Hi. đź‘‹

I am JayVii, a data enthusiast with a passion for Free and Open Source Software. I care about social inclusion & privacy. This is my personal Fediverse server, powered by ktistec. I modified its appearance with my own adjustments.

I typically remove shared posts after ca. 3–6 months. I do keep most of my own posts (for now).

I post about a variety of topics, both in German and English, such as:

I also developed a few tiny & simple self-hostable tools to ease my life (and that of others), such as:

You can find out more about myself on my website or in my introduction post.

JayViiAral Balkan
JayVii shared a note by Aral Balkan 8:29am

If you don’t have the resources to write and understand the code yourself, you don’t have the resources to maintain it either.

Any monkey with a keyboard can write code. Writing code has never been hard. People were churning out crappy code en masse way before generative AI and LLMs. I know because I’ve seen it, I’ve had to work with it, and I no doubt wrote (and continue to write) my share of it.

What’s never been easy, and what remains difficult, is figuring out the right problem to solve, solving it elegantly, and doing so in a way that’s maintainable and sustainable given your means.

Code is not an artefact, code is a machine. Code is either a living thing or it is dead and decaying. You don’t just write code and you’re done. It’s a perpetual first draft that you constantly iterate on, and, depending on what it does and how much of that has to do with meeting the evolving needs of the people it serves, it may never be done. With occasional exceptions (perhaps? maybe?) for well-defined and narrowly-scoped tools, done code is dead code.

So much of what we call “writing” code is actually changing, iterating on, investigating issues with, fixing, and improving code. And to do that you must not only understand the problem you’re solving but also how you’re solving it (or how you thought you were solving it) through the code you’ve already written and the code you still have to write.

So it should come as no surprise that one of the hardest things in development is understanding someone else’s code, let alone fixing it when something doesn’t work as it should. Because it’s not about knowing this programming language or that (learning a programming language is the easiest part of coding), or this framework or that, or even knowing this design pattern or that (although all of these are important prerequisites for comprehension) but understanding what was going on in someone else’s head when they wrote the code the way they wrote it to solve a particular problem.

It frankly boggles my mind that some people are advocating for automating the easy part (writing code) by exponentially scaling the difficult part (understanding how exactly someone else – in this case, a junior dev who knows all the hows of things but none of the whys – decided to solve the problem). It is, to borrow a technical term, ass-backwards.

They might as well call vibe coding duct-tape-driven development or technical debt as a service.

🤷‍♂️

#AI #LLMs #vibeCoding #softwareDevelopment #design #craft

JayVii

Well, TIL that you can pipe tar directly into ssh. Need to play around with that a little. Maybe it overcomes the requirement to have enough space for a giant tar file on the host?

From Drew Devault's blog post on tar as rsync alternative

JayViiBaldur Bjarnason

“On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse”

tarakiyee.com/on-the-enshittif

> Read against the speech itself, Lorde's argument seems less concerned with whether antitrust law can break up monopolies and more with whose knowledge counts, who gets to define the problem, and what gets systematically erased when liberation movements reproduce the exclusions of the systems they are opposing.

JayViiGary Strydom's Tiny Car

LLMs do not "democratize programming". A 4-year-old can learn to program. LLMs throw up stupid barriers by convincing you that you can't learn to program and you have to rely on whatever shit the bobot spits out. Every asshole that says that AI "democratizes" fucking anything is trying to scam you.

JayVii

In an attempt to use my smartphone a lot less, I am currently trying Newsboat's Podcast integration and a slim script I hacked together this morning. It automatically fetches podcast episodes, downloads and pushes them to the MP3-Player I bought a few months ago for taking to the gym.

It is of course a little bit more clunky than simply using Antennapod on my smartphone, but honestly, it is a quite smooth and pleasant experience nonetheless. Let's see how this goes for a few weeks.

#newsboat #podboat #rss #podcast

JayViiMike :nixos:
graphic showing Linux VS Windows

For many people, the #Linux vs #Windows vs #Mac debate is a privilege — it assumes you can choose. But working with the Computer Upcycle Project, I've seen the real choice is often Linux vs no computer at all.

~95% of donated computers are "too old" for Windows 11 or macOS. Linux installs on them anyway, adding 10+ years of life to machines #Microsoft and #Apple called trash.

This isn't Linux vs Windows. It's Linux vs e-waste.

JayViiAnya Karl
JayVii shared a note by Anya Karl Mar 28, 2026

Perfekter Zeitpunkt, um die Miniserie "Adolescence" zu empfehlen.

Im Zentrum steht ein 13-jähriger, der verdächtigt wird, eine Mitschülerin getötet zu haben.

Es geht um die Auswirkungen von Patriarchat & Frauenfeindlichkeit, um Online-Radikalisierung, toxische Männlichkeit, die Incel-Bewegung & die Konsequenzen, die all das für Jungen & Mädchen hat.

Die schauspielerischen Leistungen sind legendär, der One-Shot-Dreh pro Folge ebenso, die Intensität kaum aushaltbar & erschütternd.

JayViikcxt (casey)
AI, mental health

if you're using AI regularly to generate text/presentations that you intend to use persuasively i don't think i can trust a single thing you say. Where does the AI end and the human begin?

I think this is why im so against AI generated commit messages especially if the code was written by a human, you wrote the code so you should be able to demonstrate that you understand what the change does and why.

If you're deferring that to an AI and you made a subtle logic error that it decides to justify for you suddenly we have obfuscated our own fucking zero days. Good luck finding the bug if the commit message describes the error as if it was intentional.

For general text, if you start with the conclusion and let the AI write the justification then there is no justification!!! Details matter, having a paper trail for decision making matters.

I wonder how many executives will escape the consequences of their white collar crimes by blaming AI.

AI zombification is coming and it's going to create a distinct difference in communication styles between those who do and don't use it, honestly that point is already here.

And we're gonna find out yet again that marx was right when it becomes clear that AI usage correlates with class lines.

JayViiMetaGer
JayVii shared a note by MetaGer Mar 10, 2026

Die Informationssuche verändert sich, TikTok wird immer häufiger als Suchmaschine genutzt, insbesondere von GenZ & GenAlpha.

Erinnern wir uns an die Zeiten, als schon die Internetsuche negativ beurteilt wurde, weil die schnelle häppchenweise Bereitstellung von Information als Problem gesehen wurde. Inzwischen kann man froh sein, wenn die Gruppe der sehr jungen Nutzer die klassische Suche noch medienkompetent beherrschen und Infos nicht nur von Influencern beziehen.

retail-news.de/tiktok-als-such

JayViiMetaGer
JayVii shared a note by MetaGer Mar 12, 2026

Mojeek und Kagi im Test!
Wer MetaGer als #Suchmaschine nutzt, erhält übrigens auch Mojeek-Ergebnisse. Es ist ganz aufschlussreich, mal zu schauen, von welchen Anbietern ein Ergebnis bei uns kommt. Manchmal z.B. kommt es nur von Mojeek. Das macht dann wieder deutlich, dass eine Metasuchmaschine gewisse Vorteile in der Ergebnisvielfalt haben kann.

heise.de/hintergrund/Google-Al