the rise of AI has taught me that simply not using computers is way more viable than i thought.

I literally learned to crochet because i feel existential dread and need more practical skills so i’m not at risk of computers suddenly becoming unusable and my life being in tatters… Being able to make things is actually so fucking comforting, it’s a great way to pass time too.

yeah no sorry, you don’t just get to conveniently ignore all the systematic problems with AI usage.

AI datacentres are displacing people, deforesting huges swathes of land, placing massive loads on electrical grids which makes electricity more expensive and encourages more fossil fuel usage, using shitloads of water for cooling; and AI is replacing workers, sneakily influencing users, and people offloading cognitive effort onto it results in their skills atrophying and code becoming unmaintainable.

Using AI to write code is like always buying fast food: it’s bad for you, bad for the environment, fucking expensive, and means you never learn how to actually cook your own food.

not just evangelism but the general weird culture around it, i feel like it’s gotten partially absorbed into the crypto/linkedin sphere where people just constantly post technobabble-filled affirmations to show they’re part of the group.

everyone i know still uses SMS just fine, yeah it’s not discord but come on it’s not that big of a deal

It’s really not difficult at all, best case you scan a fucking QR code, otherwise the fallback is just that you verify that the emojis shown on both devices are the same.
Takes 5 seconds…

how was it hard to set up the client?? You sign in like any other service…

while i agree that the crypto stuff is fucking depressing, this is very exaggerated and miserly…

What do you mean by it not being “usable by the general public”? There’s a desktop client, browser extensions, and you can legitimately build things with it that “just work” provided you have those things installed.
I’d say you’re borderline outright lying.

the thing with openwrt is that you have the freedom to fuck it up, which is exactly what tends to happen to people who know enough to come up with the idea of installing a different OS on their router.
So you really should make sure that you’ll be able to deal with it when you eventually fuck something up because you wanted to configure the blinking pattern of the LEDs or whatever.

Though to be fair openwrt makes it fairly easy to back up configurations and just reinstall everything from scratch

Idk if zero tolerance is the way to go, but conceptually at least allowing things with “significant” AI usage is kind of horrifying to me. The entire rest of the fucking world is completely uncritically embracing it so i see no reason why places like these have to allow it as well, i think it should be obvious that we want some communities that reject AI usage so we have control groups and safe havens for the future…

you do realize that any mention of AI immediately nukes any credibility for the project, right?

i fucking hate modern technology, can we go back to knapping arrowheads?

And this can presumably hopefully finally fucking condemn hamachi to the grave, maybe?

Forward local ports to a tailcat server

To make ports served by a tailcat server available as ordinary local TCP ports (for browsers, database clients, or other tools that do not support SOCKS or stdio), run forward with the server’s tailcat address:

$ tailcat serve 8080,3306
# 🐈 Server listening with new address: tcXXXXXXXXX

$ tailcat forward tcXXXXXXXXX 18080:8080 3306

A local port of 0 asks the operating system for a free port; each listener prints its address once it’s listening.

To forward local ports to assets on the network reachable by an exit-node server, run the server in exit-node mode and specify each remote IP address and port in the mapping:

$ tailcat serve exit-node
# 🐈 Server listening with new address: tcXXXXXXXXX

$ tailcat forward tcXXXXXXXXX \
    3001:172.23.52.30:3001 \
    17170:172.23.52.31:17170

This forwards 127.0.0.1:3001 to 172.23.52.30:3001 and 127.0.0.1:17170 to 172.23.52.31:17170 through the exit-node server.

By default, listeners bind to 127.0.0.1 and diagnostic logs are suppressed. Pass --verbose before the subcommand to enable verbose networking logs. Use --bind=0.0.0.0 only when clients on other machines should be able to connect:

$ tailcat forward --bind=0.0.0.0 tcXXXXXXXXX 18080:8080

Press Ctrl-C to stop forwarding.

Okay so i think this section is one of the most useful ones for a normal user:

Send and receive files

To receive files, run a drop box and share the printed tailcat address:

$ tailcat recv ~/inbox
# 🐈 Server listening with new address: tcXXXXXXXXX

The sender then runs:

$ tailcat cp report.pdf tcXXXXXXXXX:

tailcat cp runs the system scp with the connection routed through tailcat, so you get its usual progress display, and -r for directory trees. The drop box is write-only: senders can’t list the directory, read anything back, or touch existing files.

To offer files instead, serve a directory read-only (the default) or read-write:

$ tailcat serve files                  # current directory, read-only
$ tailcat serve --files=/pub:rw files  # a given directory, read-write

$ tailcat ls -l tcXXXXXXXXX
$ tailcat cp tcXXXXXXXXX:report.pdf .

“like netcat” huh, i wonder what netcat is…

“netcat (often abbreviated to nc) is a computer networking utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP. The command is designed to be a dependable back-end that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool, since it can produce almost any kind of connection its user could need and has a number of built-in capabilities.”

mapquest doesn’t seem to have anything to do with OSM, sadly

it’s the future, just like blockchain and NFTs. I mean really if you don’t marry an LLM right now (ignore the gun i’m holding to your head, don’t change the topic) you’ll just go mad at some point as everyone else leaves you behind…

I was recently amazed to discover that you can now buy 10W portable solar chargers that are ACTUALLY portable, and cost like 9 euro
Feels like yesterday that they were 10x the cost and it took 3 bulky panels to get enough juice that you could maybe theoretically charge your phone if there are no clouds in the sky!

that comparison works quite well to explain why i think it can’t legally qualify as open source, too!
Both ai-generated software and short generic scripts aren’t really unique in any meaningful way, there’s no creativity in it and therefore it really shouldn’t be considered covered by copyright in the first place.

the problem with “just a tool” is that using it will inherently change how you act.
Best concise way i can put it is that it’s like how better hardware has largely just resulted in software not really caring about efficiency any longer.

what makes you think it would become an unused backwater? The people most vocally anti-AI are also those most likely to actually engage with places like this. And there’s plenty of people here who support banning AI slop on the community so clearly there’d still be people left after you leave.