Clearly the best advice is “Build your PC a year ago”

(I originally put this first para at the end, but it’s pretty important, so putting up top) Be aware that just because we’re autistic, it doesn’t mean we’re not bad guys. He might be grooming her, he may already have more personal information than he should, and he may be targetting autistic children specifically. If you think that is the case, go to your parents or the police. I know that’s the last thing you’ll want to do, but the consequences if he is can be life changing or fatal.

(Original follows) Fellow autist here, if that matters, but probably not.

No, it’s not mean. People come and go out of each others lives all the time. Your time with this guy is clearly over - if it feels less than fun or has become uncomfortable or weird, move on. Why not? You don’t owe him anything.

As you know, autistic people are no strangers to being obsessive, and putting that alongside a lack of awareness when we’re pushing personal barriers, we can be really annoying. I don’t recommend you accept any money or gift cards from this guy, even to buy your GF a new tablet. That will give him a bigger feeling of entitlement and certainly gives him power over you.

Just stop communicating. No explanations, no apologies, both of you just stop and block. If he tries to contact you after that, or by other means, that’s creepy af and definitely report.

It’s a self hosted web app, and that’s not something that’s easy to change once it’s written. The benefits to self hosting are pretty well established, and this type of thing can be accessed from anywhere in the world by multiple devices and always be in sync. For myself, I use this both from a laptop, my desktop and a phone when I’m out - I’m always jotting down thoughts before they fall out of my head. Also, there’s probably a lot of desktop task apps out there already that do tasks, like many Email clients. I don’t mind reinventing a wheel, but not too keen on reinventing all the wheels.

Demo is a fair point, I’ll include that on the wishlist for the future. I think the pictures probably do a fair job of indicating how a task app works - which is basically a way of entering, displaying and ticking off tasks which many people will be familiar with, but perhaps I’m just over familiar with the concept. A self resettable demo might be nice, yes.

Advertising revenue.

Not just America - all Western countries did.

We made it expensive to manufacture goods due to labour costs and well-meaning but crippling environmental protections and couldn’t compete on price.

bleddy 'ell

Commercial and explicit spam. Report and block.

People change, and with bigotry, they’ve often been changed by others.

He may not always have been like that, so it’s okay to like someone once and not at other times. Best advice I can give is listen to your inner moral compass. If something sounds wrong, it probably is.

(very) Late diagnosed autistic guy here.

Thank you for writing that.

One of the revealing things about realising this is what I am is looking back at a long life and realising a lot of people thought of me as rude, or that I was being deliberately awkward. I’ve certainly lost one job because of it, lived a life that’s largely friendless (IRL anyway) and doubtless missed a thousand opportunities through not being aware of them. There’s also an element of cause and effect - sometimes you know pretty quickly that someone’s not going to warm to you, so you just shut them out mentally. It’s expensive for me to make the effort to be normal and as I’ve got older I’m less willing to waste this time and energy.

I see it as very positive that so many people are aware of neurodiversity now, especially younger generations, and their first thought when someone behaves differently isn’t always that they’re deliberately being an assehole. Sometimes they are, of course, especially those with particularly bigoted views, but not always.

Thank you for the kind words.

Syncing is a tricky one. The universal method seems to be using caldav, so Taskpony would need to support that as an endpoint. But I haven’t investigate this as the android side of things is complicated - or at least, I found it so when trying exactly that. You need to install third party software (DavX5 is the most common) - which is listed as both free via fdroid and paid via GPlay. That provides the syncing which is then available to other things on the device. Not an unsolveable problem, but I found it fiddly, and kept being nagged to register software to get it working.

But I made an early decision not to replicate things that are done well elsewhere. Caldav has lots of options, the best I found is Radicale which provides unlimited tasklists and calendars, but has no interface. That does tie in well with Thunderbird on desktop and other things, but again, the syncing problem exists on Android. Vikunja and TaskTrove are good projects that do support caldav and multi-users if you do want to go that route.

I wanted Taskpony to be simple to set up. Run a docker compose command and visit a URL - that’s it for LAN use. No reliance on other software apart from a web browser. I can’t achieve that and provide syncing or multi users, sorry. Of course, you and your wife can just use the same instance of Taskpony and have different Lists for personal or shared tasks, then everything is always in sync.

I guess it is getting on a bit, and it’s no longer required by Bootstrap - but it is still a dependency of Datatables, which I adore.

Thank you.

Thank you for the kind words!

All good points and well argued. Thank you.

There’s a difference between programming and software development, after all.

Yes, absolutely, but only because we’re the customers.

The art is software design (imo) comes in understanding the problem and creating a clever, efficient and cost effective solution that is durable and secure. (This hardly ever happens in practice which is why we’re constantly rewriting stuff). This is good and useful and in this case Art is Good. The artist has ascended to seeing the whole problem from the beginning and a short path from A to B, not just starting to code and seeing where it goes, as so many of us do.

A human programmer writing “artistic code” is often someone showing off by doing something in an unusual or clever way. In that case, I think boring, non-artistic code is better since it’s easier to maintain. Once smarty-pants has gone elsewhere, someone else has to pick up their “art” and try to figure it out. In this case, Art is Bad. Boring is Good. LLMs are good at boring.

So the customer thing - by that I mean, we set the targets. We tell coders (AI or human) what we want, so it’s us that judge what’s good and if it meets our spec. The difficulty for the coders is not so much writing the code, but understanding the target, and that barrier is one that’s mostly our fault. We struggle to tell other humans what we want, let alone machines, which is why development meetings can go on for hours and a lot of time is wasted showing progress for approval. Once the computers are defining the targets, they’ll be fixing them before we’re even aware. This means a change from the LLM prompt -> answer methodology, and a number of guardrails being removed, but that’s going to happen sometime.

At the moment it’s all new and we’re watching changes carefully. But we’ll tire of doing that and get complacent, after all we’re only human. Our focus is limited and we’re sometimes lazy. We’ll relax those guardrails. We’ll get AIs to tell other AIs what to do to save ourselves even the work of prompting. We’ll let them work in our codebase without checking every line. It’ll go wrong, probably spectacularly. But we won’t stop using it.

I still think it’s going to be discovered by some guy working at home one evening.

The first most of us will know about it is when the sky goes dark.

(I’ve possibly read too much scifi)

I think it’s… not wise to underplay or predict the growth of LLMs and AI. Five years ago we couldn’t have predicted their impact on many roles today. In another five years it will be different again.

My point is that you don’t know the actual truth. Nor do I. We can’t.

Bots and paid agents are not a new technique - in ancient times, countries would send spies undercover into enemy territory to sow discord. To rabble rouse and change public opinion. It’s the same now, just the tools have changed. No news source is entirely unbiased, even word of mouth is influenced. The only way you can determine the truth is by seeing it with your own, naked eyes. And even then, your own personal bias can change the context.

Reddit is a platform where its’ easy to get the ears of a lot of people, so it’s a big target. It’s not Reddit’s fault, and Lemmy would suffer exactly the same if we had the numbers they do.

What is different now on the world stage, mostly thanks to Trump, is that there’s no longer even any pretence to truth. The most powerful person in the world lies constantly, and his example proves that works. No shame, no integrity, no honesty - just lies and crude manipulation.

“Truth is the first casualty of war”

You sure?

Every iteration of the major models is better, faster, with more context. They’re getting better at a faster speed. They’re already relied upon to write code for production systems in thousands of companies. Today’s reality is already as good as I’m saying. Tomorrow’s will be better.

Give it, what, ten or twenty years and the thought of a human being writing computer code will be anachronistic.

That’s a fair point about defining them as LLMs.

But it’s wrong to assume those algorithms don’t change. They do, and improve, and become better with iterative changes and will continue to get less distinguishable from real intelligence with time. (Clarke’s quote about “sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic” springs to mind)

As for my point - writing good code is exactly the sort of task that LLMs will be good at. They’re just not always there /yet/. Their context histories are short, their references are still small (in comparison), they’re slow compared to what they will be. I’m an old coder and I’ve known many others, some define their code as art and there is some truth in that, and art is of course something any AI will struggle with, but code doesn’t need to be artistic to work well.

There’s also the possibility there will be a real milestone and true AI will emerge. That’s a scary thought and we’ve no way of telling if that’s close or far away.