And why students of all people shouldn’t be using it.

Don’t use it.

I know it seems like everyone is doing it, and it’s really good and cool, but that’s not reality, and you can certainly just write code the old fashioned way by thinking about what you want to do, and then typing some words on into an IDE or text editor.

I rarely manage to time anything correctly for market fluctuations, but for once I hit it right on the head when I built this machine last summer.

I could totally see that for the web stuff where I only make changes a couple of times a year. Usually when working on those I just delete the local DB before I start to keep it clean, but spinning up a new copy would be more efficient.

For our desktop apps / server Postgres is always installed locally on the machine, so keeping it there mirrors “production”.

I spent most of my time working on those apps and services, or working on the Android client (or both at the same time when a feature requires that both change), and often on a copy of actual customer data as we do a lot of custom work for clients.

Why an RDBMS on the local though? Testing shit doesn’t make sense to name it as a regular piece of software.

I always build against a local DB?

For our desktop / LAN software the DB will always be local.

For web, it’s easier since I’m likely to burn the DB down over and over during early development / prototyping. But I’m not using cloud hosted DB even in production, and don’t expose Postgres outside the DB server, so I find it easier to work on this way.

EDIT: I also think that a default installation of VS includes SQL Server. I don’t use it, so always have to adjust the installation and remove all of those bits, but I also have complete control of my environment. I could see an IT department just doing a stock VS installation with the required workloads.

I build windows software, so need Windows and VS. I keep my entire development environment in a virtual machine. I also have a couple of other VMs for client isolation, clean installation testing, etc.

So having that much memory allows me to run more than one virtual machine at a time, and keep enough reserve for my actual desktop.

It was also my first rebuild in over 12 years, and RAM prices hadn’t gone stupid yet, so I figured I’d drop a few more $ and build another decade+ future proof machine.

Some of us bought our 64gb of ram when it was cheap.

My brother in law worked at the BMW plant and they weren’t supposed to have their phones on the floor at all.

As a solo dev, working from home, the real reason I use Github is for off site backup.

Back in the SVN days we hosted our own server for a bunch of years, then moved to one of the many paid SVN hosts that existed.

I think I’m going to spin up another VPS and self host Forgejo at this point (or see if I can add it to one of my existing servers).

I think the fundamental difference is that a human trained on something isn’t likely to reproduce the thing they were trained on exactly.

I know that some research I read a few years ago showed that LLMs generally produced novel text (rather than simply returning verbatim training material), but that that wasn’t always true, especially as the training sample got smaller, or a single training text got larger (something like a 1000 words).

So sure, for something simple like creating super standard CRUD or basic API endpoints in common languages, the sample size is significant enough that what you get is likely to be homogenized from thousands of samples available, and not likely to be an exact copy of someone else’s code. But the risk is that as the problem being solved gets more niche, and the training sample size gets smaller, you become more likely to get exact copies of someone else’s code, or something close enough that it might be considered plagiarism.

There’s also still grey areas where some courts in some areas have stated that LLM generated content can’t be copyrighted, since a human didn’t create it, creating issues with protecting sources with copyright.

IMO proprietary code has this same risk.

I have non FOSS projects that my company writes / sells (I’ve written these for over 20 years, but only owned them for 3, and opening the existing source is complicated as it’s tangled deeply with non OSS projects).

I don’t allow LLM generated code in our products either, since I have to assume that most of training was done on public repos, and there’s no way to know what licenses existed on that code (in addition to all of the other valid arguments to not use that shit).

Repetition is key here. And solving problems.

I started many years ago with a “for beginners” book, and didn’t fully understand a lot of it by the end.

So I started trying to build something, and searched for answers to the things I couldn’t figure out (and went back to the book numerous times). I don’t think I ever finished that project, but by persisting through it, and figuring out how to solve the problems that I ran into, I learned how to build something, and it stuck.

when Microsoft decides to EOL

Will never happen. The freaking VB6 runtime is still supported in Win11, and there’s a mountain of .NET Framework code still out there.

Framework 4.8 still gets regular security updates, and will for years to come.

Currently using UptimeRobot, but have used a few different products over the years.

All of this, and the facts that the entire thing was trained on stolen material, and the companies behind it are all run by bat shit crazy shitheads.

Everyone loves to shit on US tech companies, hates Windows and MS, and Amazon, Google, Apple, and Meta (all rightfully so), but is absolutely willing to overlook the AI companies that are arguably doing more harm than those others combined (or are tightly invested / integrated with them, or are them) just so they don’t have to spend a few minutes typing, or thinking about how something works.

Another article trying to solve the problems of using AI in development with better specs or better prompts instead of just writing the fucking code.

Even worse is that I used to be able to get Crucial drives for less than Samsung, and I trust them way more. The Samsung ones are fine, but we’ve never lost a single Crucial SSD in 14 years.

I’ll take a look at the PNY ones. We actually can use 256gb, since these are just backup drives that get a data dump every 5 minutes, so that may save some $.

We buy a decent amount of half TB SSD drives to add to desktop PCs that we sell to customers.

Samsung EVO drives have gone from $47 to $285 in the last year.

Oh no, anyway …

They opened one a few years ago here in SC. It was in a strip mall that was just 3 restaurants all owned by the same guy (the Donatos, his own private restaurant, and a Salsaritas).

After about a year he moved the Donatos menu to the restaurant, made it a drive through only for pickup, and expanded the restaurant bar into the old Donatos dining room.