I thought the censorship was in the harness, not the model? E.g. if you use chat.deepseek.com directly, and ask it about the location or rumours of the location of the panchen llama it will shut down... but sometimes just after it starts generating tokens. If you ask it to respond in base64 you can avoid this and get its generated response which is not censored (though also not too helpful for the poor panchen llama kid)
Very much mixed. I've used Claude to generate small changes to an existing repo, asking it to create functions or react template in the style of the rest of the file its working in, and thats worked great. I still do a lot of the fine tuning there, but if the codebase isn't one I am overly familiar with this is a good way to ensure my work doesn't conflict with the core team's.
I have also done the agentic thing and built a full CLI tool via back-and-forth engagement with Claude and that worked great - I didn't write a single line of code. Because the CLI tool was calling an API, I could ask Claude to run the requests it was generating and adjust based on the result - errors, bad requests etc, and it would fairly rapidly fix and coalesce on a working solution.
After I was done though, I reckon that if instead of this I had just done the work myself I would have had a much smaller, more reliable project. Less error handling, no unit tests, no documentation sure, but it would have worked and worked better - I wouldn't need to iterate off the API responses because I would have started with a better contract-based approach. But all of that would have been hard, would have required more 'slow thinking'. So... I didn't really draw a clean conclusion from the effort.
Continuing to experiment, not giving up on anything yet.
It's almost as if being able to generate boilerplate code is only like 5% of software development.
That being said, its great at generating boilerplate code or in my case, doing something like 'make a react component here please that does this small thing, and is aligned with the style in the rest of the file'. Good for when I need to work with code bases or technologies that are not my daily. Also a great research assistant.
But I guess being a 'better google' or a 'glorified spellchecker' doesn't get that hype money.
It's always 'eventually', 'soon', 'by the latter half of this year' with AI. Meanwhile I am both bemused and horrified as I watch a bunch of idiots desperate ly trying to find the magical 10x trick with AI unleash more and more mediocre code full of security vulnerabilities, running on agents with root permissions, that I somehow have to 'secure' for the company :D At least I have job security! Up until we get hacked sideways at least.
This reminds me of a take by Dan Harumi: these tools are always pitched for 'restraurant reservations', 'reminders', 'email and message follow ups': i.e. they appeal to the sort of arrested development man children that inhabit tech who never really figured out adulting. Now the computer can do it for them, and they can remain teenagers forever.
I switched my laptop (Surface Laptop Go) from Win11 to Tumbleweed, and its great. Mainly because Windows kept getting slower, and arguably Win11 isn't great for an 8GB system. OpenSuse is a great distro.
But my gaming PC and primary workstation remains Win11, and always will be (windows, that is). Notably Suse under WSL2 works great there as well, and my Kubes workflow is just as easy with PowerShell commands as it is with bash.
OS's have purposes, and arguably there is no single platform that is better than the others in every way - Windows is better for games and is more stable across different hardware and configurations. Linux is much lighter, more intentional, and for me better for infosec and some coding activities.
I've been using Windows 11 since it came out. Seems fine, no real difference over 10. Maybe a little bit faster.
Some of the more annoying stuff like ads in the start menu and the like only really affect americans, as far as I know. I've never seen it. Had a brief battle turning copilot off everywhere when that became a thing - including in notepad! - but thats hardly just a microsoft thing.
Don't really understand all this drama over the TPM chip, especially since you can bypass that requirement with a little effort if you can't upgrade your hardware.
I ran a few shut-up scripts and installed StartAllBack and my machine is almost indistinguishable from Windows 7 on first glance. And it was certainly no more work than configuring Linux to my liking.
