Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I don't have to use plan9 to value what the 9fans did.

I don't have to use plan9 to secure the benefit of exploring models of software, systems, networks which plan9 explored.

I think that you have to swim very strongly across some currents, to decide to "be" in plan9, but its no different in that sense to choosing to live behind a Nokia brick phone, or only using pen and paper in meetings. Others may work effectively in their kanban on a laptop, but the decision to stop using the parts of your brain which type, and instead use the parts of your brain which shape semantic intent, by writing, is quite large.

And in that sense, deciding to use plan9, or even just a tiling window manager, or to disable image load in web by default, or to use Markdown or Org mode to do thing instead of reaching for some packaged electron app, or to focus on GO or Haskell or whatever the thing is, which forces you to think about what you are doing in code, That decision may be swimming against the stream, but its big.

Plan9 is big. Its not for everyone, and I decided not to invest because it had moving parts I didn't feel confident I understood and at the time I looked at it, was wedded to multiple independent instances of boxes I didn't own.

Now, it is probably entirely possible inside containers or VMs or something, but I am content to know I could.

(I am however, using pen and paper more in meetings)

One interesting trick about only using pen and paper, is that your Handwriting becomes like a quick indicator to your state of mind.

If I'm taking notes and they come out like chicken scratch it means I'm usually too agitated and just rushing. Even just writing slower doesn't help. You basically have to actively relax yourself, breathe in/out, and collected yourself.

This so much. Handwriting quality helps me decide which paper should be tossed. If its agitated like you describe, the value of the information on it is probably trash and therefore it goes into the trash.

Wow. I think I now understand why I work so much better when using pen and paper to take notes. Thank you.

Hmm I unconsciously resort to my notepad when working through problems. This should be part of my mindfulness routine :)

This is an insightful observation. What are your thoughts regarding why most choose to swim with the stream, instead of exploring other models?

It's significantly easier to get to team-based outcomes if you can adhere to a common platform. Finding a common platform by swimming against the stream is just harder. Larger enterprises, which can provide jobs, tend to want team. The history of science/technology is littered with companies which had the courage to give small groups of people budget and time, to do things. We don't often hear about the failures, but I am sure there are many.

Bell happened to be one of those companies. You could walk into another door in Bell (or AT&T) and drive to a room much less tolerant of swimming against the stream.

>It's significantly easier to get to team-based outcomes if you can adhere to a common platform.

Both the good outcomes and the bad outcomes. Cue the recent Slack WYSIWYG editor woes.

Slack used to have an IRC gateway, allowing anybody to peruse it from any OS, on any device, with any UX. The Slack corp. chose to supply UI for one popular platform (Electron), and cut off[1] any other means of access. This single platform focus did put Slack in full control of the UI and UX of the messenger, and able to force the WYSIWYG editor on all users.

Without the overwhelming dominance of one platform (Electron), Slack most probably would feel the need to maintain the fully featured IRC gateway, letting people interface with it fully via alternative means.

--

[1] the APIs are un(der?)documented, changing, and you are on your own

I use wee-slack with weechat, works great. It is definitely a better experience than when I was using the irc gateway.

Whenever I see a new IM service pop up, my first two questions are:

1. Is it FOSS?

2. Can I use it in Weechat?

That's really all that matters to me. I currently use Weechat to handle IRC and Matrix.org.

I've had to use Slack in an internship in the past. Thanks for mentioning wee-slack; I'll keep an eye on it should I be subjected to a proprietary IM service again.

irccloud.com (needs a paid account) will provide an BNC interface to a slack - been using that for a while to talk to customer slack setups, works really nicely.

In addition to what @ggm said, consider why software projects tend to employ external libraries instead of rolling their own solution. The time investment of reinventing the wheel is often immense, even though the eventual result may be objectively superior.

This also leads to extreme bloat in a lot of cases, but is cheaper to build (not necessarily maintain), and always gets chosen.

I think one of the subtle benefits to using well-known libraries is that they've already discovered and handled edge cases.

Per most of the reading I've done on "Why software development time planning is so difficult", the problem lies with bounding uncertainty.

We're pretty good at estimating business as usual, but much less so at producing a number when "there are 3 items, each of which has a ~10% chance of adding 10x happy path time" holds. Or even identifying it might hold!

That someone has already found a way to thread the minefield, or dealt with any unavoidable mines, is valuable.

Peer pressure. As one of those who consciously refused the smartphone there are people in my environment who won't let any chance go by to tell me that 'if I had a smartphone' and then followed by some inane reason that is probably one of the reasons why I don't have one.

I can see people giving in just to get rid of that kind of continuous low key harassment.

Evolution. Society works better when most people fall in line with the major consensus narrative. Even a society with a suboptimal strategy that everyone follows is better than a society full of second-guessers that doesn't get anything done.

That's not to say that you need everyone to be a mindless drone, but just like reinforcement learning works best with a healthy balance (usually like 90/10) of exploitation and exploration, society works best when a few people explore new options and the majority follows the emergent consensus.

Because perhaps you see an OS not as a hobby, but as a tool, and you may swim across other streams in life such that you feel your time is spent in better ways.

For instance, I enjoyed being a janitor for my Arch Linux install for a while - it taught me a lot - but eventually I switched to MacOS because I actually wanted to ignore my OS and focus on the code I was writing and connecting to WiFi reliably.

If you are putting your time into something, it makes some sense for it to be something you value.

> actually wanted to ignore my OS and focus on the code I was writing and connecting to WiFi reliably

I feel this. I was a distro-hopper for years. I eventually settled on just using Ubuntu LTS for ease but definitely benefited from the time I spent nurturing my arch laptop.

Yeah I much preferred Arch because every moving part was one I'd installed, so there was less mystery.

However, still very annoying having to rearrange meetings because you did an upgrade and some X11 config needed to change and so you can't even boot a GUI for a bit.

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