• 2 Posts
  • 117 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • honestly, i 100% do not miss GUIs that hopefully do what you want them to do or have options grayed out or don’t include all the available options etc etc

    i do get burnout, and i suffer many of the same symptoms. but i have a solution that works for me: NixOS

    ok it does sound like i gave you more homework, but hear me out:

    • with NixOS and flakes you have a commit history for your lab services, all centralized in one place.
    • this can include as much documentation as you want: inline comments, commit messages, living documents in your repository, whatever
    • even services that only provide a Docker based solution can be encapsulated and run by Nix, including using an alternate runtime like podman or containerd
    • (this one will hammer me with downvotes but i genuinely do think that:) you can use an LLM agent like GitHub Copilot to get you started, learn the Nix language and ecosystem, and create Nix modules for things that need to be wrapped. i’ve been a software engineer for 15 years; i’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to making a working system. what i want is a working system.

  • someone was asking for a GUI, so not going to be an ffmpeg expert. likely the LLM would recommend ffmpeg anyway. plus you would run YOLO (or maybe CLIP) locally; it has been running on Android phones since 2020 at least. a Jupyter notebook would also give a quick and dirty GUI to visualize and document the solution. plus “motion detection” is probably not the full story, and any video will probably have artifacting that means you’d have to tune the motion detection algorithm or end up with a bunch of garbage artifacts/false positives in the end. also, sounds like the user isn’t looking for something long-running like Frigate. if the user isn’t familiar with Python and wants to do something downstream like sort the outputs or whatever, an LLM would help with that.

    sure, programmatically, it’s not a difficult problem, but like it or not it can be solved by someone without an advanced CS degree with an LLM precisely because the problem is easy. no easily ready solution exists, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. “just use ffmpeg” to someone like my dad who might have the know how to install Linux but isn’t a programmer isn’t exactly the simple advice it sounds like.




















  • i think it’s easy to make comments like this from the peanut gallery, with the benefit of hindsight and a self-selected group of users who will agree. but Apple should be legally obligated to address this. the solution can’t be “this idiot didn’t spend his nights and weekends doing 3-tier backups and high availability infrastructure diversity!”; that’s not scalable. if we just accept that companies can do this, they will continue to. but this has been on the front page of HackerNews. it’ll probably make it to Tim Apple’s desk eventually, so we’ll see what shakes out.