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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in fucking about with. I didn’t have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn’t really a thing).

    I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn’t work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.

    The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix shit usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).

    I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.

    Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your “main” PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.

    Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.

    As I fucked around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.

    So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.

















  • There may be exceptions but everything I’ve seen from AI programming is next level trash. It’s like copy pasting from Stack Overflow without the thousand comments all around it saying DO NOT DO THIS!

    When ChatGPT was just released to the general public I wanted to try it out. I had it write a script to handle some simple parsing of network log files. I was having some intermittent issue with my home network I couldn’t figure out, so I had logged a lot of data and was hoping to figure out the issue. But I needed to filter out all the routine stuff that would be just noise in the background. I could have written it myself in about an hour, but figured hey maybe ChatGPT can help me bang it out in a couple of minutes.

    The code it wrote looked at a glance to be very good and I was impressed. However as I read it, it turned out to be total nonsense. It was using variables and declaring them after. Halfway the script it seemed to have switched to a completely different approach leaving some sort of weird hybrid between the two. At one point it had just inserted pseudo code instead of actual functional code. Every attempt to get it to fix it’s issues just made it worse. In the end I just wrote the script myself.

    I’ve seen examples from other people who attempted to use it and it’s just bad. It’s like having a junior programmer high on weed writing your code, checking it and fixing it takes more time than just writing the code itself.

    Then there’s the issue of copyright, a lot of the training data wasn’t licensed and stuff like Github Copilot want to add your data to it’s training set if you want to use it. That’s not OK on many levels and not even possible for people working on corporate codebases.

    A lot of programmers work on big code bases, with things like best practices and code standards. Not only does the AI not know the codebase and thus wouldn’t know how to do a lot of stuff in that codebase, it also doesn’t know about the best practices and code standards. So for those kinds of situations it isn’t useful.

    I feel like people ask it to do some first year student programming tutorial tasks and the result looks somewhat like what one would expect and conclude the thing can actually write code. It really can’t in reality and probably shouldn’t even if it could.