I have a rough idea of what I want to achieve and some steps on the way there, but don’t know how to actually implement it.

That is literally what the job is. If you can’t do that then you aren’t an engineer.

I’m concerned that there are skills I am missing out on developing, but at the same time if AI is being pushed so heavily is it not something I should lean into to be better equipped in working with it?

I’ll tell you what I told my nephew: Yes, everyone is going to use AI to one degree or another. So why would I hire you over anyone else? Or, more pointedly, why would I hire someone at all?

Getting to that interview gets harder and harder every year (every month, really). But engineers (and even many managers) can immediately tell someone who knows their shit versus someone who “vibe codes” all the “hard parts”.

These days it more or less explicitly refers to asking an LLM to write your code for you based on prompts.

But on a broader spectrum it is just the idea of (I forget the buzz word) Ticket Driven Development. A manager defines software based on a series of (jira, gitlab, kanban, whatever) tickets/issues and someone below them (in this case, an LLM) implements it.

Done properly? It is incredibly effective as it allows designers and “idea people” to work to their strengths and junior developers to work to theirs. The problem being that, much like when it is a junior dev under them, the person making the tickets likely has no idea what they are doing.

Which is the big problem. Someone who has been writing scripts for decades? Using chatgpt to get the syntax of a function or even to write a utility script is great. They can focus their brainpower on the harder/more fun stuff. Someone who has been writing code for, at most, a year or two? They never learn those foundations and never have a way to do anything the LLM can’t (or verify if the LLM is correct).

In fairness, this is a dot ml board so 404 might get banned for completely different reasons.

… Have you tried? Been a minute since I signed up for my free “account” but I want to say the only requirement was that the email is a real one because you’ll be sent an auth link whenever you login. No identification beyond that unless I choose to pay.

So… if you are truly concerned then use a VPN and a free email service every time you want to read this or any other independent media sites that use the same model?

You know what an even bigger barrier is? Not existing.

Independent journalism is good. 404 is REALLY good (it comes out of all the best parts of Vice’s tech reporting). They have a very small barrier that basically exists solely to fight bots as a mixture of reducing traffic load (keeping costs down) and encouraging people to actually consider supporting said independent journalism.

Instead we have chucklefucks immediately wanting to remove that paywall or outright accusing them of abusing SEO and data scraping and all that. And these are the same people who will then get mad when EVERYTHING is AI slop.

And this ties in directly to what right wingers want in terms of making the populace even stupider and more uninformed.

This is literally why these sites have the free paywall. Some get bypased. In this case, I suspect 404 gave archive dot org access because they rely so heavily on that site for researching articles.

But. Regardless: if you think a journalism outlet is so evil and are scamming everyone… Maybe just ignore them because you clearly don’t think they are worth your time.

Also: republican love people like you who do everything possible to attack independent journalism.

Which is also a wall between bots scraping the articles.

Support independent media.

Yes. the system logs every entry/exit by keyfob.

Whether the building managers associate those fobs with individuals or even know how to look at the log is a different discussion entirely.

That said: If the building cares enough to have a lock on the door then they have a camera too and THAT is much more likely to be recorded. So if your “friend” depends on people not knowing he is entering or exiting his building for whatever reason… good luck with that.

Fun story time: I used to work at a facility that was VERY strict about people badging in and even out of many areas. At one point it came up in a safety debrief that there was no way to log who was inside or outside of an area… that required badging in and out. Could see someone’s brain cell trigger in real time as they proceeded to ask a lot of very pointed questions that boiled down to:

They had an access control list that was checked. They did not know how to access the log files to know when that list was checked or even the result of a check. The person who asked questions was pushed out of the company because it was easier.

If a government has you in the nebulous situation where you technically aren’t in the country yet and they want your phone, it doesn’t really matter what security system you have on there. You either give them access or go to a black site.

That’s why every company of “moderate” size ends up adopting a policy of “DEVICE for foreign travel”. You don’t take your actual work laptop/phone/whatever. You take a burner (except they hate the term “burner”) that can remote in but stores little to no data locally. And you realize that any good remote access software has logic to detect if you are accessing it from a security checkpoint and flag you…

So what does that mean for you, an individual?

• A super locked down device is just gonna get your ass beat… if you are lucky.
• A completely clean factory wiped device? That is going to raise a bunch of red flags (kind of rightfully) and more or less equate to the above

Like almost all things privacy/security related: Nothing is easy if you actually need it. A good friend of mine is a journalist and they semi-regularly do the kinds of stories that get a person “investigated”. And the reality is that there is nothing they can do, in software, to protect themselves. So what they instead do is have completely separate devices that are never in the same physical location. So, unless they are communicating with a sensitive contact, they always have a device that “looks real” because… it is. Texts from the partner about a dinner party next week, spam from facebook, etc.

And if they need to access something sensitive while on foreign travel or otherwise unable to get back to their “private” devices? Either buy a cheap laptop at a best buy equivalent or use one of their burner emails/accounts.

1. Learn how to take a screenshot
2. Clean your damned screen