You can do engineering without an engineering degree. A degree is just a piece of paper.

Yup this is what I've got up and running recently and it's been awesome.

My setup is roughly the following.

- Dell optiplex mini running Proxmox for compute. Unraid NAS for storage.

- Debian VM on the Proxmox machine running Forgejo and Komodo for container management.

- Monorepo in Forgejo for the homelab infrastructure. This lets me give Claude access to just the monorepo on my local machine to help me build stuff out, without needing to give it direct access to any of my actual servers.

- Claude helps me build out deployment pipeline for VMs/containers in Forgejo actions, which looks like:

  - Forgejo runner creates NixOS builds => Deploy VMs via Proxmox API => Deploy containers via Komodo API

- I've got separate VMs for

  - gateway for reverse-proxy & authentication

  - monitoring with prometheus/loki/grafana stack

  - general use applications

Since storage is external with NFS shares, I can tear down and rebuild the VMs whenever I need to redeploy something.

All of my docker compose files and nix configs live in the monorepo on Forgejo, so I can use Renovate to keep everything up to date.

Plan files, kanban board, and general documentation live adjacent to Nix and Docker configs in the monorepo, so Claude has all the context it needs to get things done.

I did this because I got tired of using Docker templates on Unraid. They were a great way to get started, but it's hard to pin container versions and still keep them up-to-date (Unraid relies heavily on the `latest` tag). Moving stuff over to this setup bit-by-bit and I've been really enjoying it so far.

Which Hasan Piker interview was this? The only one I saw was about shoplifting.

That one. They asked if the murder of the United CEO was justified because he committed "social murder".

Piker is the left equivalent of Charlie Kirk - saying outrageous things for attention, but he has constantly called for violence, while Kirk never did.

I don’t think most people would say that the United CEO was killed for his political views. He was killed for the actions he was taking at his job.

Not saying that’s justified, just that there is a difference there.

Do you think charlie kirk would be proud of you for lying about what he said?

I’ve found that I hit the limit just around the end of the 5-hour window, so it’s definitely been usable for me.

But I’ve mostly been using it for gitops infrastructure in my homelab. I wonder if the token usage is lighter than if I were developing an application.

Have you ever smoked? I feel like I only hear this sentiment from people that have never tried nicotine.

Nicotine absolutely produces effects that people enjoy. Smokers don't just do it because they want to smell bad and look cool.

Yes, I smoked for a decade. The only noticeable effect it produces after a while is providing relief from nicotine withdrawal symptoms. It does feel similar to regaining focus or calming your nerves, so smokers trick themselves into thinking that's what it actually does. Nicotine is also way, way more addictive than alcohol. I've gone months without alcohol with almost no mental effort but day 3 of quitting smoking was probably one of the most miserable and challenging of my life.

Is there proof that the positive effects are still there after you're hooked? Or are the "positive effects" at that point just a cessation of the negative effects of withdrawal?

Yes, absolutely. It's a stimulant, similar to caffeine. Just like how nearly everyone adjusts their caffeine consumption based on the situation (got to buckle down, drink an extra cup of coffee), people do the same with nicotine. It also still works as an appetite suppressant.

Now, the euphoric effects that you get at first, those very rapidly go away with tolerance. With habitual use, you probably only experience a tiny shadow of that with the first hit of the day, or a respectable replay if for whatever reason you go a couple days without (which is heightened by the cessation of withdrawal). The nausea and disorientation also go away, which is nice since otherwise it would be a problem.

We need objective research into subjective effects to really say either way, but such things to me are worth knowing

There was some whole blowup with Booklore over it being vibecoded by a single maintainer recently. I think the project has changed ownership since then, but be cautious.

I use Calibre + Calibre Web. Definitely a bit old and clunky, but reliable.

Booklore was nuked by the maintainer after the blowup and no longer exists. Mostly it was not vibecoded, just the last few releases. The other contributors have since forked it as grimmory and have already done a first release that removes the telemetry etc. Grimmory is great imo and seems to be in good hands now.

Ditto for Calibre Web. Clunky, but effective.

I wish there was a way to add books to a ‘shelf’ (a collection, which you can sync to a device) without having to open each book and add. I want to go Select + Select + Select > Add > Sync.

This is just... not true? I'm curious what you mean, because iCloud cannot be on by default since it requires you to set up an iCloud account. You're asked to sign into iCloud during device setup, which you can decline.

Do you mean that, after consenting to and signing into iCloud, all of iCloud's feature are enabled by default?

> We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.

There are plenty of people who advocate for war and consider it good, and plenty of disagreements over war.

People are usually in agreement that war / killing is bad when other people do it but will find all sorts of ways to justify themselves doing it when it is to their advantage. This isn't really contradictory, from an evolutionary perspective.

You have to be in a very secure situation to think this way. You also ignore that a war can prevent more problems down the line though often it doesn't. When applying game theory to these situations, depending on how you rig the utility function, you can get any chosen strategy as optimal. So it is more about how you value outcomes and if you are estimating their probabilities correctly as to what is the right decision. By your logic, imprisoning or executing a serial killer isn't OK (let's say in this situation we know they are guilty).

Finally you are completely ignoring competition for resources in your analysis. What makes you think more monkeys has positive utility to individual monkeys? You hope that's true, but until you can speak to them, its going to be hard to know.

These are complex decision and you are acting as if there is always one "correct" answer to every situation. Heck, the trolley problem was conceived of to explain to people like you why your thinking is just plain wrong in some situations.

So if I use Claude to write the first pass at the code, make a few changes myself, ask it to make an additional change, change another thing myself, then commit it — what exactly do you expect to see then?

A Co-Authored-By tag on the commit. It's a standard practice and the meaning is self-explanatory. This is what Claude adds by default too.

I make the commits myself, I don't let Claude commit anything.

Yea in my Claude workflow, I still make all the commits myself.

This is also useful for keeping your prompts commit-sized, which in my experience gives much better results than just letting it spin or attempting to one-shot large features.