“Loser talk” is something a fucking 4chan basement dweller would say. I hate how society is just the stupidest fucks at the forefront now.

The world is run (into the ground) by absolute fucking losers.

I have one of these and it’s awesome.

Some things you might face:

• Residential IP blocks from your ISP
• Port 25 is often blocked by ISPs and cloud providers
• Big email providers immediately distrust small email servers; Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo will silently block and move the emails to junk
• You have a multitude of DNS records and they have to be perfect. They’re also fiddly. DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS. One blip and email ain’t working
• If your security is crap, your server can get turned into a spam cannon and it can take weeks to months to get removed from blacklists
• Managing your own spam filters sucks
• Troubleshooting deliverability can be a nightmare

This is a good way to get blacklisted by email providers. Not discouraging it but your mileage will vary greatly on this endeavor.

I should retract my statement after remembering how good the G1/HTC Dream was. The hinge on that thing was sturdy as hell!

I’ve managed to land at a wildly uncommon yet positive company where engineers get to steer a lot of the timelines. We don’t always get what we want, but I feel like we have a better spot at the table than I have at previous jobs where it felt like MBAs and product people set the deadlines in stone before conversations with engineering even started. The only way I’ll leave this job is if they fire me.

100%. There’s a difference between asking AI to do things that you yourself don’t understand, and using it as a quicker route to something you already know as an engineer. The difference is that the engineer knows when to halt the agent or push back to do something properly. I don’t make AI dabble in languages I don’t already know myself.

My ISP gave me an Eero device when we upgraded our internet. I got rid of that shit ASAP. There’s no reason for a cloud provider to have visibility into my LAN and the thought of that makes me feel ill.

Bookmarking this one for later. Thanks! It’s hard not to feel like my entire field has been cheapened. We spent so long perfecting our craft, only for it to to be completely devalued with speed as the main focus.

The bright side is that AI will never be as good as me when it comes to CSS. I’m still the go-to CSS person at work, despite folks having AI tools at their disposal.

It’s the addition of a moving part. That alone is a death knell for the device.

Lol I predicted this to friends months ago. Apparently the era of phones with hinges taught us nothing.

As someone that uses AI at work because 1. this is a run-out-the-clock situation, and 2. I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible, it feels weird and hypocritical to expect no AI in all of the software around me as well.

With that said, if I still had any semblance of passion for writing code, which I do not, anything I worked on for the OSS community would be fully devoid of AI usage. But I’m mentally at a point where I’d rather move to a cabin and use computers less and less with each passing day.

I know for a fact that I am not as fast as this. I had it build out entire page flows and pull together Vue components while connected to Figma’s MCP, and it was done in 1 hour. Tests, types, services, everything. I can’t compete with my own AI flow. I had it finishing 5-6 Jira tickets in one go.

Refusing also has its own caveats. Like painting a target on my back for layoffs.

I use it to corral data a lot of the time. Stuff that is already verified by humans. It’s great for getting quick metrics, or pulling info about something into one central place. I’ve also given it an instruction to use the STE writing rules. It makes it speak more technically and deliberately, as opposed to always trying to sound like my friend.

I’m absolutely not one of those AI worshipper types, but I’ve found ways to harness it (hopefully thoughtfully) at work.

Work has forced us all to adopt it, so everyone did. It was either that or suddenly be the slowest person at work, which eventually gets you canned. People will evangelize all day long about how they refuse to use AI, how it’s dog shit, etc. Meanwhile I’ve managed to dial in my AI workflow so that it never deviates from our code standards, it never tries to invent its own components or styles, and I still manage to review it with experienced human eyes. It’s the reason I can start my work day at 10:30am, walk away from my desk at 4:30pm and still be well ahead of schedule. I’ve malicious-compliance’d the fuck out of my job, it has made my life easier, and I don’t give a fuck what some nerd still devoted to the “art of code” says. We live in a capitalist hellscape and I’m a survivalist.

With all of that said, I’d still wipe this capitalist shithole fever dream of a tool off the planet because I’m tired of data centers and AI companies fucking up the entire industry, the planet, and people’s lives. I’ve already witnessed firsthand what it did to my industry and I’m lucky to even still have a job (especially one that pays as well as it does—it helps to be in the industry just shy of 20 years).

I think this is also tied to a decline in mental faculties. My mom had dementia and I had to dig her out of various situations, like having multiple car warranties, and destroying her inbox by clicking on literally anything. She hit a point where the gates that would validate or invalidate a decision vanished entirely. If a salesperson came to her door, the chances they left without landing a sale were slim to none. They just had to be charismatic and sound positive. It’s the reason she got stuck with one of those whole-house water softeners.

I think AI slop hits similarly. It’s made to tap into their most basic hooks. Religion, family, cute stuff, etc. Their brain drives past any of the gates that we have where we ask why anyone would watch this over actual videos of animals, people, etc. They’re a deer in headlights being entertained by the rudimentary dopamine hits, while all of the technical details go over their heads.