emptysongglass

I also don't believe in defending big corporate but Jeff's takes were wildly out of touch with what was actually happening. I do not love Red Hat or any corporation and I think their messaging could have been a lot better but I don't think the people who together make up Alma or Rocky acted in any way in good faith and I do find their desire to have everything hand prepared for them by Red Hat spoiled behavior.

The sources are all still there, they just need to work a little harder to get it. Forgive me if I shed no tears.

> Hate bandwagon? I'm not a huge follower of Jeff's but I have never seen a single thing from them that I would consider "hateful" or jumping on a bandwagon

I'll just address this bit. Yes, it was a hate bandwagon and it wasn't jumping on one, it was leading it. It was all over his LinkedIn and everywhere else he could post at the time.

Jeff, plenty of smarter people than me came out against you to correct your crusade. As a practicing Christian, I'd expect more from you than coming out to lead a mob frothing at the mouth for blood. You didn't even try and have a reasonable discourse with Red Hatters. As an influencer, you have a responsibility not to encourage this kind of social media vitriol that's become all too common. It's a contagion upon the human mind and you are directly responsible for whipping people up in this one.

Because so much of it was just completely false. Jeff positioned Red Hat as going against the community, which wasn't the case at all. The "bad actors" were squarely Rocky and Alma who just wanted to sell the exact same ten year support enterprise Red Hat as Red Hat themselves without any work. Well, Red Hat said, you want it, you go get it in Stream, which has a 5 year lifecycle.

The only companies that need ten year lifecycles are the same consumers Red Hat caters to with RHEL.

Red Hat is continuing to honor all its licensing terms. It just isn't doing its freeloading competitors any favors. And yes: they're freeloaders.

Red Hat's choice never touched the community in any way. As a hobbyist who uses Red Hat stuff, I'm not using RHEL, and even if I was, Red Hat gives generous licenses for hobbyists like me.

Jeff (and everybody else) jumped on the hate bandwagon. It wasn't kind, it was mob behavior, and it completely lacked any nuance.

Our country is massively corrupt. This isn't at all surprising.

Not being able to fetch packages from PyPi is not great either. And for some reason it doesn't have pytest?

> btrfs being unstable persists for a couple of reasons

Fedora uses it by default as does openSUSE. Meta uses it for thousands of their own servers. The very specific RAID configuration is a non-issue for 99.9 percent of people. If they have need of it they'll use something else.

> I'm pretty sure the main thing holding it back is that it's just too hard to use and people silently abandon it.

That's why you use the tools to make it easy. Use the Determinate Nix installer, then install Fleek. I haven't read the Nix manual in at least 5 years.

> But for any first-time user, I'd expect them to be SOL and stuck spending a Linux evening digging through the Nix manuals to figure out how to configure their system. (I just checked, and "First steps with Nix" starts with "Ad hoc shell environments", not anything to do with `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix`)

What? This is not what most users will be doing, no.

I disagree and that's why I recommended Fleek. What is dead simple to you about Nix is not dead simple to others. Especially given your other comment: it's filled with Nix-isms that most people used to imperative thinking would not grok.

That's literally why we make tools, so yes. Claims of Nix is too hard are like the BTRFS is unstable camp (which thankfully has mostly died out): they're holdovers from when these things were true.

You have an entire industry building on top of Nix. Nix itself is complex because it has to be. Its DSL didn't need to be so terrible but the ideas Nix packages are not easy.

So use the layer above the thing that is complex to make that thing easy. That's what tools are for.

> Nix is great in theory, but the user experience is unacceptably bad, especially for anyone who isn’t a software engineer.

This is a pretty extravagant claim. It was once very bad but there's now a large quantity of tooling that makes it as easy to work with as Homebrew.

For managing their home, people can use Fleek, which makes Home Manager straightforward to work with: https://getfleek.dev/

So Paul Graham posted that Phind is better and got absolutely destroyed in the comments

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1719657855240815026

No, I do not take these benchmarks seriously and for good reason. They're benchmarks. The only thing that matters is the user's direct experience of the product. And Phind isn't there.

Is this true for all of the incumbent password managers? If so, it seems like the worst of software lock-in.

Well no we have the anecdotes of all the HN folks which I trust many, many times more than a benchmark.

That conclusion is based on their benchmarks. I'm not interested in those. I'm interested in community benchmarks, like those we're seeing in the comments. Lo and behold, GPT-4 is still king. The claims of any company should be taken with exactly a pinch of salt.

That is pure naivete and I'm saying this as a person who lives and works in the EU. It's time to get off our ethical high horse and treat corporations exactly as they expect to be treated.

This is how the cookie law should have been implemented and it was absolutely one hundred percent the fault of the lawmakers for not implementing it this way. The millions of hours bureaucracy has wasted having people click through banner pop-ups is entirely on the makers of the law, not the offenders.

My GitLab server has at least beaten the GitHub down average so yes I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Because my GitLab self-hosted instance is up currently and theirs isn't.

Reading this I wished for a lot more meat. It ties itself to the Palestine/Israel conflict pretty early on. It's largely a footnote but it makes its presence felt in a narrative that didn't need it.

But then it never really makes an effort to explain the how. Something about a shadow dragon master who was attempting to live a life away from its base impulse to do evil. Ok, but give me more on how D&D specifically set up challenging situations that in the end saved your life.

I understand this is just someone's blog but I was really hoping to read something meaty here. Instead I got some vague indications of the life-saving potential of D&D without clear explanation. The writer is also a GM, so they should know how to tell a story.

Like yes, as long as GPT-4 remains the most useful (and now they have multi-modality in Plus so they've just extended their lead) nobody will adopt anything else.

So grandparent's argument makes even less sense as search should also be fungible but it isn't when Google still provides the best search product and has since it started. If OpenAI can maintain that lead and continue to ship improvements that continue to push their peak higher, most people will not pay for anything less even when that price is free.

I am shocked at how this start-up with a not-great name that was just another developer environment tool not less than six months ago managed to do a full re-haul and pivot toward fine-tuned AI models. It's much more compelling now.

Popped into my feed recently with two laughing attractive employees. That little video loop of them popped back into my feed again, and again, and again. And then they did a new, expanded version. It's TikTok marketing crack.

They caught lightning in a bottle in a sea of high interest rates and startups going bust left and right. Fair play. Great combined maneuver from marketing and product.

Not sure that's the case. I think this is more a Gen Z thing. Most millennials I know think Gen Z is "not great" in their conservative outlook. (Don't even get me started on Gen Z fashion.)

Hipsters were despised back in my day, even by hipsters themselves, but in the end I think we all had a lot more fun than Gen Z today. I wouldn't change any of it.

I'd say brew is the least effective option but people on macOS just deal with it because it's basically the only package manager they've ever been exposed to. Lots of Stockholm Syndrome going around.

It's macOS at fault here.

Still the finest and finest-looking UI today. Just look at this screenshot of one person's setup from 2017: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/6m9du0/windowmake...

That's a terrible argument and one that gets trotted out every time. We can do better than this. We should.

The CPC governing bodies are indirectly elected too, by members of the Party, of which most anyone can join. That doesn't make it democratic.

Let's not play fast and loose with democracy here. We deserve, and should agitate for, more representative democracies else we slide slowly toward the very tyrannies we oppose.

I wish we citizens of countries in the EU would stop bending over backward to apologize and explain away these undemocratic institutions. "Oh but don't worry those unelected officials can't pass laws, just propose them." "Oh but actually this other body is directly elected unlike these other folks." "Oh it's actually democratic because we voted those other folks in who elected them in."

Like c'mon folks. It sucks. It's really bad. We should do something about it and stop falling all over ourselves to explain how it's not that bad. You don't think the actual lawmakers are listening to their advice? Of course they are. They elected those proposers.

This weird defense we keep rallying to is tiresome. It's ok to criticize the EU. It's really not a paradise in any sense of the word and many, many of its constituent countries look far less democratic than the US.

Did you make a typo? Not reachable here.

Your articles are so helpful: great Python guidance and now HTMX? What's next, React frameworks? ;)

Is there a good tutorial out there for using GnuCash as a YNAB-like budgeting app?