It is very hard work and with multilayer boards and surface mount components it is not really a hobby for me anymore, maybe with AI it can be again?

Ahem. For you or for the AI?

Yes.

I guess I walked right into that one.

In this case it’s not AI that helps its full service board fab and assembly shops like JLCPCB. It’s so cheap to order fully assembled boards there I don’t bother assembling mine at home anymore. Bonus is you don’t need to mess with tiny components. You can put a 1x1mm 4 pin BGA on there and they will happily solder it for you.

Bugs days are numbered with AI!

Technically correct, because there are infinitely many numbers.

True and funny.

AI-powered email agent that syncs your emails via IMAP and provides intelligent analysis Interesting to analyse 20+ years of my gmail account. Fork the repo and make it better, this is created with AI

good luck, nice idea, agents are fun and a bit scary sometimes!

Gambling feeds on human misery, it should never be normalized, they made the right decision.

Yes. One way to do so is by eradicating gambling (or at least the ads for it).

People will never be 100% happy, all the time. And gambling (like many other companies) prey on people in the moments where they feel down.

I am using the older version of raspberry pi 3 B+ to host mail and web services locally behind firewalls. There is a use case here for developing for remote areas that have unreliable internet and power. Still a way to go but there is something in place. This site is a beta running from my lounge at home. https://localboxmail.co.za/software.html

Any suggestions for an ancient Chromebook?

Have one that is managed by a school from 10 years ago and they failed to release the device.

I am a fan of alpine Linux which i think may work well on an old Chromebook.

Any suggestions/links welcome

If you still want ChromeOS, try https://chromeos.google/intl/en_au/products/chromeos-flex/

If you want to boot a Linux distribution, try https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/

Along with farfatched's suggestions, you could look into Postmarket OS (based on Alpine Linux).

The devices page on their wiki shows compatibility with specific devices - https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

> managed by a school […] and they failed to release the device.

This means you cannot install the alternate OS setups mentioned in sibling comments.

Throw it away.

ETA: info correct as of a long time ago. I have done no new research.

My son wants to throw it away, I want to at least try and reuse it.

I have mixed feelings about this, I hate the loss of slow "discovery" and the warm fuzzy feeling when you understand something that used to be Greek to you (unless of course you are Greek) The piles of programming books, sadly many unread but admired on the shelf from afar. Now I create programs in languages I only vaguely understand and run remote servers without even logging in, it feels slightly shameful but then we are all complicit

wow this is murky water, I love the abstraction of AI, I feel like the director of an orchestra creating beautiful music in code.

I always resented having to write the same code over and over, now automated by AI

but also support free and open software, as all knowledge should be

> I always resented having to write the same code over and over,

Those problems had been solved in the 1970s and don't need LLMs. One solution is called 'copy-paste', another 'software libraries/components' ;)

Neither really solved the problem, reality is too nuanced, AI fills the gap.

Not sure if a non-deterministic copy-paste is really filling a gap ;)

But yeah, there are areas in software development where AI assistence is actually useful, I just see code-generation as one of the less useful areas, since tbh this isn't a problem that needs urgent solving. IMHO LLMs are much more useful for passively analyzing/bugscanning code bases (or data in general).

Absolutely, I give my agents access to MCP/API and they can check logs and setup checks for potential problems and whatever else

> I love the abstraction of AI

Careful with that wording. LLMs are not an abstraction, they do not provide an abstraction, not in the software sense, as they are completely non-deterministic the way they are used today. Saying "write me a function that does xyz" is not an abstraction layer ontop of writing it yourself.

It is a really interesting debate, it seems to be a type of abstraction at least, with an interface as a natural language instead of a typed schema.

It's no more an abstraction than working with a bunch of contractors to make an app.

> I love the abstraction of AI, I feel like the director of an orchestra creating beautiful music in code.

You can host your projects elsewhere you know? Codeberg is not the only public git service available.