knighthack

How you started completely disqualified whatever the author of the article argues next:

"...The recent fiasco involving Linus Torvalds running Linux like the privileged man that he is and entirely missing the central points of the arguments made by people who don't enjoy his kind of privilege..."

It was his 'privilege' that led to the technical competency of the project that is now enjoyed by many.

Attacking someone's 'privilege' is the lowest form of argument.

I leaped to Linux a few years back. One of the best moves in my life. The speed, the reaction time, the lack of bloat.

I side-car'ed a Mac for some apps that could not go through (e.g. for audio work, which Linux has some difficulties with, and lacks a lot of good apps for), but even that went smoothly because it had far less bloat and was already very UNIX-y.

The post is aggressive.

I was about to dislike it, then I realized: the author's aggression comes off as... human.

I don't know if the aggression itself is an intentional mockery of the cool, dispassionate, pseudo-poetic tone that AI mostly writes in.

But the passionate visceral disgust is definitely human.

I really don't get having a ton of MD files lying around. And the possibility of having to edit a thousand MD files when the metadata frontmatter changes.

A single SQLite database implements columns/metadata handling, and comes baked-in with FTS and BM25 ranking too.

AI music appears to be reasonable music, but it carries no human emotion, it has no intent to exist and stand up on its own.

The 'lack' of human emotion does not make anything less musical, at least on the composition side.

But even on the playing side: well-crafted AI music these days have started sounding just as expressive as human-made music. It is not bland at all.

LLMs are terrible at accurately summarizing anything. They very randomly latch on to certain keywords and construct a narrative from them, with the result being something that is plausibly correct but in which the details are incorrect, usually subtly so, or important information is omitted because it wasn't part of the random selection of attention.

I don't know what you've been doing, but the summaries I get from my LLMs have been rather accurate.

And in any event, summaries are just that - summaries.

They don't need to be 100% accurate. Demanding that is unreasonable.

One other thing - latency.

The newest Macbooks have insanely powerful hardware (I have an M4 Macbook Max). Yet they do not feel as speedy or instant on my machines with i3. There's always a perceivable milliseconds of latency, with response time from the keyboard to the screen. As someone who has tons of key bindings, I find this tolerable, but it can get a bit grating compared to just how instantaneous everything is on my Linux.

The one interesting thing (as a heavy user of both OSes) is that since the past decade there now are plenty of high-quality games (if those count for apps) on the Linux, that still don't work as well or as plentifully on Mac.

Linux is bound to be the number one gaming machine in time; general apps aside.

I use CopyQ. Love it because it's so cross-platform, and consistently works across my Mac and Linux machines with minimal fuss; it handles images really well too.

I have some doubts about your statements. If you can't get a job at FAANG or the major startups, sure - that makes absolute sense. Competition is crazy.

If you can't get a job at all, that makes no sense, and probably speaks more to the fact that you might be an academic parrot who can talk code, but not write code, as an actual software developer with practical abilities. And that goes more to your lack of practice, rather than lack of knowledge. The world is not to blame in that regard but you.

Alternatively, try different domains - your skills might work little wonder in the software world, but might move mountains in other (especially labour-intensive) domains.

While I love this insightful analogue, your statement seems exactly like the kind of text you copy-pasted from some LLM, which you then regurgitated to Hacker news with some modifications.

It even ends with that trademark conclusion-style statement... which is a hallmark of ChatGPT output.

I'm not sure why allowances are made for Zig's verbosity, but not Go's.

What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.

What "ugly things" exactly did he say?

I find it ridiculous how "writing scripts to keep things working the way I want" can be a source of frustration.

To me, that's a source of pleasure.

I've never expected Windows or Mac to work exactly how I want them to. In fac, they can't. So given that, how can Linux be a poorer experience/

The truth is that for virtually everyone, Linux will be the absolute closest experience to having everything work exactly the way you want things to, because it is that open to being modified.

Swift's become so feature-heavy, and complex, whilst the documentation is all over the place. That's not even counting things like SwiftUI, or its rather arcane CLI tooling.

Out of curiosity, I put in more than 150 genuine hours in 2024, trying to get deeply into Swift - and eventually just abandoned the language.

In comparison - I got very far experimenting with Go in the same amount of time.

Unless one needs to get into the Mac ecosystem, I see no reason why learning Swift should be necessary at all.

I'm willing to bet there's a dragon in that egg.

What exactly do you write, where your Python+C is faster than Nim which compiles to optimized C?

"...I am a psychologist of software environments and that is something of an anomaly."

Right. Translation: "I'm actually incompetent. I have no technical abilities, and I'm lazy to learn."

Her entire blog post - and probably career - is just her waffling around.

I really wish there was more of a discussion on Nim.

I've always thought the word 'bricked' as more akin to 'turning the phone into a useless brick'.

Somehow an anti-DEI push is "ridiculous", but the prior pro-DEI push isn't?

There are those who were successful without merit, achieved renown/success only because they were DEI tokens.

Therefore if they didn't deserve their 'achievements' by the merits in the first place, there's nothing wrong with taking their stories down once the political climates have changed (especially a climate that encourages truth and merits over the political advantage that got those DEI tokens in in the first place).

Lack of passion and enjoyment for an art form generally correlates with a mentality of doing 'just-enough', rather than a keen desire for craftsmanship.

I think those who enjoy paychecks but don't enjoy coding are likely to be incompetent developers. Which is not a desirable end.

I really don't get how this can't be emulated with the F5 key, or something like Sublime Text's InsertDate package, or a text expansion software. What does this note taking provide that's any different?

This is so fascinating. I would totally read it if you expanded this into a full blog article on your specific experience at the time.

Rustaceans, the over-engineers.

I haven't read the code, and I wonder if there's excessive focus on performance, safety, and modern programming paradigms for a fake productivity app such as this.

I lost confidence completelythe moment I saw that the example code was with React.js.

Immediately felt like one of those disposable framework ideas.

The underground lizard people doing their thing, of course.

This is a great article on decorators! Sad that it's not gotten more comments. Love the gradual shift between using decorators for functions, wraps, classes, decorators with parameters.

"...women do spend more time on dating apps than men"

How is that statement even true, when there are often more men than women on dating apps, by a significant factor?

There are also studies showing just how difficult women are to retain on dating apps; behind the scenes, a lot more has to be done in the first 24 hours to ensure women match and meet someone of interest so that they stay in the pool.

I'm happy for Zig to gain support for one major reason: Zig does not engage in "woke" culture the way Rust does.

Zig seems to take a neutral, technical-first stance, while Rust has a strong focus on inclusivity, strict moderation, and social policies like with the foundation drama (which is just nonsense for a programming language).

I really wish Nim would have won the language wars though.