I haven’t write for quite some time…​ A lot of things are on my head right now…​

I still haven’t finished appartment renovation and finally decided to workout. Other than that I work as Full Stack Developer for ING. I wish to have more motivation to make some proprer programming. Sadly due to overwhelming situation at home it’s hard to be productive.

Last week I started a rewrite of my Stativa project. It will be moved to fully web based solution. Hope to finish it before new year.

From positive notes I listen to an audiobook about Stoicism philosophy. It’s pretty good and it made my mind less focussed on current advancements in AI.

I also learned Dutch to a point where it’s possible for me to communicate during drinks with my friend in Weesp.

Maybe I should start writing about my general thoughts and not only focus on IT. There are for sure some things I would like to write about like atheism, pacifism and social media privacy issues.

Time will show.

Lastly I bought OReilly subscription and try to read couple of pages a week. It’s really good service. Sadly it comes with a price that if I would not be a programmer probably would not be affordable.

Stay positive people! No matter what.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have first confirmed death which was caused by LLM.

Some Belgian person took his own life after not being able to find help from AI that he treated as his therapist.

I guess the introduction of chatbots goes faster than education that these AIs are not your friends, therapists, or someone you should fall in love with.

Pine64 made another newsletter with information about their products and I just love it! I wish more companies did such updates. Clear and concise newsletters that are easy to read on any device.

Pine64, Duckduckgo, Leaf Shave are one of the few companies that newsletters I read fully and the key features between them are the same.

I recently started to think about current sources of data that are given to AI and the claim that "AI like GPT is not producing samples of data it was learning on but instead creates new content based on context".

So let’s start the experiment. Some person A scraps websites like IMDb for movie reviews and later feeds it to his AI. Next, he defines the output of AI. Basically, AI should output new reviews with the context of previously learned movies. Context is defined as a positive or negative review. So when you ask this AI to generate a review of Scott Pilgrim vs The World it would generate content with text that is completely different than all reviews written in IMDb but the context of those reviews is remembered. It’s important that this context is limited to the data sources.

So this AI is capable of generating all reviews for all IMDb movies but reviews are each time different. The thing is you ask your AI to make a review based on some parameter. Let’s say the overall rating of the movie. AI is aware of this rating and it always generates positive reviews for Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

Should it be right for person A to do it? It does not repeat content with "samples" but it repeats the context of the data. It repeats the general opinion of people which is the intellectual content of IMDb.

I made small React library which allow you to create sliders from any component you want. This library should be fully compatible with any touch device which is supported by Hammer.js.

Library can be found in npm and examples of its usage here.

If you need to make changes feel free to make PR on Codeberg

Life got busier recently. I need to focus more on my thesis and work. When it comes to technologies I continued to learn GSAP but I try to focus more on CSS keyframes and CSS variables to not rely on JS for animations. Also, I invested some time in learning of Next.js.

I have stopped writing on this blog since I host everything on my local server that I did not have time to configure after I moved to a new apartment. Now I hope I will share more small updates and maybe some interesting blog posts about general programming knowledge.

Apparently, you cannot write this on LinkedIn as it’s not professional. But I don’t really care. This is my blog and I can write whatever I want here. People in Ukraine are dying because of Putin.

This is not acceptable. #fuckputin #fuckrussia

Here are a bunch of links to support Ukrainians with their fight for independence.

Looks like FLoC from Google won’t be introduced to general public and company decided to make a new algorithm for personal add targeting. They not only changed name from FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) which sounds scary to Topics but whole architecture is different. Is it good? Is tracking people online good? Depends who you ask but it’s good to keep an eye on this since it delays dropout of third party cookies functionality for Chrome browser which is now estimated for 2023.

This weekend I was involved in an FB conversation about Live Coding and why seniors don’t like it.

It all started from me reading article that really got me thinking about the state of senior IT professionals. Adam the person who made this article shared some points that seniors don’t like. I’ll also share them to give you an overview of what I think people with experience in IT are scared of.

To conclude I really think that the current state of IT professionals is a mess. People think they deserve a lot of money without proper skills and because the culture of developers moved from skilled professionals into script kiddies everyone is senior now.

Last thing. I am a senior myself but when I compare myself to people I worked with that had senior level I know which skills lack. I know how much knowledge is lacking and what I need to improve to be a better developer. If I take live codding I try to show my best skills. Many times I failed on some really basic things but I never gave up and most importantly I took lessons from my mistakes to not repeat them.

I found a great place to search websites with interesting content without the bloat.

The search engine is called Wiby and allows to search websites which are built similarly to those build in the early days of the web.

On about page of Wiby there is quote why it was build and I found it very relatable.

In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages.

Don’t you feel overwhelmed by shit coming from the Google search engine? I can tell you that I am. Every page I visit has tons of floating content, cookies popups, newsletter subscriptions, and content that is usually not interesting at all. A lot of these websites also have patterns that baits you to click. This is really horrible and I’m getting sick of it. Recently I noticed that I click on things that I really don’t want to but I do since it’s a behavior I developed.

To not end this post sadly I will share one website which was found by Wiby. It’s a website that was made by the person that was gathering old computer mouses.

It might not look modern but the content is true and it looks like someone really took the effort to write about it.

I went back to PHP and since I haven’t written in it for a couple of years I thought it’s good to check the state of the CodeIgniter framework.

API to save files is something I was not expecting since my blurry memory of PHP has information that file upload was a mess. I though maybe I was the only one who could not get my head around and then I read

When you upload files they can be accessed natively in PHP through the $_FILES superglobal. This array has some major shortcomings when working with multiple files uploaded at once, and has potential security flaws many developers are not aware of.

But no more headache! New API is clear and extremely easy to use.

$path = $this->request->getFile('userfile')->store('head_img/', 'user_name.jpg');

I think there is much to learn from the architecture of this framework. What a time to be alive!

I decided to move to VIM as my default "IDE" for university projects. I used VS Code for around 5 years now and it was working great. I think now it’s the best editor in the world. Plugins work like charm, there is support for almost every language and it’s blazingly fast.

Why then I moved to VIM again? I noticed that VS Code is going in a strange direction. Like a month ago I noticed that every time I opened it some strange login popup is shown. It’s not really described where it points. Then I noticed that there is some special integration with Github that allows you to log in via some token only when you use VS Code even though HTTP login is not possible now. This is only possible with Github…​

In general, I start to notice that Microsoft made VS Code free but as always free tools that come from corporations don’t respect your privacy.

Lastly, OpenAI developed Copilot that is again closed source and it’s trained on code that is hosted on GitHub. I kind of feel like with this copilot OpenAI robbed programmers from their work. On Copilot webiste there is a quote

Training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use across the machine learning community.

Which I agree with but making machine learning algorithms on publicly available data should be available for free. This whole field misses regulations and some companies clearly benefit from that.

Other scary claims are:

If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future. We want to use the preview to learn how people use GitHub Copilot and what it takes to operate it at scale.

and

Not yet. For now, we’re focused on delivering the best experience in Visual Studio Code only.

Because of all of that, I decided to give VIM a try again. I configured COC, highlighter, linter, and custom mappings. Everything seems to work great even though I need this setup for PHP, JS, HTML, Elixir, Java, Bash, and Scala.

Today I started to think why certain professors in Polish universities can treat students with no respect. For an example, there are some classes in which you don’t want to ask questions as if you do you will be treated like a stupid person. I think I know why it’s allowed and nothing is changing for decades. Universities create a toxic environment due to the limitation of possible solutions to stop the harassment.

I’m a developer for a very long time but also I started to work pretty early in my life. The main difference between work and the university is that you can change work whenever you want not even mentioning writing complaints on your coworkers.

Imagine having a professor who says "Women are not good IT professionals". What would you do if your coworker said something like this? Obviously, you would make a complaint and if your boss would not care you could easily change the job. This is something you can’t do at the university. You can’t easily change it since that would require you to move to a different city and probably pass some classes again.

Today again one of the students I’m in a group with was treated like shit and I cannot do anything about it or otherwise I’ll probably have to look for some new university to study at…​

Lastly, it’s not like students are without guilt but everyone who studied at Polish university will know what I’m writing about.

I really don’t get that. There are many good alternatives like PostgreSQL or MariaDB and on every semester that has some databases, the assignments are based on SQL Server. Good that at least there is Docker version so I don’t need to install Windows anymore. Another issue is that sometimes it’s necessary to install SQL Management Studio that does not work on Linux. I really wish universities move to OpenSource alternatives or at least services that do not involve heavy tools like this SQLMS. It would make students' life easier and personally with 6 years of experience as a developer I never commercially had to use SQL Server as a platform to store data.

Recently I had to make one of these flashy websites with scroll triggers and parallax effects. I did some research on which animation library to use and in even though there are some good ones like anime or react-spring I got hooked on GSAP. It’s a huge library but it really allows to abstract animation so coding with it is relatively easy and pleasant. For sure I’ll learn more about it.