I personally enjoy using it to the point I’m ready to pay for it. It helps me figuring out rather complex things where I wouldn’t even know what to type into a normal search engine to start tackling the problem. Imo, both forcing people to use it and forbidding people to use it, is making people unhappy. Just let people work the way they want to.

Yesterday I got just a regular ChatGPT explaining me how to convert some geometry into screen space using inverted transform matrix of the camera and dividing x,y by z in camera space to get the projection and then normalizing using min/max x,y, then after I got some bad results trying to get those numbers into the place where I need them, writing me a script that transforms my node-based Blender geonodes setup into JSON (just for the sake of giving this JSON to ChatGPT for analysis), then after reading this JSON explained to me some advanced control and data flow intricacies of geonodes and recommended a setup I could use to reshape control and data flow the way I need. This is all rather useful and would take more time and effort to gather all this information by myself. And it’s not like I’m not learning anything, it just makes learning faster.

how many propaganda pieces AI companies pay to have written about vibe coding,

Imo there’s orders of magnitude more anti-AI propaganda and stigma than pro-AI. If you’re ok with AI it’s very dangerous to admit that in professional setting IRL, you have to use careful language and a lot of conditionals.

senior developers were twice as likely to put AI-generated code into production compared to junior developers, saying that the technology helped them work faster

Perhaps senior devs are more likely to use more granular, step-by-step, controlled prompting. Asking it do write specific functions in specific ways and following specific approaches and conventions instead of just “do me an app, robot bro”.

I think it would be enough to say that I looked for a server with a good bandwidth in torrent-neutral countries not too far away from me.

Plenty of good deals here: https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers

Edit: also some offers provide test IP so that you can check the ping - I didn’t use that, but in case you’re looking for something far away or overseas - very helpful

Early this month my Proton subscription ended. Instead of paying for one year more I decided to rent a VPS for 20$ per year (my Proton subscription costs 80$ per year now). It took 4 hours to setup wireguard server, configure port forwarding and update my clientside stuff accordingly. So far I’ve transferred 1.7 TB of data through this VPS (in a bit less than 2 weeks). It might be slightly slower than some Proton VPN servers, but it’s still very fast and decent enough for me. It’s easier than it seems and you get much lower prices, decent speeds, and more flexibility. You need to be a bit careful with VPS selection though: country where it’s hosted, their bandwidth and hardware.

Imposing the ban and a 10 pm to 8 am curfew for 15- to 18-year-olds would “send a signal both to children and parents” that social media “is not harmless” for the young

The signal I’m reading there is that the concept of statesmanship should be seriously reevaluated.

More people gonna get their porn from darknet. And discover its wider selection of genres…

you won’t be able to tell if something is wrong

When you run it, test it, and it doesn’t work as expected (or doesn’t work at all), that means most likely something is wrong. Not all fields of work require programs to be 100% correct from the first try, pretty often you can run and test your code infinite number of times before shipping/deploying.

This is phenomenal, I’ve been switching through countless EU countries and servers, and catbox just kept becoming inaccessible in every single one day by day, and even after abandoning Proton VPN altogether and moving to obscure VPS provider with my self-hosted VPN, it worked for like 2 days, and now it’s blocked again.

what VPN service was that?

Proton VPN

be sure to run shellcheck for your scripts though, it can point out issues. aim for it to have no output, that means all seems ok.

It does some logging though, and I read what it logs via systemctl --user status. Anyway, those scripts/services so far are of a simple kind - if they don’t work, I notice that immediately, because my torrents not seeding or my tor/i2p proxy ports not working in browser. In case when error can only be discovered conditionally somewhere during a long runtime, it needs more complicated and careful testing.

We’re a bit off from the ability to have models which can tackle large projects like coding complete applications, but they’re good at some tasks.

I believe they’re (Copilot and similar) good for coding large projects if you use them in small steps and micromanage everything. I think in this mode of use they save a huge amount of time, and more importantly, they prevent you wasting your energy doing grindy/stupid/repetitive parts and allow you to save it for actually interesting/challenging parts.

This “dopamine hit” isn’t a permanent source of happiness, just repeatedly clicking “randomize” button not going to make you feel constantly high, after 3 maybe 5 hits you will start noticing a common pattern that gets old really fast. And to make it better you need to come up with ways to declare different structures, to establish rulesets, checklists, to make some unique pieces at certain checkpoints yourself, while allowing LLM to fill all the boilerplate around it, etc. Which is more effort but also produces more rewarding results. I like to think about it this way: LLM produces the best most generic thing possible for the prompt. Then I look at it and consider which parts I want to be less generic and reprompt. In programming or scripting, I’m okay with “best generic thing” that solves the problem I have. If I were writing novels, maybe it’s usable for some kind of top-down writing where you start with high-level structure, then clarify it step by step down to the lowest level. You can use AI to write around this structure, and if something is too boring/generic it’s again simply a matter of refining this structure more and expanding something into multiple more detailed things.

I agree, I should have clarified I actually meant setting up a wireguard server on a vps, not developing and alternative to wireguard or openvpn.

I’m happy for your successes and your enthusiasm! I’m in a different position, I’m kinda very lazy and have little enthusiasm regarding coding/devops stuff specifically, but I enjoy backsitting the Copilot. I also think that you’re definitely learning more by doing everything yourself, but it’s not really true that you learn nothing by only backsitting LLM, because it doesn’t just produce working solution from a single prompt, you have to reprompt and refine things again and again until you get what you want and it’s working as expected. I feel myself a bit overpowered this way because it lets me get things done extraordinarily fast. For example, at 00:00 I was only choosing a VPS to buy and by 04:00 I already had wireguard server with port forwarding up and running and all my clientside stuff configured and updated accordingly. And I had some exotic issues during setup which I also troubleshoot using LLM, like for example, my clientside wg.conf file getting wrong SELinux context and wg-quick daemon refusing to work because of that:

unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0

I never knew such this thing even exist, and LLM just casually explained that and provided a fix:

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t etc_t "/etc/wireguard(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -Rv /etc/wireguard

Oops, I meant self-hosting a wireguard server, not actually doing an alternative to wireguard or openvpn themselves…

and, port forwarding… I don’t know where are you running that, but linux iptables can do that too, in the kernel, with better performance.

With my previous paid VPN I had to use natpmpc to ask their server for forwarding/binding ports for me, and I also had to do that every 45 seconds. It’s nice to get a bash script running in a systemd demon that does that in a loop, and also parses output and saves remote ports server gave us this time to file in case we need them (like, for setting up a tor relay). Also, I got another script and demon for tor relay that monitors forwarded port changes (from a file) and updates torrc and restarts tor container. All this by Copilot, without knowing bash at all. Without having to write complex regexes to parse that output or regexes to overwrite tor config, etc. It’s not a single prompt, it requires some troubleshooting and clarifications and ultimately I got to know some of the low level details of this myself. Which is also great.

doing something wrong is worse than doing nothing.

Is this a general statement right? Try to forget about context then and read that again 😅

I actually think the moments when AI goes wrong are the moments that stimulate you and make you realize what you’re doing and what you want to achieve better. And when you do subsequent prompts to fix the issue, you essentially do problem solving on figuring out what to ask to make it do the exact thing you want. And it’s never going to be always right, simply because most of cases of it being wrong is you not providing enough details about what you actually want. So step-by-step AI usage with clarifications and fixes is always going to be brain-stimulating problem solving process.

I’m in the same boat with many things I’m using AI for. I would never write natpmpc port-forwarding demons, I would never create my own DIY VPN, etc, if I had to do this all by myself. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t enjoy spending my time diving into tons of manuals for various utilities, protocols, OS level stuff, networking, etc. I would simply give up and use some premade solutions. But with AI, I was able to get it all done while also quickly getting to know some surface-level things about all of this stuff myself.

I think they meant it doesn’t return to non-AI-user levels when you do the same task on your own immediately afterwards. But if you keep doing the task on your own for some time, I’d expect it to return to those levels rather fast.

My understanding is that it’s for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it’s not as useful when the user’s on a VPN.

Don’t think even the most extreme actors go that far, link could be opened accidentally, etc…

Anyway, from what another poster here linked, it looks like Catbox might actually not be banning any VPNs at all on its own, this might be some kind of middleware/routing infrastructure issue.

With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.

At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn’t matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn’t make any difference here.

I’m 99% sure it doesn’t work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox unless you have an auto-preview setting enabled that opens/caches every link you scroll past automatically, which I don’t believe is enabled by default.

I’ve seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don’t know what’s their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I’m not sure if it’s disabled or it’s the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.