Always eat your greens!
Totally agree, I threw a quick filter on some public domain, actual human artwork, and cropped it square. Took me as long as it would have taken to generate that slop logo.
Here’s the original source: Citation
For the love of anything even mildly good or wholesome…enough of the fucking AI slop images!
Not only are his comics CC, his entire artistic workflow is built on FOSS. His art tablet runs Linux, he uses Krita for digital painting, his fonts and brushes are FOSS too, and he provides them free of charge for anybody to download.
He also provides free tutorials and guides on his setup and workflow, and advice one how to start using FOSS as a professional artist.
Finamp has been my goto for my music collection for several years. I know there are better solutions, but I’m not hardcore, I just want a simple app that streams my music from the server reliably.
The only thing that is a pain is getting all the tags and metadata correct, but there are lots of good apps to help with that also.
Same conclusion for me. Been using Linux for years, Mint is the only distro I’ve used that #JustWorks in my experience.
I use LMDE as my personal laptop, it’s rock stable.
A handful of ones, mostly just what I run on my home systems, but I also have a Windows 10 and 11 iso for archival purposes, and just in case I have to run a Windows VM for some obscure reason in the future.
If you like/don’t mind working in the terminal, Neovim can do basically anything, it’s hyper-modular. But the learning curve is very steep. The people who use it are absolutely devoted, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but it’s not made with the beginner in mind.
If you want a traditional GUI app, Kate from the KDE team is a really nice, reasonably lightweight IDE. Kate IDE
It’s like a simplified VSCodium. It has all the basic IDE features, LSP and syntax highlighting for 400+ programming languages, tabs/panes/window support, code breakpoints, Git integration, built-in terminal execution, and community plugins for various other features.
The one thing Kate doesn’t have for your use case, is a built-in live HTML preview. Technically, Kate actually supports a simple HTML live preview if you enable it, but only in the Linux version, and from what I read online, other than very basic HTML stuff, it’s not very good. There may be a community plugin that somebody built, but you would need to research that yourself.
One of the most dangerous things about modern LLMs is that they rarely mess up in obvious ways.
They are incredibly good at making very subtle mistakes that look correct to non-experts.
That, combined with how drastically they lower the barrier of entry to creating functional software, creates the ultimate Dunning-Kruger scenario.
The amount of effort it takes to properly vet LLM-produced code is an order of magnitude more than the effort it takes to produce, which makes maintainers’ work basically untenable. The “solution” proposed by AI shills is for the maintainers to do the same thing, but obviously that suffers from the exact same problem.
It’s better to be broadly right than precisely wrong, and LLMs are fantastic at the latter.
I think we’re in the middle of another wave similar to the “code bootcamp” era. The market is getting flooded with a bunch of people who want to make software engineer salaries without having to put in the effort to learn proper software engineering skills or computer science theory.
We’re constantly hearing a more extreme version of the coding bootcamp propaganda, “Why go into debt $60k-$100k and spend four years of your life getting a Comp Sci degree, when you could spend just $15k-$25k and 6-12 months getting our cert to land the same jobs?” Now it’s, “Why spend all the time and effort learning how to write & understand code, when you could just prompt an LLM to build all your software for you?”
But in the end, people will learn that there actually is value in having a deep, technical understanding of the theory and practices of software engineering. They’ll learn that you can’t just vibecode the next AWS, Linux kernel, SAP, hypervisor platform, or firewall appliance. They’ll learn that it’s not enough to just tell a swarm of agents to maintain your code base forever.
But it’s going to be a very painful lesson for a lot of people, and when the AI bubble finally pops, it’s going to be a truly Biblical reckoning for the entire tech industry.
In mid to large cities in the US it was and still is depending on the situation. Historically, during hype cycles in tech, starting salaries can be crazy. Mostly at the FAANG companies, but even smaller companies would do this sometimes too.
During Covid, my spouse knew a guy who got hired right out of college, didn’t even complete his 4 year cyber security degree. Starting salary was 95K, with zero experience, and this was a mid-sized city.
And even if you weren’t getting six figures right out of college, you could land a job still making 65-85K starting as a junior dev, and within 18-24 months, jump ship or get promoted and be making 100K+
Also remember that depending on the city, 100K salary isn’t “that much” money, and places that are typical tech hubs in the US (San Francisco, Seattle, NYC) are also some of the most expensive places to live in the country, and often literally in the world.
Tech pay is wild in the USA because of the Silicon Valley culture and the massive government subsidies that the industry has gotten for decades to artificially pump its growth.
This is one of the reasons why tech workers have made almost no progress getting unionized, it’s a deliberate tactic by the industry. Pay super high salaries, sprinkle in some healthy American Individualist propaganda, and most people won’t have any incentive to unionize, they can always get a job that pays well to very well.
That’s finally starting to change, as enshitification takes over and tech companies begin to treat tech workers just as shittily as other kinds of workers. This AI bubble has already resulted in a ton of layoffs in the tech sector, when it finally pops, it will be absolutely devastating. Painful for millions, but probably will be the catalyst for a real unionization effort, and not just of tech workers, but workers in general.
Of course, that’s what I said; in this Capitalist world, sometimes you have to compromise and choose a worse license in order to support FOSS.
MIT makes sense in a Capitalist world where corpos want all the advantages of FOSS without having to give up the massive amounts of money generated and protected by IP laws.
Copyleft licensing scares them away, and anything that scares mega-corps away is probably good.
Don’t get me wrong, MIT is still better than proprietary licensing, but not as good as strong Copyleft licensing like the GPL.
MIT is the most popular Open Source Permissive license. It’s permissive vs Copyleft like the GPL, meaning it doesn’t require the same license to modifications/forks. That means new contributions to MIT licensed code can be made closed source at any time, which is why it’s so popular in the Silicon Valley corporate Open Source space.
Companies love having the ability to start out Open Source so that can rapidly develop and get free code contributions from the community, then when their application gets super popular and deeply integrated, they change the license to something more restrictive to lock in customers/vendors/users and start getting more money.
That’s why some folks in the FOSS community don’t like it. It’s still better than straight up proprietary licenses, because the old MIT version can still be forked and remain open if there is a large enough community around it, (this happened a few years ago with Terraform and Open Tofu). Best though to just start out with a Copyleft license like the GPL.
It’s easy to slop together the 10 Billionth remake of Pacman, Minesweeper, Kanban board, ToDo list, etc.
Actually making something innovative, unique, interesting, and useful is tough. It requires skill, knowledge, creativity, and passion to keep at it long after the high of vibe coding your first solitaire game fades away.
If LLMs are blockchain 2.0, then Vibe coding is its NFT fad. Just a way to take advantage of useful idiots who think being a software engineer consists of typing code all day as fast as possible.
Same for me. I clearly separate my “experiemental” machines from my “just works” machines now.
My laptop runs LMDE, my servers are mostly Debian 13, a handful of Ubuntu Server in there. My gaming rig is Nobara Linux, which is just Glorious Egg roll’s gaming-optimized Fedora build. When I first set it up a few years ago, I had everything all customized, themes, fonts, icons, fancy desktop/window effects, etc.
I actually considered just going with something vanilla recently, not because I have had any major issues with my current set up, but just because I don’t feel like tinkering with it anymore.
My tinkering desire has shifted more and more towards server/enterprise infrastructure and DevOps automation.
I’m older now, my career has taken off, and with that comes more responsibilities and mental energy required during the workday, then family obligations through the week/month, etc. I find myself with less time and mental energy to just tinker and play with tech. So when I do find myself with a bit of free time, I want to maximize it and work on stuff that both helps with my actual career, and helps me get more stuff self-hosted for myself and my family.
Way back in college, I used to spend more time tweaking my PC’s overclock than actually gaming xD
It’s a lightweight, independent distro for power users. It’s also currently one of the very few distros still offering an official 32 bit version out of the box.
I use it on my oldest and lowest power machines. It’s snappy and stable. Plus, the name is badass, for whatever that’s worth lol.
Very true, but that may make things worse down the line. Once they realize that kids are circumventing their restrictions, they won’t think, “Hmm, maybe a blanket ban of social media for minors wasn’t a great idea.” They’re just going to double down and say that there needs to be more hardcore restrictions on all internet/computer activity. More sensorship, more data harvesting, mandatory governement spyware in all devices.
Essentially the Great Firewall in China. Many governments have already expressed interest in modeling national internet access after China.
To a large degree, yes, but blanket bans on social media use for minors will fail for multiple reasons.
Find what and where you can fight best, and throw your weight behind it. Don’t fall into dispair, that’s what they are counting on.
Some fight for better laws, some fight for better politicians, some hack, some donate, some build, some propagandize, some host and archive, some preach and philosophize.
The best often do several of these things. Find what you’re inclined towards and do it. We need every last drop of effort to defeat the corpos and their corrupt political allies.
You can’t stop the signal.
Ryzen 7 5800 X3D Radeon RX 9070XT 32GB of DDR4 system memory.
What local models have you been using? And what hardware are you running them on? I’ve been playing with local LLMs a bit for exactly your use case.
I have zero interest in vibe coding or full agentic workflows. But having a local LLM generate a Bash script to help me automate parts of my home lab infrastructure would be nice.
Because many tech jobs have become glorified vendor management. You don’t actually support anything yourself, you have a vendor sales rep and a technical rep or maybe two.
When something breaks or needs an update, you call/email the rep, go back and forth a few times, schedule a date for patching, and then create your 10,000th email Chain/Teams group chat with all the various people internally and externally who “need visibility” into the process. Everybody says their piece, argues about coverage or pricing, asks the same basic questions 5 different ways, so on and so forth.
Now multiply this by all the unique software/hardware components of your infrastructure. Add to that the AI executive-led slop fest, angry sarcastic, tech-illiterate end users, corporate software enshitification, etc.