I’m a freelance software engineer with about 8 years of experience mainly in early stage startups. At this point, I have a pretty steady flow of referrals. I don’t take every project on and not every one works out, but enough do that I can do it more than full time.

Lately, though, I have noticed a large increase in projects where they paid a ton of money for an internal software and it does not work well at all. Tons of errors, unreasonably slow, inefficient and taking up a lot of resources, and large security flaws. At first, I thought maybe people just hired bad developers. The bar is pretty low to call yourself a developer or even a software engineer anyways, but I’m seeing the same problems now on multiple projects.

When I take on a project on, I always sign an NDA and look at their codebase to look at some upfront issues that I can bring up because, most of the time, the people hiring me aren’t technical and don’t understand what the problem is. This is probably the 5th time …

I liked my company — I was employee 600 (engineer ~150) at a place that’s now 3000 employees and tens of billions in valuation

I worked hard, they gave me nice promotions, and lots of ownership and equity, and it was great.

But now that I’m senior enough to manage people (and by that I mean literally a single intern), the vibes are off. My 1-on-1s with anyone in management is now about:

• what projects are we funding this quarter?
• how are we going to frame our metrics for leadership?
• does [person a] have bandwidth for this?
• do you think [person b] is good?

I just came here to build stuff… I hate performance reviews, I hate kickoff meetings, I hate “stakeholders” and “leadership”, and I hate defining growth areas for my intern who y’all judge way too much!

The only stakeholder that should matter is the customer, and when every single one of their zendesk tickets is complaining about the same fucking thing I’m inclined to just …

Left my old role nearly 2 months ago and they of course had my position posted within days of me leaving. It only stayed up a few days.

I just saw the position pop up again. Having been on their side before, I’m almost certain they couldn’t find anyone decent and decided to repost it.

Their problem: they are basically looking for a tech lead at a low end senior salary. I was doing tech lead work because I’d been pushing for that position. But despite being told I’d be getting the title and salary bump, they ended up saying they’d only be able to give me the title but no bump. And that’s how I ended up leaving.

Anyways, I find it amusing that they are struggling to hire for their unrealistic expectations.

And it was kind of a relief. With all the doom sayers, including myself, fearful AI will take our jobs, I have realized that it is still far away. The system I’m tasked with building is a synchronization mechanism to keep two data sources in sync. It requires interacting with two first party systems and four AWS services. I gave it a paragraph of what I wanted and it was not even functional. Three paragraphs of prompts still not even close. 6 hours later I’ve written two pages of basically unreadable text trying to get it to do exactly what I want (if/else and try/catch don’t translate well to English, especially when nested). It is pretty much just pseudocode right now.

So what did I learn from this? AI is great at helping you solve a specific discrete task (e.g. write some code that will send an email, generate unit tests/documentation), but by the time you’re trying to stitch together half a dozen services with error handling, logging, metrics, memoization, …

I work for a mid-sized global software corporation in a niche industry. We’re talking about AI in biweeky, company-wide meetings. It’s mostly the older devs (age ⁴⁰⁄₅₀+) talking about the different ways we’re using it, or planning to use it. The younger ones spend less time talking about it.

Right now, on my team, we’re using it for unit tests. Having more success recently, especially if we get the prompts right, and it generate new units for new code. We fill in the additional edge cases. It’s a great time saver.

Code completion is a mixed bag. I find it helpful, and easy to ignore bad auto commenting/code. Others are reporting being anoyed with it.

Other ideas and to have AI start writing features based on acceptance criteria. And, to perform log analysis. Everything else is too detailed (and abstract) to really describe. Everyone’s changing the model to Claud. I don’t know how the company’s hiring or performing …

Hello everyone! OpenAI just released their first open-source models in 5 years, and now, you can have your own GPT-4o and o3 model at home! They’re called ‘gpt-oss’.

There’s two models, a smaller 20B parameter model and a 120B one that rivals o4-mini. Both models outperform GPT-4o in various tasks, including reasoning, coding, math, health and agentic tasks.

To run the models locally (laptop, Mac, desktop etc), we at Unsloth converted these models and also fixed bugs to increase the model’s output quality. Our GitHub repo: https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth

Optimal setup:

• The 20B model runs at >10 tokens/s in full precision, with 14GB RAM/unified memory. Smaller versions use 12GB RAM.
• The 120B model runs in full precision at >40 token/s with ~64GB RAM/unified mem.

There is no minimum requirement to run the models as they run even if you only have a 6GB CPU, but it will be slower inference.

Thus, no is GPU required, especially for the 20B …

I’ve managed to convince my Dad to give me an old laptop to run a server on. I know how I’m going to do this (pterodactyl) but I need to make sure I cover my ass. The problem is my dad’s always been the tech guy and when I told him I’d be running a Minecraft server for friends it started an entire lecture on security and port forwarding. My dad is weird with tech in the sense he knows what he’s talking about but also not really? He’s a bit like an old man who thinks the computers are mythical beings and I need something to reassure him that hackers aren’t going to get into our home cameras from my minecraft server. Which is nuts coming from a man who has only one password.

I was just going to stick a whitelist on it and call it a day. That’s what most people I know have done. I don’t really want to spend any money, that’s the whole reason I’m hosting it myself. I have looked into VLANs and ehhhhhh I don’t want to …

From the official release post:

Leading open-source server solutions provider Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH (henceforth “Proxmox”), celebrating its 20th year of innovation, today announced the release of Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) 9.0.

Main highlight of this update is a modernized core built upon Debian 13 “Trixie”, ensuring a robust foundation for the platform.

Along with it an upgrade guide from 8 to 9.

Hey everyone!

I’m Ayaan, a 16-year-old developer from Toronto, and I’ve been working on something I’m really excited to share.

It’s a Jellyfin client called Finetic, and I wanted to test the limits of what could be done with a media streaming platform.

I made a quick demo walking through Finetic - you can check it out here:
👉 Finetic - A Modern Jellyfin Client built w/ Next.js

Key Features:

• Navigator (AI assistant) → Natural language control like “Play Inception”, “Toggle dark mode”, or “What’s in my continue watching?”
• Subtitle-aware Scene Navigation → Ask stuff like “Skip to the argument scene” or “Go to the twist” - it’ll then parse the subtitles and jump to the right moment
• Sleek Modern UI → Built with React 19, Next.js 15, and Tailwind 4 - light & dark mode, and smooth transitions with Framer Motion
• Powerful Media Playback → Direct + transcoded playback, chapters, subtitles, keyboard shortcuts
• Fully Open Source …

Sup, self hosting is great, and I’m looking for more to host at home, but how many have apps created for them?

Wwe use our phones so much and apps to go with the self hosted applications make it easier.

What do you use that has an app ?

There’s flairs for indexers, providers and software but I guess you can’t talk or post anything that mentions the name of any of the things that are required to use the Usenet? Can someone explain to me what the purpose of the subreddit is? I see others posting about indexers and providers but they seem to have no issues with their posts being removed.

Simply all I wanted to figure out is if there has been a breach of any of the 3 indexers I use due to random Chinese and English downloads being made on my servers the other day over a 20 hour period. Would think people in the community would like to know if there was a breach of api keys or not.

First off, big thanks to u/Bakerboy448 there’s no reason they should have to justify the actions we take.

As moderators, we’re not here as employees or to lord over anyone we give up our own free time because we genuinely care about keeping this place running well and safe for everyone. Sometimes people seem to expect us to defend every action, like removing posts or locking threads, but at the end of the day, it’s all done to protect the subreddit and the community as a whole.

I do have to laugh when people ask the same questions over and over or don’t seem to bother reading the rules. So much of what gets taken down is already covered if people take a moment to look through by doing a quick search. Honestly, it makes me wonder how many actually give the rules a glance before posting. You’d be surprised how much is already answered if you look back a bit.

I’ve seen how the subreddit used to be a bit of a Wild West, much messier and riskier. Now, in my opinion, it’s miles better …

Hello. Just thought I would mention that I created the newsgroup free.3d-printing earlier this week, and it is available on Eternal September (I presume other providers will carry it sooner or later).

I created it in response to a user in one the ES internal support groups, asking for a 3D printing group. He got flamed a bit, and I had thought about creating a group for 3D printing discussion a while ago, so I went ahead and newgrouped it (and got somewhat flamed for doing so… lol).

Anyway, if there are any 3D printing enthusiasts here, you have a newsgroup on Usenet now where you can chat about 3D printing. :)

I live in China and have been heading down a self hosting rabbit hole since I’m finding it increasingly difficult to stream media here from all the normal providers (VPNs are unreliable and always seem to stop working just as I sit down to watch something). I would like to incorporate Radarr and Sonarr into my setup and this has led me to Usenet. I was wondering if anyone has any experience with it from behind the Great Firewall. Is it even accessible without using a vpn? What are download speeds like? I’ve seen Frugal Usenet has a server in Asia but haven’t found anything suggesting this will improve speeds in China specifically. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Did a search here and see posts from 3-6 months ago, but nothing recent.

Page displays a message that it’s down for maintenance?

https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/nzbplanet.net.html shows as down for everyone…

I recently bought a new UGREEN DXP4800 with two 6TB drives and one 22TB drive. This is essentially my new home media server, primarily functioning as a backup solution with a Plex Media server. I’m completely new to Docker, but it was surprisingly easy to set up. I’m very happy with this setup!

(P.S. No, the NAS isn’t connected to the Deco Mesh Node. It’s in the spare room but still connected to the main router via a switch.)

Picked up a base model M4 Mac Mini (It was on sale, $450 at MicroCenter.) This thing is insanely powerful and fast. All my friends are able to stream 1080p videos no issues. It stays on, is quiet, it got warm when I moved my entire library over, but it’s been super since. I know I could have gotten a N100, but I heard about the fans failing on those over time, I actually picked one up and the windows key was locked. and left a bad taste in my mouth on it. I like using MacOS, I know it well since I use an MBP for my photography job. I hooked up a 5tb external drive (which is still less than half full with all my stuff). Doing Watch Together on browser still works well. I have about 5 friends that we share our libraries with one another. 1 step closer to cutting all cords and streaming services (currently only pay for Netflix).

Anything else I should download besides a VPN and Folx for torrents?

Edit: $450 ain’t 💩 for a plex server. Noted lol

Edit #2: I get it, this isn’t …

Repost because I posted my IP address to the world lol

I am trying to port forward and have no idea what I’m doing. No matter what I try, I just can’t get it to allow me to use the server outside my network. I can’t download anything or use the lifetime plex pass I just paid for. I’m really clueless when it comes to stuff like port forwarding and it seems like everything I watch online does not apply to me. Any help for trying to get this figured out?

Seriously? My Plex server went down for a few days for some hardware issues so I had to watch things like a regular person? How do they do it? How do you keep track of your shows across 8 different streaming services? I had no idea what shows were on what services, etc. I felt like I was in the dark ages. Plex really plays a large role in simplifying my day to day.

Thankful for Plex (as well as other satellite services).

Edit: Less about suggestions and more of an appreciation post for a service that truly helps simply my life.

Just was invited to join a colleagues server and noticed that a lot of the shows have the color like this. I was suggested to try a different quality stream, which I’ve had varying success with. Any other tips or suggestions?