The sheer amount of hate against organizations like EFF, tells me we need to support organizations like this more than ever.

It's got a butt ugly design, it's roundy, transparent, plasticy, has the commodore logo on it, primitive, and it's got a SIM card.

You know what that means? It's still fully trackable, it will give you false feelings of safety, a phone without the bloat for sure, and maybe it's best as a 30$ Nokia simple-phone (yes they sell those), but this is a 500$ simple phone in disguise, and with a design that is so ugly that I can't even see it sell to people like me who actually used and coded Demoscene stuff back in the 80s.

Yes, and there's another reason to it as well (old fart ranting here):

When you do suggest that LLMs can be terrific and explain why they CAN be useful, old professional coders will often chime in, chop your head off and absolutely hate on you, every move you make, everything you say with passion.

I'm old so the last time that happened I just said "oh you're right, I didn't think about that, my bad" and they were happy.
Do you think I stopped experimenting with the tools? Not in any way. In fact I run my own local LLMs now on (I feel kinda super lucky) hardware bought the last few years before pricing became absolutely insane, so I have some hardware to do that, glad I did not sell those, but that's getting offtopic, I did warn - I'm an old fart so I do rant a lot.

But I do experiment a lot too.

For anyone who cares, here's the skills you do need:

- Your prompting needs to be god-tier level, it's like in the olden days we used to say "Google it", well most people had no clue WHAT to google, because they often didn't have the initial skills to know what to look for. LLMs are the same, they have various training, you need to know their limitations and ask questions sharply and very focussed, not like you'd ask a human (because they're not), but kind of extremely specific, like you would with a computer.

- Have thousands of hours with AI prompting, experimentation, build and learn to scaffold your code. Build frameworks with your AI, compartmentalize your code so you don't have to ask LLM to re-code everything from scratch every time, saves tokens, saves on context memory (especially important if you run locally). The thousands of hours with using the models will help you become an expert in using it as a tool, surprise - just like any other tool.

Just because you can prompt and get results, doesn't mean you'll get good results, you need to get good at recognizing the failure points, what it responds to well and where it fails, and learn to tighten your scaffolding skills. The more direct, focused you are, the more NOTES you take of your project, such as naming the items in your apps, naming the tasks in your app (accurately, not loosely like this), the more high quality your results will be.

- You also need to be a great project manager and note taker. Take tons of notes, document the hell out of everything you do, and have your LLM document EVERYTHING. Make things tight so an Idiot (me) could understand it even with meager coding skills (I might be humble here, but in my world everyone is better than me, it helps because you anticipate you could be wrong, this is good!).

Learn the above well, be humble, use several approaches, learn from that, and you'll be surprised how dangerous and amazing these tools indeed are. I've honed my local model skills to become so damn good I code actually good games today with the help of ONLY local models, we've reached that point - we were NOT at that point just 9 months ago.

No joke!

And while I am still working on OpenWater and Alignable, the only thing I've gotten from LinkedIn in the past year is rewrite-your-resume scams

Given the reference list, I suspect not ChatGPT, but rather https://magisterium.com/

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

I've been looking since March 2024. Having no reasonable options in sight, have reopened https://informationr.us/

In this job search, Linked In and Dice- but MOST of my LinkedIn devolves down into one of the above quickly. The number of scammers on Linked In is truly awesome.

Wait until every camera around you is used to track the eyeballs of every person in a store and everywhere.

There will be AI watching what you are currently looking at, looking at that booty? Ai will know who, and how often you look, there will be lists that will measure this.
It will go under the disguise of crime prevention, and also what goods customers want and desire.

Looking at that booty or that box of Cereal? That observation goes somewhere.

Someone suspects you of something? They can look at the statistics.
This also goes for Meta Glasses wearers - your direction and what you look at can be recorded all the time, and metrics can be done.

It's indeed a "Duh" moment for sure. We remember this happened to the printed news and the musical industry who refused to embrace the new digital format.

It's always like that with anything old, it will cling onto it's old ways and old times, because it's their business model, when a business model no longer is viable and they failed to find a new way to create a new model, this is inevitable.

The same happens to broadcast media, here in our country they finally moved to "forced pay via taxes" because their model no longer works, they had for decades used so called TV-License vans, meaning they would actively seek out who had a television and did not pay for the TV License with so called TV Detection Vans, they would be equipped with RF radio gear to look for the local oscillator found in a Television to detect who secretly watched TV and ring their doorbell to get them to report themselves or face fines.

This happened in Denmark over 15+ years ago when the state enforced TV License was moved to the mandatory "Taxes" instead of an separate bill in the mail.
Happened in Sweden about 7+ years ago, they finally caved and did the same - moved the Mandatory TV License as an "internet media bill" instead which is added as tax into the national taxing system so everyone is forced to pay for "Public Service".

It's he old Elite of people who decides who gets to be employed and approved as artists, who gets to distribute the "official news" etc. Gov don't like to lose control of that, when people moved to other medias, most people got fiber and got rid of their Antennas country wide, the Gov saw it and thought, dammit - we can't have this, we must get payment somehow, so let's introduce it into the Tax system instead - to be permanently mandatory.

And the industry went, wait - we don't want that!

Buys up all the hardware in the world, and rents it back to you.

I was actually in college in the 1990s, but yes, a middle schooler today with python on a raspberry pi and a pretty simple GPS module could do this.