I found VM to be on-par with Docker. Sure, the initial provision takes time, but this is true to for initial Docker build as well. I know that worrying about sharing kernel with the Docker container, is probably light paranoia, but I really don't trust agents to not run malicious code.
Few people posted here about the "intent" behind such content, i.e. today, most people are motivated by money because "this influencer told me I can make 10$k by writing blogs", so while you might find a blog you like, it's not immune to starting to accept "just put our link here for $$$ and we link back to you".
Something similar happened in the Podcast and YouTube spheres, where every creator seems to be "sponsored" by these shady companies that allocate 70% of their revenue for creator payouts, for the sake of affiliate marketing.
On the other hand, take LinkedIn for example, and you get the bottom of corporate AI-slop.
I agree that anonymization makes people more hostile to others, but I doubt the de-anonymization is the solution. Old school forums and IRC channels were, _mostly_, safe because they were (a) small, (b) local, and (c) usually had offline meetups.
I remember participating on *free* phpBB forums, or IRC channels. I was amazed that I could chat with people smarter than me, on a wide range of topics, all for the cost of having an internet subscription.
It's only recently, when I was considering to revive the old-school forum interaction, that I have realized that while I got the platforms for free, there were people behind them who paid for the hosting and the storage, and were responsible to moderate the content in order to not derail every discussion to low level accusation and name calling contest.
I can't imagine the amount of time, and tools, it takes to keep discussion forums free of trolls, more so nowadays, with LLMs.
Something that's been on my mind for a while now is shared moderation - instead of having a few moderators who deal with everything, distribute the moderation load across all users. Every user might only have to review a couple posts a day or whatever, so it should be a negligible burden, and send each post that requires moderation to multiple users so that if there's disagreement it can be pushed to more senior/trusted users.
This is specifically in the context of a niche hobby website where the rules are simple and identifying rule-breaking content is easy. I'm not sure it would work on something with universal scope like Reddit or Facebook, but I'd rather we see more focused communities anyway.
I dont know if it's true or not. But I remember reading about this person who would do the community reports for cheating for a game like cs or something. They had numerous bot accounts and spent a hour a day on it. Set up in a way that when they reviewed a video the bots would do the same.
But all the while they were doing legitimate reporting, when they came across their real cheating account they'd report not cheating. And supposedly this person got away with it for years for having good reputable community reporting with high alignment scores.
I know 1 exception doesnt mean it's not worth it. But we must acknowledge the potential abuse. Id still rather have 1 occasionally ambitious abuser over countless low effort ones.
Yeah I can definitely see that being a threat model. In the gaming case I think it's harder because it's more of a general reputation system and it's based on how people feel while playing with you, whereas for a website every post can be reviewed by multiple parties and the evidence is right there. But certainly I would still expect some people to try to maximize their reputation and use that to push through content that should be more heavily moderated, and in the degenerate case the bad actors comprise so much of the userbase that they peer review their own content.
Fine, I accept your point. You don't have an obligation to disclose the tools you've used. But what struck me in that particular thread, is that the author kept claiming they did not use AI, nothing at all, while there were give away signs that the code was, _at least partly_, AI generated.
It honestly felt like being gaslighted. You see one thing, but they keep claiming you are wrong.
The thing with em-dashes is not the em-dash itself. I use em-dashes, because when I started to blog, I was curious about improving my English writing skills (English is not my native language, and although I have learned English in school, most of my English is coming from playing RPGs and watching movies in English).
According to what I know, the correct way to use em-dash is to not surround it by spaces, so words look connected like--this. And indeed, when I started to use em-dashes in my blog(s), that's how I did it. But I found it rather ugly, so I started to put spaces around it. And there were periods where I stopped using em-dash all together.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that unless you write as a profession, most people are inconsistent. Sometimes, I use em-dashes. Sometimes I don't. In some cases I capitalize my words where needed, and sometimes not, depending on how in a hurry I am, or whether I type from a phone (which does a lot of heaving lifting for me).
If you see someone who consistently uses the "proper" grammar in every single post on the internet, it might be a sign that they use AI.
I am a native English speaker and I agree with you completely that em-dashes look better when surrounded by spaces rather than connected directly to the words.
I knew it was real as soon as I read “I stared to see a pattern”, which is funny now I find weird little non spellcheck mistakes endearing since they stamp “oh this is an actual human” on the work
Ha! Despite the fact that I tend to proof read my posts before publishing, right after publishing, and sometimes re-reading them few months after publishing, I still tend to not notice some obvious typos. Kinda makes you feel appreciation for the profession of editors and spell checkers. (And yes, I use LanguageTools in neovim, but I refuse to feed my articles to LLMs).
I dont mind paying for a personal finance tool, but I feel like most of them are made for an average consumer who spends in one currency and needs budgeting. I operate in at least 3 currencies, don’t care about budgeting, and need support for tracking stocks and automatic currency conversions.
The only tools that were able to provide that were GnuCash and PTAs like beancount.
My point is, there is a big segment of people who are not served by existing personal finance tools simply because they operate in more than 1 currency, or have a slightly more complicated setup than envelope budgeting.
Are the currency conversions automatic, do they fetch the rate of whatever service you're using? E.g. converting USD to EUR on Wise on 28 Dec 2025 surely gets you a different amount compared to doing it on Revolut, or paying EUR with your card (which is USD-denominated), and on Jan 2 2026 the rates are also different..
I was travelling in the Nordics (they had 4 currencies back then, and they still do!) and wanted to have some precision what cash I exchanged with what rate...
The currency conversion can be whatever you want. I have a python script to bring conversion rates for European Central Bank because I need to report my business earning according to ECB rates, but you can specify any rate you want both during transaction entry (for example `100 USD @@ 95 EUR`), and as a global rate.
I have 14 years of personal (and 2 years of sole proprietorship) finance data in beancount. I tried all the available personal finance apps there are, from cloud/online offerings to offline apps. Eventually, I settled on beancount because it is the most versatile file format. In addition to tracking finances, I can track stocks, unvested RSU grants, vacation hours, and even personal training I have paid for but yet to use.
It's cumbersome at times, and I do miss the (G)UI of entering transactions, but with (neo)vim I got used to it and I breeze trough my finances in 15-20 minutes once a week.
How US centric is the software? I've found that a lot of these accounting/finance type programs have very prescriptive ideas and expected usage of it that doesn't really seem to even remotely match the type of exported data I get from my UK bank account.
The core software itself is completely agnostic to currency or country. Otoh the importer ecosystem is somewhat US focused but a) you can easily write importers yourself b) I just published importers for a bunch of UK institutions (e.g. HSBC, Barclays, AJ Bell) - see the other post hanging around the HN frontpage :)
I have a git setup and I commit once a week, but don't currently push it anywhere. I do want to install a git server on my home server at some point, as I don't intend to push my financial data to any of the SaaS git offerings.
it's good (even novel) if you're a dev or are used to working with this kind of interface.
But for the vast majority of people (even including devs), this will not be ideal at all and most people don't really care about it being in text files.
What I'm trying to say is that its designed for a very specific niche userbase and I doubt most people will have the same experience as you described after trying every single personal finance app to settle on this.
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