another department). We currently have a frontend lead who passionately hates AI for basically all of the reasons you bring up, and as long as they keep delivering, I doubt that will change anytime soon. As far as the BI goes, well, that will probably always be a horrible mess because it's next to impossible to find someone who's interested in working with the development/design side of PowerBI. I'm not sure it's even because we won't pay them enough, there doesn't seem to be anyone around here who wants a job like that. We tell our collective selves that it'll be better when we switch to Microsoft Fabric, but we'll see.
