Let's do this, then.

What we cover

• MacBook Neo
• /r/selfhosted new Friday rule
• Huntarr fiasco
• The right way to run Proxmox, LXCs, and docker does not exist
• Vibeslop and AI existential crisis

Welcome to the first episode of the BitFlip Show, a new podcast about self-hosting, Linux, homelabs, and open source technology. Host Alex (formerly of the Self-Hosted podcast and now at Tailscale) is joined by Adam Morales from Lime Technology (Unraid), Stephen (an MSP operator running real-world infrastructure), and Geoff, a lawyer-by-day and passionate Linux homelabber. In this episode, the panel introduces the show, shares how they each got into computing, and dives into Geoff’s journey from building an HTPC NAS to running a fully Linux-powered homelab with Proxmox, Docker, and automation.

The conversation also explores some of the most interesting debates in the self-hosting community right now: running Docker on Proxmox, homelab best practices vs pragmatism, the new MacBook Neo announcement, and the rise of AI “vibe coding.” The hosts break down the recent Huntarr controversy in the self-hosted ecosystem and discuss the risks of AI-generated code, open-source responsibility, and what the future might look like for developers and homelab enthusiasts.

If you’re interested in homelabs, Docker, Proxmox, self-hosting apps, Linux infrastructure, and the future of open source, this show is for you. Subscribe for new episodes every two weeks as the BitFlip team explores the tools, debates, and ideas shaping the modern self-hosting community.

Topics: self-hosting, Linux, homelab, Proxmox, Docker, open source, Unraid, Home Assistant, AI coding, vibe coding, Huntarr controversy, MacBook Neo.

Links

• https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rckopd/huntarr_your_passwords_and_your_entire_arr_stacks/
• https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/

Transcript

Alex: well welcome into the very first episode of the bit flip show podcast we are here to talk about self-hosting and linux and homelab and open source and anything else these three fine gentlemen decide to throw my way throughout the course of the episode Welcome to Jeff, Adam and Stephen and throughout tonight’s episode we’re going to talk to Jeff a little bit about how he got into computing and tech in general and then over the next few weeks we’ll introduce Stephen and Adam in a bit more detail. 00:00

Alex: But I figure it might be a good idea just to give you a quick idea of who you’re looking at. So hello, I’m Alex. You might know me from the self-hosted podcast that I used to do with Chris over at Jupiter Broadcasting. I also work for Tailscale. And I’ve been doing content stuff for a couple of years now. And alongside me is Adam. Hey, Adam, how you doing? Doing 00:31

Adam: very well. 00:52

Adam: My name’s Adam Morales and I work for Lime Technology and we provide Unraid to the world. Been doing this for a very long time and I think I met Alex. 00:52

Alex: Southeast Linux Fest in Charlotte, I reckon it was. 01:06

Adam: Yeah, and we kicked off this little conversation about Unraid and Tailscale and here we are today. 01:08

Alex: Here we are today joining us from the frozen tundra in the north of, well, it’s not even the north of Canada, but it’s still flipping cold. Stephen. 01:16

Stephen: Certainly not the north of Canada. I would have, I don’t know, a far higher electrical bill for my heating. I have a small little data center that I host a couple of things for some podcasty people. 01:26

Alex: Yes, you do. 01:38

Alex: Now, what’s interesting about Stephen in particular, and we’ll get more into his backstory over the next few weeks, is that you run an MSP. And so I thought it’d be really interesting for folks to hear about how being a small business owner and looking after, well, people’s data, like for real, when you get an ice storm and it knocks the power out for a month, all those kinds of stories, which we’ll get into later. 01:39

Alex: But tonight’s star guest is Jeff, who’s up in Pennsylvania. And I would love to go over a little bit, Jeff, your background and how you got into computers. 02:04

Geoff: Sure. 02:15

Geoff: So we’ll start off with the fun thing of I don’t actually work in IT for a living. I’m a lawyer by day. So I kind of don’t have the fun background a lot of you guys might have on stuff like this. So I got into computing. You know, my family always had computers. I always loved tinkering with them. But I really didn’t start getting into like building my I didn’t build my first desktop until I was in law school. So I had a friend who was very into computers. He liked retro gaming. He had a whole arcade set up in his apartment at law school. And he kind of convinced me to build my first computer. And so I kind of decided it would be like an HTPC NAS thing that I would hook up to my computer, my TV. And I ran Windows. And so it had Windows Media Center. And I had a cable card and did all the fun shenanigans with that kind of stuff. 02:16

Alex: And now you’re the diehard Linux user of the group, right? 03:11

Geoff: Yes, yes. 03:14

Geoff: Everything here is fully, as we were just saying in the pre-show, you know, I only have one Linux, only one Windows box in this house, and that’s my wife’s. 03:14

Alex: We were giving Jeff a hard time because of the three of us, the only one having audio issues, or four of us, I can’t count. Of the four of us, the only one having audio issues was, bless his heart, the Linux user. 03:23

Geoff: Yeah, well, this is a relatively new Bazite setup, so I haven’t gotten a chance to fully tweak everything yet. I started playing around in a VM on my gaming PC, but of course, every time I shut that down, Home Assistant would go down, so that wasn’t exactly ideal. 03:34

Geoff: So when we moved, I bought my first Raspberry Pi. I think it was a 3B. Ran Raspbian on that thing. For those of you who can remember Raspbian and not the days of the fun Home Assistant OS and all of that, that was my Home Assistant box for a good long while. 03:52

Geoff: And then I think right before COVID, I decided to upgrade my gaming PC and I’m like, well, what am I going to do with this old gaming PC? It’s perfectly fine. It was like an i5 4690K. So, you know, it had quick sync, which, you know, was fun for Jellyfin or I think I was doing MB at the time. 04:11

Geoff: And so I ran, I, you know, moved that to the server. And so I was like, oh, well, I should learn. ubuntu for a server and i should learn docker and i should learn all these things and then alex you know over there came out with the home assistant you know podcast and he was like proxmox and i was like oh that sounds interesting and then he’s like ansible well that sounds really interesting 04:30

Geoff: So I spent a lot of my COVID time learning Ansible and learning Proxmox and learning how to set up my infrastructure as code and have reproducibility of everything. And honestly, I haven’t looked back. I mean, I’ve tried Nix. I’ve dabbled in the idea. but just Proxmox just works. I mean, it does what I need. And, you know, it’s like I have a bunch of, on my Proxmox box, I have a bunch of LXCs that, you know, I know this might be anathema for some people out there, but I do Docker in LXC. 04:55

Geoff: I know the Proxmox devs say not to do it. If I was running a business like, you know, Steven down there and, you know, I wanted to make sure I was absolutely secure, I completely understand. 05:32

Geoff: Docker and an LXE is not 05:44

Alex: ideal. 05:48

Alex: The internet’s going to hate you for that. 05:49

Geoff: Oh, I know the internet’s going to hate me. I’m fully prepared for hate mail. 05:50

Alex: I think I’ve determined there is no actual correct way to run an LXE container and Docker in the Proximox universe without somebody being upset with you. 05:53

Adam: No. 06:04

Adam: Well, that’s also applicable to anything in technology. There’s no correct way. 06:05

Geoff: Here’s what’s going to give me more people pissed off. I run Docker on Proxmox on the host. 06:10

Alex: Yeah, me too. 06:15

Alex: What rebels we are. 06:16

Geoff: But I mean, again, from my perspective, The main thing, I don’t run much on there, but I run scrutiny. I really don’t want to have to pass all the hard disks through to a VM to run scrutiny just to have reporting. Why can’t I just have Docker and run scrutiny and call it a 06:18

Alex: day? 06:37

Alex: For me, it was hardware pass-through for Plex transcoding with the iGPU. Oh, yeah. Trying to pass that through to a virtual machine is just no bueno. And so then you think, right, well, I’ve got Plex on the host. Why don’t I just run everything else on that? I’d be way easier. So, yeah, and before you know it. Anyway, Stephen, you looked annoyed with us. You were one of the people that, like, hypervisors should be pure. No, 06:38

Stephen: no. 07:01

Stephen: Okay, so here’s the thing. Like, if it’s for your house and you’re learning and it’s not running some mission-critical thing, then explore and figure something out. Just understand the consequences of your actions. I mean… if some major os upgrade comes along for proxmox and you’re like gonna jump on that day one and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work just understand that you’ve done things to your hypervisor that okay so 07:01

Geoff: i see i see i see alex going and i’m gonna have the same thing he has 07:25

Alex: I will accept your critique with a massive caveat of AppArmor is crap. It’s just, it’s not really fit for purpose. I don’t disagree. I didn’t mention it. I’m just saying, if you mess with the OS. No, you mentioned it by proxy, though, by saying that if you’re going to run things on the host and be upset when things break, because of, I did a whole thing on this, I think, was it on the TailScale channel? 07:29

Alex: I kind of forget. 07:55

Alex: Where LXCs kept breaking because of incorrect labels and tags or something being applied with AppArmor on Proxmox 9. So in a perfect world, Proxmox would not be on Debian and Proxmox would use SE Linux if they’re going to implement anything at all for enterprise security. 07:57

Alex: And everything would just kind of work. But, you know, this is my approach to technology in general, is pragmatism and simplicity of administration overrules a lot of other things, particularly in a home lab scenario, and especially doubly particularly now that I have nothing on the public internet, thanks to my employer. 08:17

Alex: So for me, it’s just a question of like, I’m doing this all day, every day at work. The days of coming home and being excited to sit in front of a computer for nine hours troubleshooting in the evening, they’re behind me. So these are the kinds of discussions we’re going to have on this show. We’re talking about Homelab, we’re talking about Linux, Docker, and all the various different opinions and the right way, the wrong way to hold things and all that kind of stuff. 08:38

Alex: Speaking of Apple, today as we record on March 4th, they’ve just released the new MacBook Neo. This is a new 13-inch little tiny laptop, which I think is probably a square shot across the bowels of the Chromebooks. 09:05

Alex: This thing is $599, has a couple of USB-C ports, although they’re USB 2.0 USB-C ports. I can’t believe. Yeah. 09:22

Adam: Oh, I missed that. 09:33

Adam: Wow. 09:36

Adam: Okay. 09:36

Alex: Everything else about this laptop, I couldn’t care. Like 8 gigs of RAM, fine. 256 gigs of storage, fine. No Touch ID, whatever. 09:37

Stephen: usb2 there’s an option though you can get the more expensive one and you can pay a hundred dollars 09:46

Alex: and get more storage and touch id yes 09:51

Stephen: i know that makes big sense because if someone like yourself might spend more than a hundred dollars to make a little custom button for touch id So maybe don’t throw shade at Apple for that one. Yeah, okay. So 09:53

Alex: what he’s referring to is this keyboard here has the little Touch ID button in the corner. I used one of these off of eBay and literally ripped it apart, 3D printed a little housing, and now I log into my Mac with my mechanical keyboard behind me with a dedicated button. 10:07

Alex: We’re not talking about that, though. We’re talking about the MacBook Neo. How much would you say that cost you to build? How much does it cost Apple to build a Touch ID button? Not $100, I will tell you that much. 10:21

Geoff: I mean, how much does it cost them to put more RAM in these things? What is it? They charge like $500 for an extra 128 gigs 10:35

Alex: of RAM? 10:42

Alex: You just download more RAM. I saw the advert years ago. 10:43

Adam: Isn’t RAM more valuable than gold these days, though? I think Apple’s, what I’ve heard is they’re doing us a solid on the RAM prices, actually. 10:47

Alex: One would imagine a company like Apple has at least purchased a few years’ worth of fab pricing and locked it in ahead of time. It will be interesting to see by the time we get to the autumn updates of computers from Apple and other manufacturers just how the RAM-pocalypse is going to affect things. 10:57

Alex: And I’m sure this will be a recurring theme throughout the show of just how… how bad of a time it is right now to buy any computer components seemingly i mean i 11:16

Geoff: i looked at i want about my you know gaming pc before covid like i bought you know a 1660 super and everyone’s like oh what are you doing and i was like i’m just buying a gpu and it was a good decision then and i literally upgraded this pc october like 7th And like, you know, about a week later, I looked at Micro Center and the costs were starting to go up. And now that the RAM in this thing would be about $500, I think now. 11:30

Alex: Yeah, it’s no joke. 11:56

Alex: It’s nuts. 11:57

Alex: No joke. 11:58

Alex: Now, this little MacBook Neo actually looks like a really great little package. It’s got a little 1080p webcam in it. So you can do all of your remote learning stuff just fine. Apple say it’s got a 16 hour battery life. That’s pretty good. 11:59

Stephen: That’s not bad. 12:13

Stephen: It steps back from being an M1 with M1 performance. So there’s that. 12:14

Geoff: I mean, let’s be honest. If a Chromebook can do, I mean, all you really need a Chromebook for is web, you know, if that’s the comparison, you need it for web browsing. I mean, you need to be open up some tabs, go to, you know, Google Docs or whatever, you know, web browser you have application for your word processing and, you know, some chat app. 12:20

Geoff: You don’t need, you know, you don’t need much these days. I mean, you can run, I mean, people were running, you know, full desktops on a Raspberry Pi. 12:40

Alex: This is the perfect laptop to throw down the side of the couch and just have something on your lap whilst you’re watching TV, huh? 12:49

Adam: Exactly my point. 12:55

Adam: That would be where this would live in my life. It’s just something where I’m not worried about hurting it. It’s inexpensive. It’s not nothing, but it’s inexpensive enough that I’m not going to baby it. And the battery life on that thing, especially Macs, because when you put them into sleep mode, they last forever. Yeah. And just have it there, have it accessible, pop it out when you need it. Bob’s your uncle. And I think the other really interesting thing about this one is that for the first time in a very long time, people who are going to college, et cetera, this is going to be a really interesting option that they’re going to be looking at at that price point. 12:57

Adam: So accessible. 13:40

Alex: It is kind of crazy. Yeah. It is kind of crazy that this is in a similar price realm as an iPad, particularly when you buy an iPad and a keyboard. And certainly when you’re sat in a lecture theater or something like that, you want something on your lap or on the table that you can type on and try and keep up with what you’re hearing. 13:42

Alex: That for me is like just absolute slam dunk. I mean, the Chromebooks are still quite a bit cheaper than this, maybe $200 or less. 14:00

Geoff: No, I mean, the super cheap ones, maybe. But I mean, like the the ones you really want, like I bought one 10 years ago and it’s about four hundred dollars. So I’d say that four or five hundred dollars is probably the price range for. Yes, they do have the super cheap. They have the super the super cheap MacBook, the stupid cheap ones. But I mean, he’s talking about the kindergarten version. going back to what i said earlier yes it can probably do things but you’re really not going to be happy with 14:10

Alex: it i just went to tour my daughter’s new school this morning she’s five and she’s starting a new school in in june july and they wheeled out the cart full of chromebooks and very proudly showed them off and i’m like they look crap but the school was proud of them 14:37

Stephen: so you know so i think we’ve made an error here one port is actually usb 3 up to 10 gig 14:52

Alex: is it 15:01

Stephen: okay i stand corrected two um i was gonna say that this is the first time i’ll be able to step back to a 13 inch um like true 13 inch for a travel computer um the last time i had a mac that size was the black plasticky looking one oh it was just it was just a macbook right it was intel 15:01

Alex: I have such… 15:23

Alex: So I used to work at the Genius Bar, and I used to be able… These plastic MacBooks, they used to come in… The plastic bezel around the top case, they called it. So you’ve got your laptop, keyboard like this, and then you’ve got the trackpad just here. This area all around the bottom was called the top case, where the keyboard was. And you couldn’t replace just the plastic shell. You had to replace the keyboard and the trackpad as a single unit. And I used to be like… I used to set myself challenges because we had like three or four every shift come in of these things. Like, can I do it in a 10-minute Genius Bar appointment? And I never quite managed it, but I got pretty close on a few occasions, like ripping out all the 20 screws that are in there. Those plastic MacBooks were, in their day, pretty good, apart from the fact they were made 15:25

Stephen: of cheese. 16:12

Stephen: the uh the black one was a matte finish not like any sort of sheen on it whatsoever so any sort of oils on your hand pretty much left a permanent mark 16:14

Alex: and it had a white apple logo whereas the yes It was a really nice laptop, actually. 16:25

Stephen: Yeah, no, I really liked it. And so I haven’t had a small travel laptop since then. It’s always been the 14-inch whatever MacBook Pro. So I’ve been thinking about, since this came out magically today, grabbing one of these as just the machine that I take out to my customers, right? Because right now I’m carrying around a fairly expensive MacBook Pro. And if I were to set that on a side of a desk or something and someone knocked it over, I’m out significant amounts of money, right? So this thing, while it’s not free, it’s not peanuts, it’s, you know, but significantly less than my MacBook Pro. Off the price, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Sounds like we 16:29

Adam: have 17:09

Geoff: patient zero. 17:10

Alex: Yeah, 17:11

Geoff: that sounds great. 17:12

Geoff: Yeah, 17:13

Alex: get one and get us a review. Indeed, yeah. Well, that’s the MacBook Neo. Pretty interesting looking little device. What else have we got in the show, Doc, today? Ah, yes. Let’s talk a little bit about Vibe Slop, Vibe Coding. r slash self-hosted over the last couple of weeks has released a new set of rules, which I actually really like. 17:14

Alex: You are only allowed to post your app that you have Vibe Coded on a Friday. Every other day, you have to at least pretend you didn’t vibe code 17:36

Geoff: it. 17:47

Geoff: Again, I like our self-hosted, but it was definitely getting to the point where 90% of what I was seeing coming out of the self-hosted subreddit was vibe coding stuff. So I think it’s been a much cleaner subreddit since they have done this. I 17:47

Adam: think it’s a wonderful role if people adhere to it and they can’t get past it in some way. then i think it makes perfect sense but i think this is just kind of an example of where things are going to go it’s like not a problem that’s going to go away this is just something we will learn to cope with and you know the there’s pros and cons obviously like huge pro it’s democratizing this technology and allowing people to create you know 18:04

Adam: create their ideas in code that never would have had that opportunity before. So that’s a huge pro. The con is that they don’t know what they’re doing. And I think a lot of them do know what they’re doing and they just don’t care. And so… You know, we’ll come up with systems like this. We’ll come up with rules. The systems will get better over time. And I imagine our robots will fight their robots and eventually we’ll get it sorted. So but I think this is a good starting point. Long story short, 18:39

Stephen: I think it’s a weird space right now, right? Everything changes almost daily. And to the point where I’ve actually seen classes to teach people how to vibe code instead of learning code, how to talk to an AI to get the thing you want. 19:11

Stephen: And so that’s all fine and dandy. I really feel like you need fundamental understanding of what you’re doing instead of just using general terms. You could be one sentence away from leave this completely open to everyone and allow passwords to be freely available if someone queries it or make this very secure and then please make it human readable in the code so it can be modified later. 19:29

Stephen: But if you have no idea what you’re actually doing in the back end, you don’t know to think about the little gotchas. And so maybe one day and maybe one day soon, AI will start to think about this stuff more in the background automatically because we do have code specific ones, right? 19:56

Stephen: But right now, I don’t know. It shouldn’t be code that goes out to the mainstream that people start to rely on. Just my 20:16

Alex: theory. 20:25

Alex: They are improving at quite a clip. But you hear a lot of people. I think AI stuff is like there’s very little room for nuance in the discussion. And for me, there’s a huge amount of nuance. So that’s what I want to talk about. So what I worry about with vibe coding in general, I think, by the way, the self-hosted rule is great. I was getting a bit tired of seeing the same old, like, I built this amazing new thing that solves my very specific problem. And I really like the fact that people are able to solve their own problems, are empowered to solve their own problems. But what I worry about are the long term consequences. You know, where are the junior programmers going to have the time and space to learn and make mistakes and cut their teeth? 20:25

Alex: Because I know when I was at university learning how to write Java, I was writing an Android app. I’m banging my head against. I remember it clear as day sat in the college library. Why won’t you compile? And that pain, that pain of learning and understanding and really truly internalizing the problem space that you’re in and understanding inheritance and all of these things. 21:17

Alex: i i know those things now because i i i always say this but like education isn’t free it could cost you money or it could cost you a lot of time and in my case in that year it cost me both but from my perspective like i just really worry for the the ramifications in five or ten years time because i know for a fact i would have just pushed the easy button if chat gpt or claude was available when i was at university i I would not have suffered through that afternoon in the library going, just compile. I only changed one character. What’s going on? I would have just reached out to nearest AI tool. That’s what I worry about. And you’re really starting to see the ramifications of it. Like with this Hunter fiasco that happened over the last few weeks, who wants to dig into this? Because it was… It was pretty bad, this one. I think I 21:45

Geoff: remember seeing that post, the post that kind of called out the dev, you know, posted on self-hosted. And basically, when I was reading through it, I mean, it’s what exposed all the passwords of all your radar, sonar, any of your R’s was basically exposed. 22:36

Geoff: And I think the most damning part of it was the dev, instead of responding, hey, let’s go patch these vulnerabilities, didn’t he ban the guy who brought them up the first time? It’s 22:51

Alex: worse than that. 23:04

Alex: So HuntR was a self-hosted tool that sat on top of the R ecosystem. We’re all familiar with SODAR, radar, LIDAR, things that we don’t talk about in public, but we all know what they do, if you know what I mean. 23:05

Alex: Huntar’s purpose was to automatically search through your library and look for missing media or versions of media in your library that could be upgraded. Very useful tool, honestly. But because it had to integrate with the R stack, you had to give it the keys in order to talk to those applications. So basically the username and password to log in and say, hey, what do you got, mate? Show me what you got. Now, what happened with the Huntar controversy was that a user posted a security review, I’ll use air quotes for that, of Huntar version 9.4.2 in r slash self-hosted. 23:20

Alex: The claim in that original post was a settings endpoint could be queried without authentication. That endpoint would return full configuration data, including API keys and credentials for any connected application. 24:01

Alex: It’s a pretty bad leak. Like, give me your username and password without any authentication. It’s pretty bad. In other words, anyone on the network could dump secrets. This became particularly bad if Huntar, for some stupid reason, was on the public internet. So you could request access to anything that Huntar could see, the username and password, the API keys, if it was on the public internet. So shortly after that, these posts were removed and people got banned from various different places. because the maintainer deleted posts from the GitHub repo and issues and removed any comments that were critical. 24:17

Alex: This is a red flag for me. It’s not exactly mature behavior that you want from a developer of an application that you’re trusting with your stuff, right? Regardless of whether this is a piracy application or not, it’s just suspicious behavior, right? Yeah, 24:55

Geoff: agreed. 25:09

Alex: So then the community dug a little deeper because a couple of other people’s spidey senses were going off and they’re like, right, well, this guy’s not kosher, is he? Let’s have a look. And so someone did a proper security review and found 20 more vulnerabilities in this Vibe-coded Huntar application, including authentication failures and other exposed settings as well. 25:10

Alex: As you can imagine, the story spread pretty quickly across r slash self-hosted, hunter, r slash subreddit drama, even made it onto the Lemmy Fediverse as well. Then, this is where it gets really kind of crappy, is the maintainer decided, I’m out, and just straight up deleted the project from the internet. 25:30

Geoff: Well, I think he also, you try to change the repo name a couple of times and do some other weird behavior that I’m really not quite sure… why he would i mean the deleting thing i can kind of understand if he wants to delete it from the internet the changing the repo bit 25:53

Alex: was just strange yeah well the maintainer deleted their entire presence from the internet as far as i can tell they deleted their reddit account they deleted github they made r slash huntar private i mean talk about an emotional reaction 26:08

Adam: The thing that this actually raises for me is I think the most interesting aspect is how is this going to affect the staying power of applications going forward as more and more people? I mean, there’s lots of different angles to this, but the angle that catches me is if you’re using vibe coding type of tooling, how much conviction and passion do you actually have in your project? 26:24

Adam: And so I was just thinking like, okay, a little bit of pushback. And how many times will we see this repeated where, oh, we’ll just, yeah. All right. Who cares? We’ll just blow it up and start over. I didn’t, you know, 26:50

Alex: we’ve heard the phrase easy come easy go for forever. And I think the same thing is true of a vibe coded software. Um, Also, the qualities are just not there, clearly. These models just chuck out stuff that works. And if it’s a single maintainer project and somebody who’s less experienced, I think the risk we run as a community is gatekeeping people from even trying to solve other people’s problems, which is the entire foundation of open source. 27:04

Alex: At the same time, you’re signing up. There’s an unwritten and unspoken contract with open source software that you’re signing up. It’s basically like you’re getting into a long-term relationship. You’ve got to treat it with appropriate care and respect and honestly just common decency. 27:34

Stephen: What if really the guy just wanted to code something because he thought it would be helpful? He was really into the hobby and it just kind of spiraled out. It became popular. He never thought it would be. Is he going to out himself and be like, guys, just so you know, I didn’t make this and AI made it. Like, do you do that? I don’t know. The fact that he just disappeared probably means that he didn’t really want any sort of staying around. 27:50

Geoff: I think he did claim he was security. He had a security plan and he was in the security industry. Not saying that’s at all true, but he was definitely trying to claim he was an expert. 28:18

Alex: Well, then I’m done. 28:34

Alex: Sorry. 28:36

Alex: So what’s the verdict here? Is it AI bad or is it we should never touch anything vibe coded or what? 28:36

Stephen: I think it’s AI good, right? It’s a learning tool. It can be an amazing learning tool. Just think because you mentioned Alex, you would say, Hey, I can’t get this, this JavaScript thing to work. Why isn’t it compiling? If you had the self-restraint to not just say, hey, AI, fix it for me and I don’t care what you do, just make it work. Instead said, please look at this code and point out where I might have gone wrong and help me explain why. It could be a very useful tool, right? but just like any tool that starts to do things for you, actually cars, for example, with all their safety features, do it, do it. 28:46

Stephen: Does everyone look behind them when they’re backing up anymore? No, they stare at the screen, right? But you really shouldn’t be doing it. But if you have the self-control to use the tool in such a way that can be helpful and not dangerous, then AI good. 29:27

Stephen: But if it just takes over for everything, 29:42

Alex: AI bad. 29:44

Alex: What about the societal cost, though? I know this is perhaps a slightly different debate from Vibe Slop, but the fact that they’re building data centers out the wazoo, the fact that none of us can afford personal computing hardware anymore because of various different data center builds out. 29:46

Alex: We are removing the ability for the average person to afford a personal computer, and we’re centralizing all of that control it’s a very dangerous we’re seeing the impacts of it literally right now it’s a very dangerous path i think 30:04

Adam: i think it’s very dangerous but it’s inevitable that’s what i keep coming back to with all this we talk about best practices and how this could be a great tool if it’s just auditing my work and such i think you just got to let go of that it’s not going to be that’s not how this is going to go It’s moving too fast. It’s going to get too good. And humans are lazy, one. And, you know, we’re we also want to use tools effectively. So everybody’s going to try to one up everybody else. I think it’s just a matter of time. I actually feel like this conversation isn’t even going to. be really an issue for that much longer. If you look at the velocity of how quickly it’s improving, this whole concept of AI slop, I think within a year, it’s just going to be, this is how things are done and it’s high quality. 30:24

Adam: And we don’t even talk about this anymore. Honestly, that’s where I think it’s going to go. 31:17

Alex: If you have enough of a pool of senior people that know how to guide these things, I agree with you. In fact, you look at Anthropics job postings right now. All of their engineering postings are for staff, senior staff, staff level. They’re not interested in juniors. They don’t care. They just need the best of the best to make sure that they’re creating things that are actually going to be able to… Like I said earlier, if you’re a junior coming out of college right now, because you just don’t have that experience, it’s going to be an interesting few years for sure. 31:22

Adam: I was going to say that we still need people to stack bricks. Somebody was mentioning the junior devs earlier, and I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s just going to not be a thing for much longer. And the concept of teaching Vibe Coding is While I think we’re just misrepresenting what that’s going to be, it’s just going to be a completely different learning process on how to how to prompt and how to have them audit, you know, multiple different LLMs auditing each other and whole workflows that are going to be in place, which a lot of that exists now, but it’s going to get better. 31:59

Adam: And that is what people will be learning how to do. And to your point, Alex, like the senior devs being what people are after right now, completely correct, because they understand those core concepts. They understand how to actually be effective now with the tools that work. are in play. But the societal aspect is super scary to me. I don’t know if, did any of you watch, I know this is a side tangent and I apologize, but did any of you watch the interview with 32:35

Geoff: the CEO of Anthropic, CBS, I believe? No. 33:03

Adam: Oh, okay. 33:07

Adam: If you want some nightmares, go ahead and watch that and you’ll see how the US government is bullying Anthropic via tweets about, I think it had something to do with marking them as a trade threat, something like that. Something that’s, it’s totally unprecedented. 33:08

Geoff: It’s not a national security threat, but it’s, I know what you’re talking about, but it’s the whole Pentagon, like they want to be able to use it for all lawful purposes. And Anthropic says, fine, but not for surveillance. And I think autonomous like drone decisions. 33:27

Adam: It’s domestic surveillance without oversight specifically and autonomous weapons, again, without oversight, which is like the most reasonable constraints I can think of. And again, Anthropic’s not even saying never. They’re just saying it’s not reliable right now. We cannot in good conscience do this, right? And the laws haven’t caught up with the technology. So they’re saying, hey, we got to work with Congress to put some controls on this. 33:42

Geoff: Well, let me tell you a thing about laws catching up with. They’re never going to catch up. Adam, you got 34:12

Alex: him started. 34:19

Alex: Oh, no. 34:20

Geoff: I will keep this short, but the point of the laws is we’re never going to keep up. The job is to make the laws flexible enough so that way they can accommodate things like AI. And I think we’ll get there because, honestly, I don’t know if there are going to be laws because I just don’t know if we can all come to an agreement on what the laws should be. 34:22

Alex: Indeed. 34:42

Alex: Right. 34:43

Alex: Well, I think it’s probably about time that we wrapped up for this episode. We’re going to try and keep them in the sort of 30 to 40-ish minute range so that people on their commute and things like that can catch a full episode. You can find more of us at bitflip.show. We’re still working out some of the kinks as related to RSS feeds and things like that you obviously can subscribe to us on youtube which maybe is where you’re watching this right now or maybe you’re listening through the rss feed at bitflip.show i don’t know but that’s where you can find the source of truth on bitflip.show uh we’re going to release every two weeks at least that’s what we’re going to try and do anyway uh all of us this is just a hobby for the four of us um maybe me less so but i like to try and pretend it’s a 34:44

Alex: So there might be the odd week where one of us is traveling and it might just be three of us. But for the most part, we should do this every couple of weeks, looking at infrastructure and like I said, self-hosting, just the wider conversation about technology in general. 35:29

Alex: You can find all of our different profiles over at bitflip.show for the various different places. You can find us on Mastodon and all those kinds of Fediverse type places. We want to try and embrace decentralized things with the exception of YouTube, clearly. as much as possible um to to spread the word you know um because that’s fundamentally i think that the four of us are all here because of a love of self-hosting and digital sovereignty and independence from large conglomerates even though we all just defended ai a little bit you know the irony of that’s not lost on me believe me um but uh yeah 35:44

Alex: That will do us for episode one, I think. And thank you very much for watching. And we’ll see you in a couple of weeks. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye. 36:21