Joe

demonstrated any actual competency in this domain

It may be that he/they have significant competency in this domain, just not publically or under this name/pseudonym.

I’ve personally made contributions under pseudonyms just to avoid employer paperwork/approvals, for projects that I’d rather not have my real name attached to, and for sharing in potentially hostile communities.

I’ve also developed software internal to companies that has never been released publicly.

In short … he doesn’t need to prove his prior credentials to you, me, or anyone. He may have some, he may not.

We can legitimately critique what he/they have done in this project all we like though.

I read the other replies. I was purposefully giving you an alternative, rather than repeating what others said. How you choose to receive it is up to you. Good luck, I guess.

Hate to be “that guy”, but you can probably make the FOSS alternative work for you. Create a feature/bug issue on the project(s) explaining the problem in detail. It might be easy to fix.

You can also try to fix it yourself, or ask a programmer friend to help. Friends often like helping friends.

For a smaller investment (eg. one month of ChatGPT Plus for Codex, Kimi, whatever) and you can probably fix all the niggly things that you don’t like yourself. Just don’t go opening pull requests for code changes you don’t understand - it won’t be appreciated.

Some home internet routers (e.g… from FritzBox) support multiple VOIP providers, letting you configure rules as to which provider is used for outgoing calls (e.g… default for local calls, and another for international calls). And they provide a normal phone connector.

I would also do #1, and I’d probably make it work (loooong time Linux user and persistent debugger).

#2 is probably simpler, both conceptually and technically. NAT and FW config is self-contained, and there are plenty of docs and how-tos.

Note: I’m not a proxmox user, so there could be some proxmox specific spanners… But I doubt it.

A couple of tricks I use:

• an apparmor profile tied to a shell script that wraps other commands … it restricts read & write access to a scratch directory … perfect for builds or one off scripts.

• iptables rules & cgroups to restrict network access… I have a setuid wrapper that drops privs again…

• bwrap and mounting only what’s necessary… quick to get going.

• custom landlock wrapper, similar to apparmor but allows for quick userspace wrapping.

They can be combined too.

I was recently reading about Talon Voice, which sounded quite interesting with lots of usability hacks. Unfortunately, not an option anymore if you are a Linux user: https://www.osnews.com/story/145162/accessibility-input-tool-removes-x11-support-doesnt-want-to-support-wayland-users-caught-in-the-middle/

spits on ground, squints reeeeaaal slow

Now listen here sonny… we don’t take kindly to none of that AI business around these parts.

We is simple, God fearin’ folk, raised on sweat, dirt, and good honest labor, not all of that fancy machine learnin’ contraption nonsense.

Ain’t no place for thinkin’ machines where a man’s meant to use his own two hands. So I reckon I’ll mosey on over and downvote this here post myself, nice and proper.

Why do you hate freeloading virus-loving mouth-breathers so much? screams into the air: Why won’t anyone think of the freeloading virus-loving mouth-breathers?! /s

You sir, need an AI agent to maintain your self-hosting addiction and free you from the shackles of homelab responsibility. Automate the automations that maintain the automations. That’s the real endgame. /s

Many people have “itches to scratch” and some interest in development but little time to learn, so AI coding tools will allow them to scratch many of those itches without paying $ to others or investing that time (for better or for worse). Even as an experienced (but no longer full time) coder, I use it to scratch itches when I don’t have the time/lust.

Often enough, you’ll find some customizable app that does 90% of what you want, with a bunch of features you don’t care about. Writing personalized apps is a cool new thing, giving you exactly the functionality that you want. Many times these will be based on OSS or open libraries, which the AI just glues together.

Will this personalized development result in new quality OSS apps, though? I doubt it. We also don’t really need more sloppy code on github.

There are a lot of personal apps that just happen to have an OSS license… and then there are OSS projects, built and maintained as OSS community projects. It takes dedication to run a real OSS project, build a community, handle issues, websites, etc.

Will AI coding tools assist developers of real OSS projects? Sure… many are already using it to varying degrees. We’ll increasingly see it being used to find and fix bugs and security issues ahead of time - security researchers & blackhats are already having a field day.

Indeed. I suspect it would need to be framed around national security and national interests, to have any realistic chance of success. AI is being seen as a necessity for the future of many countries … embrace it, or be steamrolled in the future by those who did, so a soft touch is being embraced.

Copyright and licensing uncertainty could hinder that, and the status quo today in many places is to not treat training as copyright infringement (eg. US), or to require an explicit opt-out (eg. EU). A lack of international agreements means it’s all a bit wishy washy, and hard to prove and enforce.

Things get (only slightly) easier if the material is behind a terms-of-service wall.

Let me know if you convince any lawmakers, and I’ll show you some lawmakers about to be invited to expensive “business” trips and lunches by lobbyists.

Don’t worry, your email to requests@luigifanclub.cc with the subject line of “next target” is safe. /s

Why? Because DOS and Windows 3.11 kind of sucked and I wanted to learn and experiment.

Even though I started out working mostly with the console, it was amazingly refreshing. X came a year or two later, when the web made it worth it. OS/2 Warp 3 also slipped in there for a while. Great times.

You made your point, and it was clearly understood the first time. Perhaps you don’t understand my point?

True, but the EU member states are members of it, and while complicated, ECHR rulings are generally respected by members and the EU. Why make things simple, right? :-)

There’s no EU Constitution, but there is the European Court of Human Rights.

That all goes well until someone uses your platform for scams or CSAM… or when (as the other guy said), infra costs go up. Throw in various privacy regulations, and it can be a frustrating and costly endeavour.

There’s a sweet spot, but I fear it’s quite a small one.

So you want to create a human exploitation / profit maximising system?

Pretty sure those are proprietary algorithms, with some common knowledge foundations that LLMs will happily tell you about.

It’s all simple enough at a small scale, but the challenge is optimizing it for your use-cases, and building for scale & reliability in a cost efficient manner.

Such companies will likely also have top notch software engineers & statisticians, marketing teams, psychologists and lawyers on the payroll, all contributing their part to the perpetuation of human misery in the name of corporate profit.