This you?

You know what you can learn? To own up to your mistakes, instead of pretending like you were saying something else the whole time.

Another coping mechanism I’ve learned is to walk away from people who are more interested in their own narratives than reality. If you respond, I won’t see it.

but you probably realise that

I do, and I appreciate your recognition of that. Nowhere in my post did I say this is everyone’s experience, but it is mine, and a lot of people here seem to have a problem with it.

I think you should re-read my post, because nowhere in there did I say everyone should use GPS or it’s dangerous to drive. I just said that’s how and why I use it. When I do, it does keep people safe, because I’m not putting myself in a situation where I’m likely to be distracted by trying to figure out my route while I’m behind the wheel. Distracted driving is dangerous driving, period dot and end of story, regardless of neurodiversity.

You seem to recognise that people are in fact all different, so I’m very confused as to why you’d then come at me to tell me I’m handling my disability wrong when you don’t know me or the spread of symptoms I’m living with. I can’t unlearn my brain structure, but I can mitigate it, so I do that. I’m not the idiot, here.

In my case, it’s dangerous because I’m suddenly distracted from the road by trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be going in the immediate moment. I’m on the spectrum, and on-the-fly changes of plan spike my anxiety - nothing I can do about that except work around it. That isn’t a personal fault, I’m keeping myself and other people safer on the road.

So I’m gonna keep using the GPS even when I know where I’m going, that way if I realise I’m gonna miss my exit I don’t panic and instead can keep going with the confidence that the GPS will re-route me and I’ll have time to be in the correct lane for the next one.

I’m autistic and do not do well with a change of plans, especially under time pressure, but thanks so much for assuming that it’s because I lack “critical thinking skills” (which is not what that is, by the way) and taking the chance to insult me for working around my limitations.

When you grow up, you’ll learn that people are all different, and that supplementing one’s abilities with the tools available is not a weakness. I’m going to keep using the GPS even when I know where I’m going, not because I’m “overreliant on technology” or “afraid of things I haven’t planned for”, but because I’d like to keep myself and other people safe. I can’t help but feel that if everyone took this sort of attitude, we’d have far fewer collisions.

No details on what this initiative even is - doesn’t seem to be a failure of reporting. Just more brazen theft by this rogue administration.

Even when I know the route like the back of my hand I still use GPS. Why? Because if there’s any variation in the route, such as due to construction or a parade, I’m no longer 100% sure of how to get where I’m going, and a driver that doesn’t know where they’re going in is one of the more dangerous things on the road IMO.

This is just one step, though. Money to Mullvad goes in part to the cofounder who is a racist piece of shit.

But to your question, I think the “dilution” question has a different answer for everyone. Have you seen “The Good Place”? Philosophy is the major theme and this is one of the major philosophical questions they deal with. Great show, recommended if it’s unfamiliar to you.

Guy keeps talking about their “customers” and they don’t charge a dime. I’m not sure that word means what he thinks it means. They have users, and that’s exactly what he’s acting like.

Early 2000s: The Mech Madness forums, for discussing Armored Core, BattleTech, Gundam, and all other things mech and mech-related. It was a decent-sized community, for the time.

https://grapheneos.org/

Hey now, that’s not fair! A used tampon has contributed a lot more benefit to society than Ben Shapiro ever will.

The project I’m actually most excited about is exactly the “use the carpentry” one you pointed at: software for CNC and laser machines. I’ve got a laser at home that’s made me a lot of inlays and gifts over the years, and the existing tools (LightBurn etc.) are good but kept missing the technical, specialist features I wanted - so I started building my own. It’s called Nexus Studio.

Ayyyy yeah that’s what I’m talking about! (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞

That’s a really cool project dude, if it’s public I’d love a link to check it out! (I tried Googling, to no avail) I have a friend who has both a CNC machine and a laser cutter (a fuckoff-huge thing the size of a desk, that can cut metal), so your work on that might be helpful to us 😊

In any case, good luck and I hope those resources help. Drop me a DM if you want to talk shop!

Ah, you’re alright mate. Like I said, I got the same guff when I posted my first project here, and it sucked. I wanted to offer my advice because I think it’s brilliant that AI is opening up development to a whole new raft of people, and I’m excited to see more people building neat little software projects that fill their needs - we get to watch peoples’ journeys unfold through repo commits. It’s like watching someone’s first Dark Souls playthrough.

I have another bit of feedback which I hope might be helpful: Everyone is building an encrypted messaging app these days. Do something new, and use your carpentry experience to inform what that something is. You have a wealth of knowledge and this thing is an incredible tool for augmenting that, see if you can solve an old hard problem with it!

See, now I want to help again 😂 What tools are you using and do you have any harnesses set up and what’s your system prompt like? The beautiful thing about agents is that you can just point them at repos and have them cherrypick the useful bits. Here’s a few that you may find useful:

• https://github.com/obra/superpowers
• https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail
• https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f (strong recommend for organisation and human readability, also reduces token use handily)
• https://github.com/obelisk-complex/hermes-agent (this is my fork of Hermes that adds an on_output hook, but it includes my custom self-checking harness that I built for myself as well)
• https://github.com/obelisk-complex/claude-agents (My Claude Code agents, also good for cherrypicking generally but especially the QA agents)

I’m surprised you think I care. I’ve seen what you’re dumb enough to fall for.

Imagine thinking you know all there is to know about AI and then using an AI Detector which are famously bullshit: https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-work/

You don’t need an AI detector. The patterns are obvious. But that’s also the wrong criticism. Rolling your own encrypted messenger app is dumb, whether you use AI or not. Setting up and hardening a Matrix server with AI == godbrain. That’s just implementing (battle-tested) software that someone who knows what they’re doing wrote.

I considered it, and the point stands. I came here offering advice - good advice, grounded in two decades of IT career, because nobody who cares about security rolls their own app with encryption unless they know what they’re doing. There’s too much risk of a bad implementation and leaving holes for bad actors to find.

They can just do what I do and use AI to set up their Matrix server. I set it up before AI was a thing too, but it’s so much faster now. That uses a lot less tokens, too. But they don’t seem particularly interested in actually taking advice onboard, so I’m not holding my breath.

edit: well that’s refreshing, he listened! Don’t get that on the internet too often these days.

You asked for criticism and advice, and that’s exactly what I offered. It’s based on my own experience here. I was offering it to be helpful. Just what exactly are you trying to achieve with this response? Because yeah, I’m not getting attacked, I’m getting lectured. For offering advice when it was solicited.

I’m certain you don’t see the problem here, so I’m out. But for the love of Christ, just use AI to set up, harden, and manage a Matrix server instead of wasting tokens building your own application. You’ll end up with something much more secure than an app with a possibly-bad crypto implementation that you don’t have the experience to see, find, or fix.

I think you’ll find I didn’t accuse you of trying to deceive anyone, I just suggested that you not gloss over using AI in your projects. Because yes, in my experience people here take it very badly if it looks like you’re trying to present AI generated work as your own (note: that doesn’t have to be your intent, it just has to look like it was). I was trying to be helpful, and as far as I can see my wording and tone were mild, so I see no reason that my comment should have made you feel unwelcome. The more fool me for the attempt, I guess.

Man, your writing here all reads like Claude after I’ve given it a list of “AI tells” to avoid in its writing. There’s structural patterns that are pretty easy to see when there are so many samples right next to each other. I strongly suggest not trying to gloss over your use of AI in your projects when posting about them; some people will always hate, but most I think don’t mind AI code as long as it’s been tested properly and doesn’t have any more bugs than you’d find in any other project.

Problem is, testing encryption properly is difficult, and there’s a lot more to a messenger application than just sending encrypted messages. That’s my criticism: you’re reinventing the wheel for no good reason.

My best advice is to set up a Matrix server if you really don’t trust Signal, rather than trying to roll your own. Its a lot less work, a lot more secure, and you can modify the source anyway if it doesn’t do what you need.