It feels like we are coming full circle to the times of the Silo Engineer, but on steroids. Back in the day when social media feeds were chronological (if they even existed), the Silo Engineer would retreat into his cubicle to Create (it was usually a he).

He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.

No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.

After exiting the Flow, the Silo Engineer would often come back to his Work weeks later and wonder: “who in the F wrote this S?”

… It was beautiful.

Seems like with LLMs we are entering that era again, but it’s different.

Smaller teams, mentally overtaxed developers, exhausted from scrolling walls of …

i was very excited about code generating ai tools since early days of github copilot in vscode, was using it daily since chatgpt release and wrote almost all code through prompting (html/css/javascript, python, ruby, terraform etc) for years. It felt very good at first.

However, about a year ago i started to notice subtle (at first) negative changes in my mental health. It’s hard to describe in words this negative feeling because it’s very basic and fundamental, but over that last year it progressively developed to the point where I started to suffer mentally. I should have just stopped using ai tools right then, but i continued, probably supported by the enthusiasm of my collogues and the ai excitement in general, or maybe because of the loss cost fallacy -> i already invested years in building these skills. Or probably because i was addicted to ai, if there is such thing.

one day it got so bad that i decided to try to stop -> i uninstalled all local ai tools and …

I’m trying to change an instinct I’ve spent years developing.

When I see a design problem, unnecessary complexity, or a better model, I naturally want to fix it. Doing the minimum requested and knowingly leaving something worse than it could be feels wrong to me.

But I’m increasingly convinced that the strategically correct move inside many companies is: do what’s asked, raise the concern once, then let it go.

I’m trying to work that way now.

It makes sense intellectually. I still dislike it.

With AI making implementation cheaper and delivery faster, I’m curious whether other experienced developers are going through the same adjustment.

Have you changed what “doing a good job” means to you?

At this point, how much of career growth in tech comes down to luck?

Good CTC, good company, good projects, and good overseas opportunities often seem to depend as much on timing and luck as on skills.

I feel 70–80% of people are reasonably talented now. Most people can learn, adapt, and work with different tech stacks when given the opportunity.

Is the game becoming more about being in the right place at the right time?

We see a lot of news of layoffs coming out of big tech, but have layoffs been just as common right across the private sector?

I know it’s common wisdom that you can quote/unquote ‘make the most money’ working for private companies, but with the way the job market is these days it makes me question if trying to target these large salaries is really worth it.

I’ve known many exceptionally good developers that got laid off for essentially no reason, some of them with real problems now. How do those working for the private sector work under these conditions and maintain their sanity?

I’ve been using Plex for years, and I’m getting increasingly frustrated with the direction this company is heading.

Tonight, I went to use Watch Together, a feature my girlfriend and I use almost daily to watch shows when we’re apart. It was working just minutes earlier, and suddenly it was gone from my Google TV.

Apparently, Plex decided not to carry Watch Together over to its redesigned app. A perfectly functional feature that people actually use was simply discarded.

This is textbook enshittification and arguably a form of shrinkflation. Plex continues raising prices while removing functionality. We’re paying more and getting less.

I run my own Plex server. I pay for the hardware, storage, electricity, bandwidth, and maintenance. Plex provides the software, yet somehow they keep finding ways to make that software less useful.

And before anyone suggests downgrading the app, using a browser, or finding some third-party workaround, why should I have to? The …

I set this service up probably 9 months ago touched it once since due to a update that changed YouTube id’s. It’s the type of service that you never appreciate until it stops working.

I think everyone who regularly watches YouTube as their TV entertainment platform it’s a must have program and can run on anything.

Edit:

Alternative YouTube clients are so amazing! They offer similar or more features than what iSponserBlockTV does and I have provided a list of some options.

IPhone: uYouEnhanced

Android: NewPipe

Android TV: SmartTube

Roku:Playlet

Other TV OS typically have a available alternative you must just do a little research.

NOT A MAINTAINER OR AFFLIATE OF PROJECT JUST REALLY LOVE IT

Demo: https://demo.pluetzner.de
Link: https://github.com/karatektus/pl_mail

So after 4 or 5 months of pretty heavy development - I’m barely going back to Gmail, so I think it’s time to get some users and with that some feature requests and bugreports 😄

AI
First things first: I am Symfony/Webdev for over 10 years. I’ve started this project with a selfcoded base but fairly quickly leaned more and more into claude code. If you dont feel comfortable with that, I understand, but really cant help you.

Motivation
Gmail crippled “gmailify” a while ago - external emails could only be fetched via POP and not IMAP anymore. This year they announced that it will be fully cancelled at the end of the year. Since I’m currently out of work, need more AI experience and a new Email client I decided to give it a shot and just build a selfhosted Email client.

Features:

• Supports Gmail, Outlook and Imap Accounts, including Gmail / Outlook Push and IDLE
• Gmail like …

Hey Pocket-ID Dev-Team, Hey stonith404,

I just wanted to say thank you for your work.

After a couple of months of intensive use, I have to say: Pocket ID is the service that makes using my self-hosted apps so much easier and more comfortable.

I came across Pocket ID while searching for an encrypted file transfer service, and I’ve been following its development ever since. In the beginning, I didn’t have much trust that a young developer could build secure and reliable software. Back then, I didn’t know that you do this for a living in an enterprise environment. (And that was before the rise of AI agents.)

So I started with Authentik, which is overkill for a homelab, and only used it for Immich. After I messed up an update, I dropped the whole SSO plan.

But I kept an eye on the GitHub project, and the great project work and the OpenID certification changed my mind!

Now I have to say: I wasted too much time on logins and should have chosen your project from the …

Helllooo everyone!

I just want to introduce myself and tell you all about my homelab. It’s all pretty high-level, feel free to ask me about anything here.

About me

I’m just someone that absolutely loves technology. Software and systems are mostly where my heart lies, I’ve been working in IT for about 19 years. I have been homelabbing and self-hosting since about 2005. It started with game servers then learning how to become a sys admin, then wanting control over my data, and now I just want to explore different technology stacks and new software.

My homelab is a bit of a mix of running services for my family and a testing ground for learning new technology.

Quick and dirty

My entire homelab is Proxmox as the hypervisor, debian VMs to run Docker and Komodo. Forgejo deploys my containers on Komodo. Docker labels control Traefik and exposure.

6 hosts (3 “production” and 3 test lab) and ~147 containers.

|Hostname|CPU|RAM|Storage|Used For| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| …

Every November somebody asks “is the lifetime deal worth it?” and the answers are always vibes. So I went through everything posted here since 2011 that mentions a lifetime indexer account: sales, shutdowns, angry threads, all of it.

Turns out “lifetime” has a pretty wild history. Here’s what I found.

The best deal anyone ever got

In August 2014 NZBGeek’s “Forever Geek” pass cost $30. On Black Friday 2016, 2017 and 2018 it was $20.

If you bought one back then, it still works today. That’s 8 to 12 years of indexer for $20-30, or roughly $2-3 a year. A plain year at Geek costs $12 now.

The price climbed as it went: $30 → $20 on sales → $30 again in 2019 (announcement thread) → $60 on BF 2021 → $80 list today. Early buyers won big.

So yes, lifetime can be the best money you ever spend on usenet. Now for the other side.

Lifetime, until it isn’t

1. The indexer takes it back

NZBsRUs, January 2013. Lifetime VIPs woke up …

https://preview.redd.it/j50acoil0ath1.png?width=554&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ca2b5f2366bf4a23e9642b56fe8e24b7d899f79

open

New to the scene, set up my *arr stack a few months ago and it’s all working smoothly (much better than when I was torrent only), but I understand there are usually some good deals around Black Friday.

What should I be on the lookout for?

• 2TB Prime Block + 2TB XS Block | $32
• Prime Yearly Unlimited + 1TB XS Block | $30

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I got lucky, im in Drunkenslug its really good but i use the 5 download limit easy, im thinking to get nzbgeek since everyone says its really good, atm im using althub mainly its pretty good and the limits are high for the free one so im not going to bother paying for that, do you think i should purchase DS or NZBgeek?

Thanks

thank you for the new client update.

thank you for forcing me to go through “welcome to Plex” screens like i haven’t been using the app for 15 years… on each profile, each device. I’ve seen it 21 times so far.

thank you for resetting ALL of the individual profile customizations.

but most of all, thanks for changing the default view of every library to “recommended” instead of “browse’, which displays “no media found” (how is that ever an acceptable message here?) to every person who connects, getting me “Plex is broken” messages from my wife, and leading to a couple hours of troubleshooting because everything looked fine on my end.

i just want to thank you

I’m about to break the remote.

For the lucky ones that never had to use this, this is how you adjust the subtitle offset if the subtitle is out of sync. I don’t know if it’s just me but when it’s out of sync it’s never for a small amount. And in order to offset the subtitle for just 5 seconds you need to press the same button 100 times.

New version of the app was just installed on my NVIDIA Shield. Not happy.

The new UI is just plain hard to read now, and I want the old interface back. Also not happy that you turned audio themes back on, again.

Seriously, save some money - fire your UI folks, revert the app changes. If you won’t do that give us an option to use the old UI.

This is going to be the reason for me to switch if I can’t find a way out of this.

I have a reminder setup to check the “Opt Out” Plex page once a month. In the past year, I have had to “All No” a couple of times - not sure why.

Anyhow, here’s the page: https://www.plex.tv/vendors-us/?vendredir=1