It’s definitely the IT Crowd.

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

We live near Western NC, and this area was hit hard by the hurricane two years ago, and is still trying to rebuild.

Trump was there a couple of weeks ago threatening to not provide the rest of the Fema funding they’re expecting if his candidate didn’t get elected in the mid term. Even for the level of backwoods chud that would still show up at a Trump event, they weren’t happy with that.

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.

This is basically me.

I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.

My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).

In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.

I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.

I really would prefer to get my personal / business machine off of Windows.

The VM is a development environment that has to be Windows, and isn’t a big deal to me since it’s just a bunch of other dev tools and third party software.

That may be a good option. It’s a minor pain, but mostly just because the email notification has been down there for like ~20 years so it would be nice for it to still be there, but it’s definitely not a show stopper.

Probably worth a shot.

The Windows VM will still be needed for native Windows programming, that will have to happen for at least another decade.

I could have sworn that was Windows only from the notification I got (they switched from icon on minimize to icon on close).

If it works in Linux, that would be great.

Yea, I just need to convert one of my existing non critical images from VMware to one of the other formats, and start experimenting until I find something that works.

But I spend 40+ hours a week in the VM (even on Windows), so I’ll have to spend some time testing and make sure everything is solid (and don’t want to deal with rebuilding the image, so I need to migrate it).

The only reason I’m even running VMware is that when I moved to VMs for dev machines in 2010 I needed multiple monitor and USB support, and at the time VMware was the only option that supported both.

I would be doing native work on Linux once everything was setup, but we deploy a bunch of Android POS hardware, and our MDM solution only has a Windows app (it uses ADB to install / configure the machine). Some days I’m setting them up all day and would prefer to use the Windows VM instead of having to dual boot.

In Windows both Outlook and Thunderbird can go to to the system tray when closed or minimized, and continue to run in the background without having to be an open window or sit on the bar. It also changes the icon when messages come in.

Dual boot is what I do now, but I end up spending all day in Windows, and everything gets out of sync (documents, etc), and I never boot back to Linux.

I’ll check out QEMU. I need multi monitor support, and USB pass-through at a minimum to be able to work with a USB software dongle and debug Android devices from Windows, so it gets a bit complicated. And I don’t want to rebuild my main work image, so migrating the virtual drive from VMWare to something else is the next step.

I need to pick a distro for the next run. I used / liked OpenSUSE the first time, and most things were pretty stable, but I could never get VMWare running. I went with Kubuntu next since there was solid Ubuntu support from VMWare, but overall it seems really unstable, especially with multiple monitors / KDE.

Thinking maybe just going with Debian this time might be the best route.

I’ve switched twice but keep having to fall back to Windows. About to take my third attempt.

My main issues relate to VMWare. The rest are small details that I’m sure I can work around with the right distro (I run 3 monitors and a GTX1080, so KDE stability has been weird).

VMWare is a real pain in Linux, and my main deal breaker, so I need to see if I can migrate to something else, as I work in a couple of Windows virtual machines all day.

Thanks for posting.

This is one of the minor pain points on my list for migrating from Windows.

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).