When I was looking through the official marriage papers you submit when oficially requesting marriage, to see what I need to do if we would want to get married, that option simply wasn’t there in the checkboxes. And I asked for clarification, and apparently our laws don’t allow that combination, at least not as a part of the marriage process.

I haven’t really looked into it more, and a friend told me it’s very probable that we could just choose one of the available options and then submit a separate request to change my surename to add the missing one. It was also more than a year ago, and someone also told me that our marriage laws did go through a revision recently and it might be actually possible to choose both for both now. I’ll have to re-check again, but I’m certain that at least last year, it wasn’t possible.

Oh, one option I found a funny loophole was that we could marry, she’d take both, then divorce while keeping our new surenames (so she still has both), then marry again and I’d take both. I would end up with three surenames, mine twice (since she already has both, and I’m keeping mine and taking her current at the point of second marriage), but while that would be pretty funny, realistically it’s easier to just file for a surename change after wedding :D

As for the reason, who knows? But an ancient patriarchic custom is probably the reason, I’d guess that especially historically it’s not really common for a man to take his wife surename in general, and usually it’s just the bride either taking the man’s or keeping both.

She lived in an entirely different city across the country (Europe, so like two hours of train ride).

She saw me on Facebook, based on photos from a goth festival in our city, so I got a message on Messanger from a profile without a profile picture and no mutual friends. We talked for a bit, I was single at the time, and we eventually decided to meet. I had no idea how she looks like, and I kind of found this idea of a blind date funny - either it works, or I’ll get a good story out of it.

We decided to meet and go to a local goth scene hangout, and not only she was really pretty, she also brought two bottles of mead. We managed to drink both of them before even getting to the hangout, where it turned out that she was actually not only a classmate of my best friend (a long time ago), but also used to be part of the scene around 5 years ago (before I joined it), before she went no-contact and changed her nickname due to a relationship (that eventually turned out really terrible). So, she knew most of my friends.

That was 7 years ago. At the time she was living in a small flat, after just getting out of a 7 y.o terrible relationship that she couldn’t leave due to having a mortgage, but she managed to save enough on a minimal wage to leave when she found out he was cheating. Her grandma was living with her in her small flat, and she was really a terrible person, even had her aunt with the most entitled child move in, and they were even worse. Always arguing, screaming, being rude, and just acting like dicks. She let them live with her, just because they had nowhere to go, even though she was earning a minimal wage. Them saying that “If we don’t like it, we should move out”, or that “I shouldn’t argue, because I don’t live here”, while I was actually helping her with rent they weren’t doing anything for was insane.

I kept visiting her almost daily, spending time in the one small 5x5m room she had for herself, even though it was two hour train ride. During covid, I was mostly staying at her place, and since she loved animals (her mother worked at a zoo, before cancer got her), we discussed what we want to get, and pet racoon was high on the list. And when she said that we will get a racoon once we live together, I immediately found a flat in my city, and we moved in together around 5 years ago. We stole the ashes of her mother and went no-contact with the people living at her old flat. They can burn in hell.

Unfortunately, racoons are not easily legal to own, but we got a lot of different animals instead. She also helped me with starting to make our own goth events, DJ, and help local promoters, and now we’re responsible for more than half of goth events that happen in our city. She’s now earning more that I do (and I work in IT), and I’m really happy how did everything turned out. We have no idea how did the rest of her familly end up, but we don’t really care.

We are kind of planning a wedding, with only witnesses, but so far what’s stopping is that I can’t find my birth certificate, and that it looks like it’s not possible for both of us to have both surnames (the options are one of us keeps theirs, and the other get’s both, or we choose one only, and we both want to have both), so we kind of didn’t want to bother with it for a while.

Tbh from my experiences, AI is also turning current senior devs into juniors. The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude (since we’ve gotten access at my job).

The skills I’ve spent a great part of my life acquiring are really not worth whatever advantages AI use may have, even if I just did my job to earn a paycheck and didn’t care about the quality of my output, as long as it’s acceptable. It may feel easier now, but eventually you will have to pass another interview, and good luck when the last time you actually coded without AI was a year ago.

Any recommendations? My only experience with defcon is through recordings of the talks from there, and they’ve always been phenomenal, and some videos from the events like various CTFs. Never really looked into it more. I think I also saw a documentary a few years ago that was pretty sick.

The algorithm is probably made to maximize the time you spend on the platform, and is really good at it. (I mean, just look how good are ML algorithms on text -> picture, and add to it that the algorithm that does your info -> engagement has decades of data and training on billions of people).

My theory is that it has misaligned, because it turned out that radicalizing people into right-wing bullshit will glue them to the social network very effectively, so it just started to do that. It makes sense - once you start spewing right-wing bullshit, it will probably isolate you from your IRL friends, you will have an echo chamber on the social network, and it is made to sound like some kind of deep truth no one else knows.

You getting left-wing content might be simply because it would not be efficient to try to convert you, so the algorithm is trying something else that’s more effective on the (minority?) of people like you.

If you’re going this route, I highly recommend looking into and using OKLAB instead.

The problem with HSL/HSV is that it’s not perceptually uniform - if you only move HUE to change color, you will get different perceived brightnesses. This is important especially when procedurally generating color palettes, but also makes it harder to pick a color.

OKLAB solves that issue, and is designed to be uniform. Here is a great article about it, which is funnily enough IIRC a blog post that invented the color spectrum, that got noticed and eventually turned into a new industry standard.

Here is a picture that sums up pretty obviously what is the difference. This is a gradient that moves just the hue.

I’ve been wondering - how do you make brown? Don’t really see it on the spectrum.

Defcon is my biggest regret about the whole “US going to shit” situation. I’m from Europe, and I was planning to eventually attend, but there’s no way I’m going there until USA gets their shit together, which I suspect won’t be during my lifetime at this point.

They should move it to Europe, especially for this kind of event, I’d suspect that for a lot of attendees and speakers, who tend to be pretty anti-systemic, going into US safely at this point is not an option.

For me, it was about gear. I impulse bought a grill that can detect the width of meat, and can pretty reliably grill whatever I put there, assuming I choose the correct program. That made me buy a lot more steaks, since they were super easy to prepare.

Another one was getting an instant pot, and just randomly choosing recipes on the internet, mostly focusing on one-pot recipes. It’s so much easier when you don’t have to deal with standing there and guarding the stove, which I always found super boring and that was keeping me from cooking.

By not having exactly the correct ingredients, I’ve eventually discovered that most of cooking is just “stock, veggies, meat and seassoning”, maybe cream, and i can just do whatever (within reason, but you can usually guess what works together) and it probably works and tastes good.

On disadvantage my mostly random approach has is that I can make an amazingly good meal, but have no idea how I actually did that, only to never be able to make the same food again. I have a memory of a goldfish on ketamine and hate planning stuff, so my cooking is mostly random. Most of the time it tastes good, but I was never able to exactly repeat the same process twice, hah.

I’ve had a similar experience at my job, where we’ve gotten an unlimited access to a few models.

There’s one huge problem I’ve very quickly ran into - skill attrition. You very quickly get lazy, and stop being able to critically think about problems. Hell, I’ve only had access to it for two weeks, and I’m starting to see the effects. “Can you add this button?” is a very simple change that I could probably make immediately, but AI can make it a little bit faster, and without me putting in the effort. Or it can at least show me the correct script to put it in, without me having to go scouring the code looking for it. It’s addicting, and quite scary. YMMV, you might have stronger willpower and be able to switch between lazy and locked in mode, but I very quickly found out I can’t.

But is it useful? That very much depends on what do you want out of your job, and both cases have major (and mostly similar) problems.

If you don’t really care about the quality of your job, and are there just to work your 8/5 and get money, hoping to just balance effort vs. quality so they won’t fire you, the it might help. Especially at this point, where management isn’t really used to it that much, you can get away with a lot. But, eventually, you will very probably need to look for a new job, and good luck getting through an interview when you haven’t really thought about code without the help of an AI for the past two years. The fact that you started coding before AI is the only advantage you now have against literally EVERYONE who can do the same job with AI. And every day you don’t write a piece of code from scratch, you are loosing that advantage.

I have I job I don’t particularly care about, but I still use it as a learning opportunity. It might be vastly different in other projects, but my job is mostly just support and bugfixing on a game that has been released for years at this point by a large developer, so nothing really involved, so I can usually afford to use my time to research things I wasn’t familiar with, look into things we could do better thanks to new tech or updates that have been released, and how to refactor or rewrite our code into it. Or making tools that would make our testing easier. I could just not do that, easily get my paycheck, and be glad I have a somewhat stable position, but that would not help me much. In this case, AI is actively harmful for what I’m trying to get out of my job, even if it works pretty well. It only erodes my skills I have, which are not very practiced even without AI, since bug fixing isn’t really much of development. Adding AI to the mix would just throw away my years of college and dozens of projects I’ve learned on. And I won’t learn anything new.

Obviously, if you care about your job output and want to do it perfectly, you don’t want to erode your skills, and you don’t want AI output in your code. AI by definition outputs mediocre and average work, riddled with hard-to-spot bugs, and you should not be ok with mediocre if you really care about the work you do and leave behind.

Especially the point about the pretty large probability of having to seek a new job eventually is IMO the most important thing that’s really worth considering, before you go all in on AI. It’s something that a lot of programmers spend years (and in less developed countries thousands of dollars) in learning, and throwing it away in favor of a service that will very soon need to massively ramp up their costs to get out of red and earn billions they have invested into it is not worth it.

Currently, AI is cheap. It also actively harms your ability to do the job without it. They have also invested billions of dollars that they need to eventually make up, and you will eventually need to pass a job interview. Keep that in mind when deciding to offload your thinking to AI.

Remember that (I think) C++ race condition in RTG software, that killed people with something like 0.0001% probability and it was a huge deal and a reason to immediately retire the devices (or maybe just fix the bug, the point is that in medical, it’s super important to have a high success chance)?

I’m sure AI doing diagnosis will be able to get to a higher success chance, lol.

EDIT: From a quick search, it looks like mis-diagnosis chance in doctors is around 10%. I still don’t think AI can do better.

In a hypothetical situation where you get a law passed in your country, where it’s mandatory to perform age verification on all social media apps, it’s simple.

No verification? Jail time. Will they go after you? They could, if someone pointed them towards your server. (I think they even have to, at least in our country, the government has to persecute a crime they are made aware of if I remember my college law courses right)

In some states, if I understand it right (based on a quick googling, might be false) failing to do verification for porn can be considered as a felony. It’s a slightly different example (porn vs. social networks), but if the laws are written in the same way, there’s not really much you can do about it.

Completely anonymous hosting that’s in no way tied to you (through IP, credit card, location, domain, logs, etc) is difficult. While you’d still probably be fine if you have a private-use server, you’d still give anyone who doesn’t like you and knows about it a pretty easy way how to make your life a lot more difficult. This of course heavily depends on how would (will) the laws be written in your country, but give the track record of lawmakers understanding tech, there is a chance that even small self-hosted stuff would catch flak. If it’s written in such a way to not be i.e limited by user count, then there’s not much you can do.

A lawyer would probably be able to talk you out of it, but you’d still be charged and it would suck (and be expensive) to deal with.

So, yeah. “How could the government force me to enable it” boils down to “jail time”. I mean, it’s basically a similar question like “how could the government stop me from using Telegram or VPNs”, and IIRC there are some examples for that already.

EDIT: Not having public sign-up enabled could be a way around it, since random people can’t make an account there, so you’re basically doing age-verification by a veto. However, if someone under-age got into your server, they then have a leverage on you, since they are there illegally (in the hypothetical scenario).

I highly recommend looking into Matrix Ansible Deploy, has an amazing documentation and actually works robustly. It will make the whole process of hosting it way easier, I only needed to change like 5 config values, give Ansible the SSH key for my server, and then basically run “just setup-all” from a Ansible docker.

It’s extremely easy, the Matrix ansible deploy project is very simple to use (with at least basic tech literacy), is very well documented and as far as I’ve seen in the past few years of using it do deploy and update my Matrix instance - it’s also very robust. I haven’t seen it fail a single time, which tends to be a problem with larger Docker/Ansible projects.

I’m paying 7$ a month for a cheap server on Hetzner, you also need a domain name, and the whole setup took like an hour.

I recommend transfering to Cloudfare, since they have guaranteed wholesale price (no added fees, and only what the tld owner and ICANN asks), so they should be cheapest (since anything less is selling at a loss for the registrar, at least ifI understand right).

Namecheap has started overcharging me like 20+$ on a renewal compared to CF. So, transfering after a first year (which is where registrars like Namecheap take a loss and give you a discount) is probably the cheapest way how to go about it.

As far as I know, Cloudfare is the only registrar that offers you wholesale price, as in the price asked by the tld owners. So, you a registrar can’t go lower, because that’s what they pay for it.

But, a lot of registrars will give you first year at a heavy discount (so, at a loss), just so they can ramp up the price to wholesale + a lot extra. I got my domain for like 5$, and they then asked for 40$ for renewal, while wholesale is around 25$.

So, I just transfered to Cloudfare for the renewal. Tbh I don’t remember if it was the first or second year, and what are the transfer rules, but I think it should be possible to just buy a first year at heavy discount with i.e Namecheap or something, and immediately transfer to Cloudfare for the first renewal at wholesale price.

Oh, nice. A sync with ProtonDrive, that looks promising.

I don’t trust myself enough to backup my passwords on something self-hosted, but ProtonDrive might actually be reasonable. I’ll look into it, thanks! And I sure don’t want to use stuff like GDrive or OneDrive.

If I’m not mistaken, Keepass doesn’t have cloud sync, right? That’s a pretty important feature for me, and a reason why I went with Bitwarden, even though Keepass is probably better.

Ah, damn. Bitwarden has Agents.md. That doesn’t really fill me with confidence, and it’s the most critical software I use.

I need to update my threat model, I’ve trusted them quite a lot to the point of using Bitwarden for MFA for less-important services (so it’s not really MFA, since both my password and MFA token is in Bitwarden, but it’s super convenient), and only had Yubikey for my Bitwarden account, so as long as the app itself isn’t compromised I should be good (and Bitwarden has a pretty good track record as far as I know), but if they are going to start vibe-coding their tools then it’s probably time to move to a proper MFA.

Oh, damn. You’re right.

When I first saw this, I read through the readme, and it sounded pretty cool. Needless to say, I know nothing about physics.

I didn’t suspect AI in the slightest, until I saw this comment thread.

Now I’m pretty taken aback. Looking at it again, it should be pretty obvious. I wonder what was it about the way it was presented that made me believe it and not suspect AI in the slightest, because that’s a mistake I don’t really want to do again.

Probably a combination of passionate presentation, topic I know nothing about combined with topic I love (game engines), and my whole interaction being “this is pretty cool” and moving on. I did try looking for some actual sources about the Tesla’s mythical “standart model”, which I found none, plus got suspicious about definiton of “standart model” feeling like it doesn’t match what the text was talking about, and I just moved on, but the conclusion I had was “i wonder what will turn up out of it”, instead of “probably llm halucination” as ot should’ve been.

Oh well, I guess it’s time to properly lock in on actual textbook knowledge in fields I’m interrested in, because recognizing stuff like this in tutorials/posts and eventually books will be only harder, and it won’t be really feasible to rely on “I’ll research it on the internet when I need it”