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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

    After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

    Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

    But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

    Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.



  • My argument is thus:

    LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.

    I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”

    But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.






  • It’s more than just centralized control.

    They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.

    That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.

    Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.



  • Same here. I’ve been trying to immerse myself in Spanish. My grandparents were from there and they were always disappointed that none of their grandchildren became fluent.

    Now I go back once per year as a sort of pilgrimage. Hopefully I’ll be able to hold conversations soon.

    It’s difficult, but I never want to be that American who refuses to make even a token effort to learn the basics of the language when they’re travelling abroad.








  • I think it would take a pretty major sea change for them. They technically split up into Alphabet, but I don’t know of a single person that actually uses that when describing them.

    Even if they did change things around, and I would wager that the entrenched bureaucracy will make that impossible, their name is toxic to a lot of tech nerds. We may be a minority, but we talk and people listen. Even the non techies in my life know that they can’t maintain a simple messaging app, responded to (rightful!) concerns about data loss by locking the support threads, and has jacked up the price of YouTube on a yearly basis.

    They’ve spectacularly failed at video game consoles, social media, banking/credit cards, IOT, messaging, video, and can’t even maintain a semblance of consistency in their office suite. At work I have three different ways to receive instant messages, and it’s a crapshoot as to which one a coworker will use.

    And let’s not even get into how absolutely useless their search is now that everything has been gamed by SEO. Duckduckgo has been my default for years, but now it’s consistently returning better results than big G.

    If they managed to correct course tomorrow, it would take multiple years for me to even begin to trust them again.




  • Speaking as a non Rustacean, I’m pretty okay with it becoming more integrated.

    It’s safe, performant, and isn’t any more difficult to pick up than C++. C has a weird aura about it that makes it seem intimidating despite the fact that it is the simplest language (macros notwithstanding) that I’ve ever used.

    Based on Google’s recent track record of mind-boggling incompetence on all fronts, I want Go kept as far away from core functionality as humanly possible. This leaves either adding more cruft to an already ungainly C++, continuing to use Boost (another Google product) with C, or to pivot to a more modern language.