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Cake day: March 22nd, 2025

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  • sure, and that works at small scales and as long as no change is required.

    when either of those two change (large projects where interdependent components become inevitable and frequent updates are necessary) it becomes impossible to use AI for basically anything.

    any change you make then has to be carefully considered and weighed against it’s consequences, which AIs can’t do, because they can’t absorb the context of the entire project.

    look, I’m not saying you can’t use AI, or that AI is entirely useless.

    I’m saying that using AI is the same as any other tool; use it deliberately and for the right job at the right time.

    the big problem, especially in commercial contexts, is people using AI without realizing these limitations, thinking it’s some magical genie that can everything.



  • yeah, no… that’s not at all what i said.

    i didn’t say “AI doesn’t work”, i said it works exactly as expected: producing bullshit.

    i understand perfectly well how to get it to spit out useful information, because i know what i can and cannot ask it about.

    I’d much rather not use it, but it’s pretty much unavoidable now, because of how trash search results have become, specifically for technical subjects.

    what absolutely doesn’t work is asking AI to perform highly specific, production critical configurations on live systems.

    you CAN use it to get general answers to general questions.

    “what’s a common way to do this configuration?” works well enough.

    “fix this config file for me!” doesn’t work, because it has no concept of what that means in your specific context. and no amount of increasingly specific prompts will ever get you there. …unless “there” is an utter clusterfuck, see the OP top of chain (should have been more specific here…) for proof…


  • no, AI just sucks ass with any highly customized environment, like network infrastructure, because it has exactly ZERO capacity for on-the-fly learning.

    it can somewhat pretend to remember something, but most of the time it doesn’t work, and then people are so, so surprised when it spits out the most ridiculous config for a router, because all it did was string together the top answers on stack overflow from a decade ago, stripping out any and all context that makes it make sense, and presents it as a solution that seems plausible, but absolutely isn’t.

    LLMs are literally design to trick people into thinking what they write makes sense.

    they have no concept of actually making sense.

    this is not an exception, or an improper use of the tech.

    it’s an inherent, fundamental flaw.











  • so first of all: fair points.

    but also to consider:

    • the Vatican is the only not-country with a permanent seat at the UN (this in itself is somewhat insane)
    • the Pope’s direct influence might be limited, but the cultural influence the catholic church holds should not be underestimated. if the pope gets killed or injured or simply stubs his toe in gaza, europe will, absolutely, go berserk. it’s pretty dumb, as you’ve pointed out, but it will happen.
    • beyond religious influence, the cultural influence of the catholic church is actually incredible! (consider: every settlement, from village with population 5, all the way to metropolitan cities has at least one church in all of europe! every single one!)
    • the pope is held in high esteem, even among other religions and their leadership. killing a pope is, effectively, a declaration of war to the entire world. that’s the kind of shit that makes north korea go “wait, that’s insanity, wtf?!” (and this isn’t pure admiration, it’s simple survival instinct: the leadership of all major religions is smart enough to realize “if it can happen to the pope, it can definitely happen to us”, and that includes jewish leadership)
    • even most people that feel contemptuous about the church as an institution (which i definitely am one of) would be extremely upset by such a blatantly hostile action against a major foreign dignitary. even just harming a pope is unthinkable to most europeans raised in christian households. even if we’ve become firmly atheist later…
    • imagine the president of germany, france, italy, poland, spain, or really any other european country being assassinated in gaza. all of europe would revolt. it would cause absolute mayhem in geopolitics and most likely result in immediate International intervention, i.e. severe sanctions. (because israel has nukes, although they would most likely be forced to relinquish or severely reduce their capabilities and they would definitely be subjected to international oversight.)
    • the US cannot, i repeat, can not ignore hostilities against the church. there will be riots, and it will unite people like basically nothing else could, because even conservatives would get severe whiplash from those news. trump claims to be christian, and even the nutty american christians would be upset enough to force a reaction out of the white house. yes, even this white house. because, as someone else has pointed out, not ever in history was a pope killed in a military conflict. never.

    or to some it up:

    ✅: fuck the catholic church and fuck the pope!

    🚫: but never, EVER, fuck with the pope!

    Madonna really, truly, has a point here: the pope could probably end this genocide!

    because as you’ve pointed out; having fans in gaza isn’t really important!

    …but the leader of THE most influential religion in the entire world?

    hell yeah, that guy has influence! and hell yeah they could definitely throw their weight behind this cause!

    and Madonna drawing attention to that fact is actually solid strategy to get the church to respond:

    no response means complicity, but virtually any response other than a resounding renunciation will be seen as weakness.

    she is putting them on the spot, forcing a reaction. that’s how politics works, and this is a political move, and an honestly pretty great one at that!

    edit; forgot this bit:

    this is why Madonna pointing at the pope is more than just a rich person that could do more being cheap; nobody in the world has the sheer support of the pope and the catholic church. she’s acting as a force amplifier. that’s something that goes beyond mere monetary influence, although you are absolutely right that she could do more.



  • what a ridiculous idea. that’s not how anything works:

    copyright applies to the intellectual property, not the exact file.

    so the code itself is the copyrighted thing, not the file you download.

    it doesn’t matter whether you download the gpl version, you type out the gpl version by hand, or delete all new code until only gpl code is left.

    all you would need to proof is that the code is identical to the gpl code. how you got to that code is completely irrelevant.

    you have some fundamental misunderstandings about copyrighted material, intellectual property, and fair use.

    most importantly: copyright applies to intellectual property. the idea of a thing, not the physical thing.

    so in the case of this emulator, the file and where you got it from is completely irrelevant; only the content of the file, the code, has any meaning. which means any files that contain the same code are identical in the eyes of the law, regardless of how you got them.

    copyright is not a contract, but a license. and a license is a manual that explains how intellectual property (the idea of a thing, not the physical thing) is allowed to be used by someone. it’s not specific to an individual, which is why contracts have to be signed by both parties. so no, you don’t have a contract and no obligation to adhere to the new one at all. you can choose to use the old license, as long as you don’t use any of the new code.

    unless you want to modify and/or distribute the new code, the license (CC-BY-NC-ND) is irrelevant for the user.

    and you can modify your own private copy as much as you want, you just can’t distribute it, or modify and use it in a way that is illegal in some other way. but that’s about it.

    and all of this applies to both US and german law.

    and none of this is remotely relevant, because the gpl version is still available for download!

    nothing got replaced, so the gpl license is very much still applicable to that version of the software!

    “new” does not mean that the old version went anywhere; it’s still around. and you can still use, modify, and distribute it under the gpl.




  • yes and no:

    the copyright owner can do whatever they want, but they can’t really revoke a GPL license. that’s not really a thing.

    and the part about

    If you obtained your copy under the old license you can use it under the old license when you obtain a new copy you have a new license agreement.

    seems to me like you are implying that “use under the old license” means “run the program on my own machine”, but that’s not true, since GPL explicitly allows redistribution and modification.

    under a GPL license, you effectively give up control over your software voluntarily:

    The GNU General Public Licenses are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software.

    (highlighted the relevant portion for your convenience)

    this makes revoking the license effectively impossible.

    you could continue development under a different license, but that gets legally tricky very quickly.

    for example: all the code previously under GPL, stays under GPL. so if someone where to modify those parts of the code and redistribute it as a patch, you couldn’t legally do anything about that.

    which seems to be what the OOP claims the change to a CC-BY-NC-ND forbids, apparently misunderstanding, that this new license only applies to code added to the repo since the license change, not the code from before the license change.