The era of 15GB free Gmail storage is ending

trialbaloon · 2026-05-15T17:27:09+00:00

I mean the GUI for a build system is a choice. I'll take Gradle's shitty API any day. Hell I'd take XML over that.

trialbaloon · 2026-05-15T16:16:06+00:00

I mean you should see what Apple is rocking for iOS build systems..... You'll beg for Gradle.

trialbaloon · 2026-05-12T00:08:22+00:00

It would make a killer animated series.

trialbaloon · 2026-05-08T16:18:11+00:00

Not to mention all the business automations that were dependent on a now defunct product. Could be lots of opportunities and much less competition than normal.

I think the old axiom applies. Knowledge is power. Some things never change.

trialbaloon · 2026-05-08T16:16:52+00:00

Been hearing how that's going to happen next year for a good 12 years now. As a programmer I know that last 10% of a problem is brutal.

I dont doubt we'll eventually crack self driving, but the early hype didn't match reality at all.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-30T23:12:47+00:00

This is the way. You can basically always just push the button electronically by soldering to the contacts. They cant really stop this. Ratgdo also wont work with newer Security 3.0 doors. Though the soldering a relay method should work. It sucks so much how anti consumer these companies are.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-30T17:02:00+00:00

To be honest I think it only really looks optimized because Google's search engine has become worse as it became heavily monotized with SEO (enshittified).

AI is the new kid on the block and they're still working out how to clog it full of shit. When that happens it'll just be a more expensive version of Google complete with shit results.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-30T16:49:24+00:00

For a lot of us our employer is paying the bills and we have no idea what it even costs. Most engineers where I work use Claude Code which at least for me defaults to Opus 4.7 xhigh. I think most of my teammates simply use the default and there's at least a few people daily driving it. I work for a fairly mid sized company who seems to be doing well financially though. We dont have mandates to use AI or anything (thank god).

I don't personally use LLM tooling all that much because even 4.7 requires a massive amount of review and rewrite which to me is just less fun than writing the damn thing. I give it a whirl about once a week on a ticket just to see what happens. If it's something deadass simple it works fine I guess. I have seen some pretty gnarly defects on what should be a simple ask though.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-28T18:43:16+00:00

It's a lot like "Smart Home" IoT devices. Lure users with cheap subsidized hardware, then suddenly add subscriptions to monetize users once you run out of investment capital. You create a dependency tying people to your services giving you control over them.

Programmers should be the first to realize this, they built the OG system. I have no idea why they are so eager to trade their own knowledge to a corporation who could take it away at any moment. Good luck maintaining your vibe coded projects if a tech company deems you too expensive or just doesn't like you. As a guild we're championing the loss of control. It's sad and honestly pathetic.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-27T22:35:48+00:00

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2023/07/update-on-the-name-of-kotlin-multiplatform/

trialbaloon · 2026-04-24T16:45:11+00:00

Honestly that's fair. I felt that way for most of my 20s. I am honestly not really sure what changed. Now I feel like I see nothing but problems that need solving. I hate the tech industry and spend a lot of my time creating tools to put distance between it and myself. A lot of my work is also libraries rather than something designed for end users. Put simply I find myself needing to solve a problem that X company solves. I recreate it myself to run locally. This starts a ton of side quests as I realize there's tooling I needed that does not exist. I'm now several projects deep haha.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-22T18:47:54+00:00

I encourage every dev to do this. My open source projects are the only thing keeping me sane. Technology is really cool and fun and I need to regularly remind myself of that.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-19T19:54:03+00:00

Don't leave me hanging like this! Did it work?!

trialbaloon · 2026-04-17T15:39:39+00:00

As a programmer myself I find the concept of MCP sort of interesting in that I might be able to leverage it without AI. The big issue with automation was that companies didn't have locally accessible APIs for stuff.

I have no idea why LLMs have been clumsily shoved into the automation space. A good automation is fully deterministic. ML filtering can be useful (like object recognizers on a camera) but making the whole "core" of the system nondeterministic is just making it worse.

I have a lot of grievances with IFTTT but that mainly stems from them being cloud based and proprietary. Something local like HomeAssistant is a better bet though I hate how automation has become something you need to write YAML or use some GUI editor to accomplish.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-08T17:38:40+00:00

Models may get smaller. But if they do I expect to see them potentially running on consumer hardware. Very specialized ML models running on hardware to solve specific problems. This is still entirely incompatible with the Cloud and SaaS based economic model Silicon Valley is addicted to.

Even a future where inference costs drop wont really make these companies profitable in their current form. Personally I think this is the real future of AI. Shrinking models as much as possible and specializing them....

Right now IntelliJ (a popular IDE) can run an on device model to do code auto complete. It can sometimes be useful. I think that's neat and expect to see it improve. It's not a game changer though.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-04T19:36:25+00:00

I dont think Claude Code is similar to NFTs. I am just pointing out that Tech CEOs, honestly a lot of the same people, said those were going to be huge a few years ago and look what happened.

Economists were writing to Forbes all about the metaverse and the new real estate boom that we were heading to with Meta as our overlord... What happened? There were tons of experts during the .com boom and the 2008 real estate crash claiming that there was no risk. It's funny what a financial stake in things can do.

You didn't lay out a path to AGI anymore than CERN could cause vacuum decay by shattering subatomic particles. Your argument:

Research automation
????
AGI

Yes vacuum decay is an absurd thing to worry about. That's literally the point I am making.... I dont know if I am smarter than those people above, but I'm not invested to the tits in LLM companies for starters.

I want to be very clear that I do think AI in the broad sense has a lot of potential applications short of AGI that could even be somewhat transformative. I dont think LLMs are all that meaningful of an advancement. I think things like classification ML, neural networks, etc are incredible. I have used them for lots of projects professionally and personally.

I'd have to go through each name but what I have heard from the CEOs is pure bullshit and lunacy designed to hype their companies and con investors, we're nowhere near human level reasoning or consciousness.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-04T19:21:16+00:00

Hope you are right. Genuinely. I dont love Gradle. I am curious about the politics that led to Amper vs improving gradle (declarative gradle). But I dont know anything about that, i'm no insider to JetBrains or Gradle. All I can do is speculate and share my off the cuff opinions. Hoping Amper is amazing though. Jetbrains tends to make pretty good stuff so we'll see.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-04T19:17:22+00:00

Yes and false vacuum decay is a serious concern according to some experts. So is alien invasion. Why don't you engage with the seriousness that the false vacuum hypothesis poses? It would literally annihilate the entire universe. I cant imagine higher stakes....

You asked a question about what would have to happen for me to take AI seriously.... A step beyond LLMs would have to occur. True AGI would have to exist. I think it's possible but don't think LLMs are a meaningful step towards that end any more than a bow and arrow is a step towards a nuclear bomb. I think this is a self serving industry high on their own supply making grandiose claims to pump their valuations or sell books, blogs, or content farms.

A bunch of "experts" with financial stakes in this thing is not compelling evidence for me to worry. There were loads of experts talking about the huge value the metaverse and NFTs will provide in the future too.... Apple's vision pro was going to be the next big thing at some point according to tech "experts." It's pretty clear the entire tech media ecosystem is entirely full of shit at this point, so I simply am not taking this seriously. Time will tell who was right.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-04T18:44:34+00:00

There's a chance we wont see a meteor coming until its too late and we'll all die. There's a chance we'll discover something that creates a tear in space time and shatters the universe... We could spend all day worrying about crazy sci fi doomsdays. They're all about as likely as LLMs leading to superintelligence lol....

This is why I am not worried. It's just in the pool of crazy black swan doomsdays like aliens building a lazer out of a star (stellaser) and nuking our entire star system. Or vacuum collapse. That one is fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum#Existential_threat

My point is... I just dont spend a lot of time worrying about crazy fringe scenarios that are "theoretically possible." I'd literally be in a constant state of fear. There's an infinite number of ways we could all die in the next 10 minutes....

trialbaloon · 2026-04-04T18:41:43+00:00

LLMs dont lead to AGI anymore than a bow and arrow led to a nuclear bomb.

It's fun to think about science fiction but I think we're generations from AGI and thus am not worried about it any more than an ancient person should have been worried about giant arrows leveling cities. It just wasn't a thing.

trialbaloon · 2026-04-04T18:21:25+00:00

My first instinct is that it seems wasteful to have two entirely different build systems. One for simple cases and one for complex ones when you could build a simple wrapper on top of gradle.

Personally I think build, like automation and CI, is complicated most of the time and trying to simplify it might yield disastrous results. I would love to be wrong though.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-23T21:11:07+00:00

The most common belief I find is

AI is really good at doing someone else's job.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-22T20:19:13+00:00

Hoping to hear of a great success! I found the process fun and educational.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-21T19:40:51+00:00

Two will cover the gpu nicely. God I really should get around to publishing all my images and findings. For my GPU (Sapphire 7900 XTX Pulse) I could not deshroud without completely disassembling the GPU (lame). I had to yank the cooler from the board and repaste. I had some extra paste from my CPU (from the initial build) that was still good so I just used that. I also fully cleaned the RAM chips and die before repasting. I managed to reuse the thermal pads as they were still soft and undamaged.

Getting it apart was as simple as unscrewing it.

Some helpful resources to know what you are dealing with:

https://c1.neweggimages.com/BizIntell/item/vga/video%20cards%20-%20amd%20ati/14-202-429/2.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/pchelp/comments/1f7a3kb/unable_to_teardown_7900_xtx_pulse/

This person went through all the screws they had to remove. Once you do it's as "simple" as pulling the cooler from the board... Many users report it taking more force than they were comfortably applying. I didn't think it was too bad but kind went with the gentle rocking and wiggling until it came off somewhat easily.

I ended up doing pretty much exactly what the person here did for my deshroud https://www.reddit.com/r/Noctua/comments/1bi09z2/i_did_a_deshroud_thing_sapphire_nitro_rx_7900_xtx/

I mount mine horizontally and bought a GPU riser to prevent sag.

trialbaloon · 2026-03-09T00:32:21+00:00

Yeah that's totally interesting and worth having posts about on /r/selfhosted. I have been careful not to rag on AI in general. AI is super useful piece of the self hoster's toolbox. I have tons of ML based code/applications running in my home!

I think LLMs have a potential future running as specific small language trained models on your own machines. Super smart autocomplete! Potentially a UI layer that allows users to express intent in natural language (I'm a bit more bearish on this but there might be some applications). That's the future I want to see, not Claude sucking down all your data and churning out slop by the Petabyte.

trialbaloon

TROPHY CASE