Companies that are incompetently led will fail and companies that integrate new AI tools in a productive and useful manner will succeed.

Worrying about AI replacing coders is pointless. Anyone who writes code for a living understands the limitations that these models have. It isn’t going to replace humans for quite a long time.

Language models are hitting some hard limitations and were unlikely to see improvements continue at the same pace.

Transformers, Mixture of Experts and some training efficiency breakthroughs all happened around the same time which gave the impression of an AI explosion but the current models are essentially taking advantage of everything and we’re seeing pretty strong diminishing returns on larger training sets.

So language models, absent a new revolutionary breakthrough, are largely as good as they’re going to get for the foreseeable future.

They’re not replacing software engineers, at best they’re slightly more advanced syntax checkers/LSPs. They may help with junior developer level tasks like refactoring or debugging… but they’re not designing applications.

I know that it’s a meme to hate on generated images people need to understand just how much that ship has sailed.

Getting upset at generative AI is about as absurd as getting upset at CGI special effects or digital images. Both of these things were the subject of derision when they started being widely used. CGI was seen as a second rate knockoff of “real” special effects and digital images were seen as the tool of amateur photographers with their Photoshop tools acting as a crutch in place of real photography talent.

No amount of arguments film purist or nostalgia for the old days of puppets and models in movies was going to stop computer graphics and digital images capture and manipulation. Today those arguments seem so quaint and ignorant that most people are not even aware that there was even a controversy.

Digital images and computer graphics have nearly completely displaced film photography and physical model-based special effects.

Much like those technologies, generative AI isn’t going away and it’s only going to improve and become more ubiquitous.

This isn’t the hill to die on no matter how many upvoted you get.

Damn near

Exactly.

All of my services are ‘local’ to the VPN. Nothing happens on the LAN except for DHCP and WireGuard traffic.

Remote access is as simple as pressing the WireGuard button.

Key based authentication is so hot right now

No, this is Patrick

As soon as they became a publicly tradable company they are obligated, by the Dodge v Ford ruling, to only maximize shareholder value. Being not evil isn’t an option.

That’s pretty close, the Permissive Action Link code was 00000000 for about 20 years.

This hamster is clearly in the know…

Not being five eyes isn’t nothing :P

Of course, any traffic leaving the US is going to be hoovered up by the NSA for their SNDL program so make sure your VPN is using something quantum resistant. That being said, I wouldn’t be too worried about law enforcement from the perspective of pirating digital media for personal use. As long as you’re not selling pirated media then LE has more important things to worry about.

If you’re in a country that has criminal ‘contempt of corporation’ laws where they actively pursue personal-use piracy, yeah you’d probably want both a VPN and a seedbox. Of course, now you have the problem of paying for it without linking it to your person. Unfortunately, a big part of the online digital surveillance push in western countries has been expanding KYC and AML laws that make it much harder to pay anonymously without linking your identity to a seedbox.

Big brother is always expanding his reach :/

Tree? What kind of nature loving hippie do we have here? We use concrete blocks like a real 'murican

I think it’s because we here in the technical nerdy spaces know the value of a cooties shot…

If you’re only interested in torrenting don’t use a VPN, just get a seedbox. You can get one with minimal stats (1TB storage, 2TB/mo upload on a 50Gb connection) for like $6/mo. You use it to run all of your torrents and handle seeding (handy for getting access to private trackers) and then just download everything via SFTP/rsync/whatever. Or, you can spend a bit more and have them host the *arr suite and Plex/Jellyfin so you have your own private streaming service. Split between a few family members, this is a very affordable alternative to commercial streaming services.

If you’re looking for a VPN for privacy concerns, don’t use a US-based provider. You have no guarantee of privacy, just a flimsy ‘guarantee’ from the company. Use a provider located in a place that has strong privacy and secrecy laws, like Switzerland.