Back when I ran a WoW guild, the first sentence in our recruitment post emphasized the importance of reading the whole post (because the way to access the application form was to click the only smiley in the post, and this detail was mentioned in the last paragraph).
Most people did not read the post, which was immediately evident from how they posted their application by copy-pasting and editing an application posted by someone else before them.
> Back when I ran a WoW guild, the first sentence in our recruitment post emphasized the importance of reading the whole post (because the way to access the application form was to click the only smiley in the post, and this detail was mentioned in the last paragraph).
I mentioned the "no brown M&Ms rule" in a recent comment, and someone pointed out to me that this is more likely to by adhered to by an LLM - humans might miss a single line in a three pages of text, but the LLM won't.
I am starting to think that a better approach might be to move to mailing lists; this means that valuable drive-by PRs (like I did in the past) are going to be unintended victims by preventing all drive-by PRs, because the friction is too high. Submitted needs to have an email address, make sure it isn't marked as spam, sign up to the mailing list, email their PR, wait for a response, etc.
The upside is that projects can start marking that email address as spam if it submits AI slop. The downside is that actually valuable drive-by PRs will be a thing of the past.
I wonder if you could take advantage of the fact that the LLM is more likely to follow instructions that humans might miss. For example include instructions somewhere in the repo that says you must use a certain phrase in all pull requests, and then you just check the PR for that phrase.
Or maybe require the PR to contain something that is generated by running code, which the LLM may not be able to do without some effort on the user's part.
Well, even if Jitsi doesn't have Push-to-Talk, you can still easily get it by using a hotkey to mute/unmute the mic system-wide.
For exampple, if you're on PC, MicMute [1] can be used for free, or if you want more customization, I would humbly present my side project, AutoPTT [2].
Four years in, I suppose you could say I'm still "launching," so I eagerly jumped right to the marketing part to see if there was any good insight.
Uh-oh. My experience has been pretty much the same. Paying for ads feels like lighting money on fire.
Like the author, I also stay away from social media. I've tried posting some videos and shorts, but since I don't actually consume any content on the platforms I'm posting them on, I don't really know what works. Not to mention it takes a long time to make even a single short, let alone a longer video.
Then I published a somewhat technical article on the product blog which brought in more traffic than a giveaway I did during the Christmas holidays, when I was literally giving the product out for free. Of course, the readers of the article were probably not the target audience of my product but it was still quite interesting to see.
I figure I'll keep writing more and see if something happens. Because the ads, videos and shorts were definitely a waste of time (and unlike the author, I don't have anyone I can ask for help).
Naturally, I'm still developing the product. Choosing what to work on is half the challenge. At least I feel productive when I'm writing code. Can't say the same for the other stuff :)
97 Twitch streams (and Youtube VOD uploads) + 32 shorts on Youtube, TikTok and Instagram. Best short got 5k views on YT, most got about 1k.
I didn't say I quit completely, I still stream when I play games because it doesn't cost me anything to do that since I was going to play the game anyway.
I no longer go through the VODs and try to cut them into shorts though, as it's such a huge time sink (and I don't think I'm very entertaining).
I made a couple of shorts directly related to my products too but as neither of them are really visual (one deals with micprohone audio, the other deal with mouse sensitivity), it's a bit difficult.
I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems. There's very little handholding; it's more like requirements come in, and results come out.
I have been part of some social circles before but they were always centered around a common activity like a game, and once that activity went away, so did those connections.
As I started working on side hustles, it occurred to me that not having any kind of social network (not even social media accounts) may have added an additional level of difficulty.
It's not so hard if you're an expert in the field or concept they're asking the solution for, especially if you've already implemented it in the past, in some way, so know all the hidden requirements that they aren't even aware of. If you're in a senior position, in a small group, it's very possible you're the only one that can even reason about the solution, beyond some high level desires. I've worked in several teams with non-technical people/managers, where a good portion of the requirements must be ignored, with the biggest soft skill requirement being pretending they're ideas are reasonable.
It's also true if it's more technical than product based. I work in manufacturing R&D where a task might be "we need this robot, with this camera, to align to align to and touch this thing with this other thing within some um of error."
Software touches every industry of man. Your results may vary.
I've seen that plenty of times. I suspect that you haven't seen it because you live in a place with high cost of living, which induces a high turnover in personnel, or perhaps you've been working in very dynamic markets such as SaaS.
When I was starting my career in Europe as freelance sysadmin, I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country, and within their niche (in one case microcontroller programming for industrial robots) they were world experts. They had no intention of moving to another city or another company, nor getting a promotion or learning a new trade. They were simply extremely good at what they were doing (which in the grand scheme of things was probably pretty obsolete technology), and whenever a new project came they could figure out the requirements and implement the product without much external input. The first time I met a "project manager" was when I started working for a US company.
>I worked several times for small companies that were definitely not at the forefront of technology, were specialised in some small niche and pretty small (10-15 engineers), but all its engineers had been there for 10-20 years. They pretty well paid compared to the rest of the country
This isn't possible in the USA. Companies like this (small, and not in tech hub cities) always try to take advantage of their location and pay peanuts, with the excuse "the cost of living is lower here!", even though it's not that much lower (and not as low as they think), and everything besides houses costs the same nationwide.
I agree that something like that is very unlikely in the US, which is why so many people in this thread (I presume Americans) were incredulous as to whether that was even possible, but elsewhere in Europe good software and electronic/electrical engineers can be making very good money for the local standards in stable jobs, while at the same time being paid a lot less than they would be in a similar job in one of the US major tech hubs.
> Windows generally treats running binaries as locked. Any attempt to overwrite a running binary should throw an exception. Again, the Zed source provides a reasonable solution.
While it's true that you can't overwrite a running binary on Windows, you can still rename it.
For example, the updater I wrote for AutoPTT downloads the new update to a temporary directory, renames all old files to ${file}.bak, then moves over the files from the temporary folder, and finally runs the new binary while exiting the old one.
Well, I'd imagine that before returning the value through their API they could just check that if the number is negative, then add 2^32 to it, which would make it look like an unsigned 32 bit integer.
In most languages that support differently sized integer types and/or unsigned integer types, you wouldn’t have to check, but can just apply the appropriate modulo or bit operation on all values.
I'm running it on a device with a Qualcomm SM8635 Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, and it just crawls. The UI is very unresponsive, and page load times are terrible.
I wonder how many people realize you can use the whole 127.0.0.0/8 address space, not just 127.0.0.1. I usually use a random address in that space for all of a specific project's services that need to be exposed, like 127.1.2.3:3000 for web and 127.1.2.3:5432 for postgres.
It’s well-intentioned, but I honestly believe that it would lead to a plethora of security problems. Maybe I am missing something, but it strikes me as on the level of irresponsibility of handing out guardless chainsaws to kindergartners.
That is awful and I hope it will never pass. It would be a security nightmare. If passed, it should lead to a very wide review of all software using 127/8, and that will never be comprehensive...
Also a great way around code that tries to block you from hitting resources local to the box. Lots of code out there in the world blocking the specific address "127.0.0.1" and maybe if you were lucky "localhost" but will happily connect to 127.6.243.88 since it isn't either of those things. Or the various IPv6 localhosts.
Relatedly, a lot of systems in the world either don't block local network addresses, or block an incomplete list, with 172.16.0.0/12 being particularly poorly known.
Also, many people don’t remember that those zeros in between numbers in IPs can be slashed, so pinging 127.1 works fine. This is also the reason why my home network is a 10.0.0.0/24—don’t need the bigger address space, but reaching devices at 10.1 sure is convenient!
I had no idea about this, and been computing for almost 20 years now, thanks!
Trying to get ping to ping `0.0.0.0` was interesting
$ ping -c 1 ""
ping: : Name or service not known
$ ping -c 1 "."
ping: .: No address associated with hostname
$ ping -c 1 "0."
^C
$ ping -c 1 ".0"
ping: .0: Name or service not known
$ ping -c 1 "0"
PING 0 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.028 ms
$ ping -c 1 "0.0"
PING 0.0 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.026 ms
0.0.0.0 is a reserved address to mean "this device". Also, 0/8 is a reserved subnet to mean "this network" (which no-one uses any more). I wouldn't have expected ping to substitute 127.0.0.1, but it's not that weird either.
I've been trying to sneak into some relevant discussions on Twitter lately. Too early to say whether that helps at all but at least my posts haven't (yet?) been deleted as self-promotion like on Reddit.
Most people did not read the post, which was immediately evident from how they posted their application by copy-pasting and editing an application posted by someone else before them.