gopher://uninformativ.de/1/phlog movq 2025-11-24T12:46:00+00:00 2025-11-19T18:24:34+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-11-19:phlog/maybe-more-java 2025-11-19 -- Maybe more Java? ============================== For quite a while now, my "toolchest" has looked like this: - C or Assembler for very low-level tasks. - C with GTK for GUI programs. - Python for "normal" programs or larger scripts. - Shell scripts for glueing other tools together. Rust is very, very slowly creeping in as well, I sometimes use it for "systems programming" or other "low-level-ish" tasks. But I'll be hon- est, Rust is so hard to learn, I always shy away from it and don't use it often enough. Regarding GTK: I loved it during the GTK2 days but now I have to admit that I'm not that much of a fan anymore. It has become a pretty heavy toolkit by now. I've pretty much stopped using it in my own code and this now leaves a gap. I've dabbled a bit with PyQt6. And I've noticed that I'm slowly getting tired of Python's dynamic typing. I find it more comfortable to have a compiler that reliably tells me when types are wrong (or when there are typos), because frankly, I don't think I've ever really made use of dy- namic typing *at runtime* (except for parsing JSON files into dictionar- ies, I guess). My brain doesn't work that way. I want static typing. I want to get all kinds of stuff out of the way before the program even runs. That's just not the case with Python, you always have to test each and every code path just to catch typos (or more serious errors). Some people might say that this is good practice anyway, but I'm not con- vinced -- how many projects really do have 100% test coverage? (I didn't find tools like mypy or Python's type hints to be helpful.) Long story short, I used IBM Java 1.0.1 on OS/2 Warp 4 for Advent of Code in 2024 and that was a surprisingly nice experience. That's an an- cient version, of course. I wasn't new to Java, but I stopped using it while Java 6 was still the most recent version. Java is bad in these regards: - Does not produce native binaries. You always need a JVM. - Memory management is annoying. Having to decide up-front how much RAM my program is going to use is a bit silly. - The code can get rather "wide" because many class names are very long. But on the other hand, these properties are great: - Compiled language, static typing. - Memory safety is not an issue. - Produces small "binaries". - The offical documentation is really good and a pleasure to work with. - It can do proper multithreading (unlike Python). I've already used multithreading extensively during my Java 6 days and it was nice to work with. - OpenJDK is Free Software now. - It appears to be very stable with few surprises and shenanigans, old stuff still works, probably because it's used so much (?) in enter- prise software. And JVM ramp-up times are not an issue anymore. This used to be annoy- ing, but that's a thing of the past. A "java Hello" takes 33 ms on my box. I'm currently toying around with making a little file manager in Java that uses Swing for a GUI. Swing is *not that bad*. I'll also try to catch up with new features that landed in Java. And then we'll see. Maybe I'll get fed up quickly. Maybe not. 2025-11-24T12:45:51+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-11-05:phlog/my-current-reasons-against-ai 2025-11-05 -- My (current) reasons against AI ============================================= I'm talking about typical cloud-based tools here. Locally run models that you train with your own data are a different story (in some re- gards). This list is not exhaustive. From a user's perspective ------------------------- Everything that AI produces appears to be correct and legitimate. AI is confident. It always *looks* right. But it just isn't. It doesn't reason, it doesn't understand anything. It's just a string of words or code that is likely to appear. And yet it looks so convincing. None of it is trustworthy. This is dramatically different from internet search engines: They also link to incorrect content, all the time. But they don't try to make it look real. And they, by design, always link to the original source. This means that I, the reader, can build a skill over time: I can learn to estimate the trustworthiness of a search result. When I see search re- sults from a random blog, I know that it's just a random blog and it could likely be wrong. When it's a search result from an official docu- mentation or a government page or whatever, than the trustworthiness in- creases. (You could do the same analogy with libraries and physical books.) AI automatically introduces a certain framing. It might tell you some- thing like: "I found a solution to your problem, you can do foo and bar, because that does baz. Here are my sources: ..." It sounds and feels hu- man, and that essentially tricks us into believing it. It doesn't just give you the sources, it gives you an "interpretation" of them, except that this interpretation is likely to be inaccurate. You have to learn to ignore this interpretation. I found this to be quite tricky, because it looks so good and convincing. By the time you reached the "here are my sources" part (if there even are any), you have already ingested pos- sibly inaccurate information. To fight this, you should treat the output of AI like a random, bad blog, basically. And then you should only trust the actual sources (based on their individual trustworthiness) and ig- nore everything else. And that just leaves you with ... a fancy search engine, but with lots of overhead. In short, AI has the effect of gaslighting you. I found it very hard to work with any of these AI tools, because I con- stantly have to second-guess something that looks legitimate on first sight. This is much more exhausting than just doing the research on my own (using search engines) or writing the code myself. It's like pair programming with a highly confident and charming intern with no work ex- perience whatsoever -- you have to second-guess every move this person makes. This slows me down. AI isn't trustworthy, it doesn't understand anything (and never will, if we keep using the current techniques). Not only is it not useful to me, it is actively harmful. From a moral/political perspective ---------------------------------- I'm already seeing the effects of AI with the (few) people that I teach: When confronted with a task, they immediately reach for an AI bot and then only work with that answer. They no longer do research on their own -- but that is an important skill. You must be able to read different sources, weigh them against each other, know which are definitive cor- rect sources and which are not. You must have your own thought process, your own understanding and reasoning. When you blindly trust the output of an AI bot, you are worse off than before. You're back to "but it said so", without having an actual understanding of your own. I already had to clean up aftermaths of "vibe coding". People not know- ing what the hell they're doing, but being proud of it, because the shiny new AI did it. Interns will only learn how to use these AI tools, they will not learn the actual skills. AI is designed and intended to make you work less. This sounds good, but in the case of programming or writing, it is bad. These are skills that you have to learn yourself. You must be the programmer or the writer. Here's an analogy that I once read: "You don't bring a forklift to a gym." That nails it. Another analogy: You can't claim to speak a language if you only ever use translation tools. No sane person will hire you as a translater, ei- ther, just because you put "I know how to use Google Translate" in your resume. If you don't learn these skills yourself, you will depend on the compa- nies that sell you their AI tools, and that is my big concern. Do we re- ally want that? Is that empowerment of the user? Is that better than de- pending on search engines like we already do? Does this make the world a better place? *At the moment*, we still have a large percentage of people who are (mostly) able to use AI "responsibly": They can use it to get new ideas, learn about new approaches, without becoming a victim of their gaslight- ing, because they can filter out the garbage (assuming they're not too lazy to actually do that). They can only do that, however, because of their pre-existing knowledge -- because they already are programmers or writers. When you take this knowledge away, then it'll be a very differ- ent story. And I am already beginning to see these effects in younger people. I want future generations to be good programmers. I want them to be able to write their own documentation in their own words (and thus incorpo- rate their own knowledge about their own software). I want people to be independent from companies. I want people to be able to program when the internet is down. I want to see strong, independent, intelligent human beings. From a webmaster's perspective ------------------------------ I host a website. It runs on a VPS at a cloud hoster. That website con- tains my little blog and my software. This server keeps getting overrun by AI bots. They viciously scrape everything they can get their hands on. They come in huge waves, I've seen about 1000 requests per second, which isn't even that much, others get way more requests. And they are not smart: They often re-scrape the same HTML page over and over, not even using If-Modified-Since. They ma- liciously try to hide their identity. All this puts a lot of strain on targets like me. You've probably seen "this anime girl"[1] pop up on a lot of websites: That's Anubis and it tries to counteract the effects of these bot attacks. Even the Git repo viewer of the Linux kernel[2] uses Anubis. This isn't good, this isn't sustainable. As a workaround, I had to block several other cloud providers from accessing my website. Yes, not just some individual servers, but entire cloud hosters -- which means that you, a user of my website, can no longer do things like run your own RSS reader and fetch my feed. This is harmful to the internet at large. If this keeps going on, people will be discouraged from doing self-hosting even more. What spam is to email, AI bots will be to webhosting. This completely goes against the ideas of a free and decentralized internet that I believe in. From a legal perspective ------------------------ There's a double standard at work here: For decades, we've been told that copyright is important, teenagers have been sued for downloads, we pay extra fees for storage media like hard disks or USB sticks (at least we do in Germany, "Urheberrechtsabgabe"). But now, all of a sudden, this doesn't matter anymore *for the AI companies*? Suddenly they can use the content of my website without asking or compensation, completely disregarding any licenses? Huh? Make them play by the same rules -- or open up everything to everyone. But don't bullshit me just because this is new shiny tech. I am absolutely aware that, in many areas, the law is (effectively) dif- ferent for rich pepole. But this double standard is an integral part of current AI tools. When you praise these tools, you either also praise this double standard, or you must advocate for a change in law that makes everything way more open. And even if AI was perfect ... ------------------------------ There's another factor at play and it took me a while to realize this. Let's assume that AI was perfect and none of the complaints above were true. I still would not want to use it. The main motivation behind almost everything I do is that I want to ex- plore and to learn. A (hypothetical, perfect) AI takes that away from me. I already dislike that I know so little about hardware and electronics. I dislike that I do not know how to fix my car. I dislike that so much that we do is "in the cloud". All this makes me depend on other people (or rather, corporations), which is bad. "But you can't know everything!" Yes, but I would like to. I *want* to dig through the problems, I *want* to write the code. I want to understand what's going on, not be a slave to some machine that spits out an answer. ____________________ [1]: https://anubis.techaro.lol/ [2]: https://git.kernel.org 2025-11-02T17:13:11+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-11-02:phlog/workflows-and-file-management 2025-11-02 -- File management and workflows in terminals or GUIs ================================================================ My desktop stopped having icons about 15 years ago. And I stopped using GUI file managers around the same time. It's all terminal-based since then. It's well-known by now that I have a certain affinity for the Windows Explorer of the 95 to 2000 era. Every time I start a Win2k VM, I can't help but think "wow, this was nice". Or maybe I'm just growing tired a bit of my current workflow and setup. PCManFM is surprisingly similar to Windows Explorer and you can even make the Qt version look somewhat similar. I've been playing with this program for the last couple of weeks. It took me a while to realize that it's not really about file manage- ment. It's about the entire workflow. Just using PCManFM every now and then isn't meaningful. I've build so many small things that only make sense in a terminal. I'd have to change everything from terminal-based to GUI-based again. I'd need to have a desktop with icons again, I'd need to have a start menu again. I'd need a Git GUI integration. And so on, and so on. Not only is that a lot of work, it's also less powerful. I think a better way forward is to keep perfecting my terminal worklow. There are rough edges that could need some improvement. As a first step, I polished up some scripts -- some of which I've been using unchanged for over a decade! -- that help with file management. For example, I have a "clipboard" system for the terminal, i.e. I can mark some files for copy/cut and then do the paste operation in some other terminal. And I have "vmv", an interactive version of "mv" that makes use of Vim. Stuff like that. What really isn't great, though, is my very frequent use of "cd $project". I'd like to have something like OS/2's "work folders" -- or whatever they're called in English, I don't know, sorry. The feature goes like this: You can mark a folder as a "work folder" and that makes it a "container" for a "session" of programs. When you open that folder, all the programs open with it. Close it and all the programs close. That means you could make, say, "~/work/C/my-http-server" a work folder and every time you open it, a Vim with the source code opened appears, the documentation for some library opens (because you need to look up stuff often), a terminal opens where you can run tests, and so on. Just *opening* these things would be pretty easy, just make a shell script. *Closing* them all in one go, *remembering their settings* and so on, that would be the hard part. I doubt that I'm going to implement all that. But maybe parts of it. Somehow. 2025-11-02T17:16:47+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-10-31:phlog/october-books 2025-10-31 -- Books in October ============================== (I'm mostly writing this down for myself. Probalby not very interesting to other people.) First one was (the rest of) "Beatrice" by Lina Bengtsdotter, the last installment of the "Charlie Lager" series. I'm already struggling a bit here, because this was a few weeks ago -- I should take these notes ear- lier. Anyway, I remember it to be a solid, captivating story. I was hop- ing for a more "definitive" ending, though, something that makes it clear that the story really is over now. (Like the soul-crushing ending of "Wallander".) But it was a good read and time well spent. Then I had to wait for a while, because I ran out of books. Eventually, "Dead Silence" by S.A. Barnes (Stacey Kade) arrived. I was looking for "books like Event Horizon" and ended up here. And this was a *great* one. It wasn't exactly Event Horizon, that would have been boring any- way, but the overall atmosphere was similar and just as eerie. The au- thor has published more books of that genre and I'm surely going to read those as well. Finally, there was "Kraehentage" by Benjamin Cors. (Dunno if there's an english version. The title means something along the lines of "days of the crows".) I had very mixed feelings about this one. It started out with a lot of what we would call "toxic masculinity" these days. There was more animal cruelty than I expected. And the cops were "bad asses" -- beating up suspects and even getting one killed, it was frowned upon, but meh, let's carry on with the investigation, shall we? The story it- self was interesting and had a lot of twists and turns, so I kept read- ing despite this. It kept getting better towards the end -- but the main characters were still mostly assholes. :-) I have another SciFi story waiting to be read. But, uhm, yeah, I should go shopping again. 2025-09-26T13:20:30+00:00 tag:uninformativ.de,2025-09-26:phlog/september-books 2025-09-26 -- September books ============================= Let's see what we got this month. First one was "Ostfriesennebel" by Klaus-Peter Wolf. A German book, set in Germany. Pretty weird to read about cities that I've been in. The story itself was quite okay, I think, I just prefer something that doesn't hit so "close to home" (quite literally). It's a lot like music: I usually don't like music with German lyrics, either, it's just too fa- miliar. It doesn't really inspire fantasy as much. Then I dug up "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk. I bought this 20 years ago, because I liked "Fight Club" back then. I had never finished it. So, while I was waiting for other books to arrive, I finally read this one. I can't say if I liked it or not, to be honest. It's quite repetitive sometimes, which is probably intentional. The story itself is ... well, there's not that much of a plot. The whole thing is supposed to work on another level, I think, but it's not working too well for me. And I'll be honest, it was quite a bit depressing to read about a guy who con- stantly beats up himself and tells himself that he's a loser. Hmm. Very well, eventually "Francesca" (and "Beatrice", but I haven't fin- ished that one yet) by Lina Bengtsdotter arrived. I got these second hand, not new items. I was expecting just another story with the same main character, but that's not really the case, luckily. It's an actual continuation of the first book, which is great. I thus expect the third book, "Beatrice", to be an actual conclusion. At least I hope so. Any- way, "Francesca" was quite like "Annabelle" (the first book of the se- ries), same style and everything. Pretty nice. It's funny how the pace picks up a lot towards the end -- if the whole book was written like this, it would only need something like 50 pages. Here's a photo of all the books from August and September (excluding "Beatrice") -- because it's still crazy to me that I'm suddenly reading this much, out of nowhere: gopher://uninformativ.de/I/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-26--books.jpg