This is a great comment. FWIW I think you'd do a great job contributing to the nix documentation.
1,121 karma · joined July 5, 2017
This is unfortunately not true. All too often people are left uncredited or are given highly inaccurate credits that completely fail to convey the impact they had.
Source: I worked in Hollywood as a composer for about the past decade.
- Give me a timeline that shows only the people I follow. - Give me an "explore" section so I can find new people. - That's right, exactly like Instagram does it.
I'll use it if you do this. I know I'm not alone.
I don't love Arc -- I bounced off it pretty fast -- but it's not insane to think that a VC would see the reuse of the most common browser engine as a good thing, as it means less work on the part of the developers and more of a focus on what sets the browser apart.
Bill by the project and this problem is solved.
That said, I'm one of the weird ones who prefers to bill hourly whenever possible.
The universe will keep expanding until entropy reaches a maximum -- the "Big Freeze." Once maximum entropy is reached -- wherein all atoms in the universe are totally dispersed, everything is the same distance from everything else, and the universe is a totally uniform field -- one could say that is very orderly indeed, i.e. the theoretical minimum entropy.
I imagine that all of the matter in the universe being perfectly dispersed would quite neatly "fill" the universe. So who's to say such a situation isn't infinitely dense?
Much like the moment just before the Big Bang.
A life form is definitely something I'd consider to be highly organized, i.e. low entropy, but that order is maintained via a greater relative increase of entropy by destroying and consuming other "instances" of low entropy (plants, animals, etc) for nutrition, which are they themselves sustained by disproportionate increases of entropy (consuming of other organisms, the sun doing its thing, etc).
So, as a life form tends to fight for its own survival -- survival being "just" a process of increasing entropy every else but the life form itself -- it is indeed an extremely efficient way of increasing entropy in the universe, in that is requires only a single point of decrease in order to cause a theoretically infinite instances of increase.
I suddenly feel an awful lot like a cow on my way to the slaughter indeed, and have the urge to go play Dark Souls.
Until I hear differently, I'm just gonna stick with my battle-tested shell scripts and symlinks. Sure, it's not the same degree of reproducibility, but also I've not yet had a practical reason to need whatever remaining percentage of the diminishing returns Nix offers that I'm not getting, at least when using my scripts combined with the use of other tools such as venv, nvm, cargo, etc, or even just building a lot of software from source.
Very, very generally, updates tend to play better with or expect that the software it's working with is also updated; and so, while yes it can be stable to stick with a particular version for 10+ years, the value of that stability drops as time goes on, as the software/OS in question has more and more trouble operating in the context of/with other/newer software, and so 5+ years into that 10+ year timespan, that stability you're supposedly paying for doesn't feel very stable at all -- and that doesn't even begin to touch what happens once those 10+ years run out and you need to get with the times.
Which is all to say: this is why rolling releases exist. Better to get used to surfing the wave all the time, rather than sitting on the beach for years and then having to swim an Olympic race after you're out of shape. I'm mixing metaphors here but you get the idea.
What's more, obviously riding the wave can be a little tiring, and thus more and more best practices are borne out of that problem -- which is why I mentioned nix in my last comment. I'm not even a nix user, have never done more than read about it, lest one think that I'm yet another nix zealot on HN, but I do think that it or something like it is a very very good solution to the pains that can be had by constantly staying up to date. I for one will always be more interested in that kind of route, rather than agreeing to the golden handcuffs of long-term support. While not in a RHEL-like setting, I've been bitten by the "I just want this old thing to keep going and never change" problem too many times before.
Like, I was listening to the most recent episode of Linux Unplugged, and they had a member of the RHEL team on, and when asked about the value proposition of RHEL, he said something to the effect of that it's not just the software, but being able to offer the specific versions with the specific patches in particular combinations of other software with whatever patches. And I couldn't help but think -- isn't he basically just describing nix? Nix's whole thing is to super easily enable declaring specific versions of software in specific combinations, and to be able to recall it with a config file -- Matthew Croughan's talk at SCALE this year was essentially...that, and doing it super easily. And perhaps if we aren't keeping so much old software alive, it wouldn't all need so many patches to allow all the various combinations required.
I don't know. It all seems like a very heavy-handed, people-y solution to a problem that we've mostly solved, and perhaps even eliminated the conditions for to exist in the first place.
Anyways, this is all mostly hypothetical pontification, and I'm sure that those who actually work with RHEL on a daily basis could poke tons of holes in my point of view. Would love that actually, as like I said I feel very much like an outsider looking in. But it just seems like a goal that is fundamentally flawed.
I've always been a user of the Debian and Arch worlds. The RHEL/Fedora/etc world has been this "other" part of Linux that I frankly haven't touched much, and haven't yet found a reason to.
One thing I'm not totally clear on is what specifically Red Hat offers that people pay for, i.e. what are the details of the "+ stability + patches" of what GP mentioned. Are there paid applications as well? Is paid support a large part of the business model? And so on and so on. I'm still just a little mystified by the RHEL business model, and every time I hear someone talk about it, it's literally vague one-word answers such as "stability," "patches," "support," "enterprise stuff," etc. Even the RHEL FAQ offers essentially just that.
I'm still not quite informed enough to be able to confidently lean one way or the other, but I have to say that I can't shake the feeling that RHEL's business model ultimately relies on exploiting their customers' desire to change their systems as little as possible, even if it means the customers eschew more modern systems that make obsolete the need for the kind of products and services RHEL provides. Or to put it another way, RHEL enables their customers to live with "the devil they know," and not adopt more modern best practices. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I get it, but also if that is indeed the case, it seems like a rickety foundation upon the already rickety foundation of trying to sell open source software that easily be unseated by, say, the nix model of doing things.
I don't know, I could be dead wrong, but starting from what I've seen most other tech companies do and mixing it with a dash of "the idea of paying for Linux seems insane to me"...in lieu of better information, I can't dismiss the above out of hand.
They made the 14 and 16, but they presumably still had plenty of 13" frames left, so they're just selling both. Jobs-era Apple likely wouldn't have done that, as it causes the product lineup to be a good bit less clear, but in Cook-era Apple, that's an acceptable tradeoff.
Just like the current 13” MBP, just like the old iPhone SE, the “new” Mac Pro exists to fulfill some manufacturing contracts and/or use up existing stock of the chassis.
A “real” Apple Silicon Mac Pro will come in 2-5 years (my best guess is 3), mark my words.
Agreed, with the caveat that I’ve almost always not regretted letting the bridge burn, because I dislike them for not being able to handle a simple but polite “no” as much as they dislike me for offering it.
That said, I had an editing paradigm too opinionated even for Helix, so I mangled my Helix config into what I thought at the time was my dream editor.
Over time, though, I started to "see the light" of Vim's ways. I'd run into this or that use-case, realize that I had mapped the key for it to something that fit my custom paradigm ideas, and one by one, switched back to the defaults. Eventually, my Helix config became more Vim-y. So I switched to Neovim and didn't look back.
I got really into the plugins and customization, and while yes, I still do have a good bit of plugins and a somewhat large config, it's become more and more stock with time.
It took me a long time to get it, but the Vim model really is truly brilliant. I still appreciate Helix (and by extension, Kakoune), and I'm happy I went through the weird twisty road that I did, but ultimately I found that the ways in which those two differ from Vim were indicative of me "clinging" to old editing habits from more "standard" editors. It took truly diving in and accepting that maybe, just maybe, I didn't have better ideas than a 50-year old editor that's stood the test of time, to see it.
The pros of Google Workspace/Cloud:
- Everything (for us) can be Google: from general business stuff like email/calendar/etc to storage (Drive and/or Cloud Storage) to automating tons of it via their Cloud API (or Google Apps Script, when that's the right tool for the job).
- Everyone at my company, especially the non-technical folks (i.e. the majority of people in my company) "gets" Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Drive, etc. It's ubiquitous, and so selling administration, billing etc on "let's just go all-in on Google" is easy.
- We don't need S3 storage, but we do need a lot of (mostly hot) storage, with easy collaboration. Because user accounts pool Drive storage company-wide, we mostly use that for our cloud storage needs. So, 99% of our storage needs are effectively free, because we're paying for those user accounts anyway. This saves us thousands upon thousands of dollars per year, and that's not even accounting for the employee time needed to integrate and work with S3(-compatible) storage.
- The Cloud API is pretty solid, the documentation is generally good, and it's language-agnostic, making hiring that much easier as we expand the team and automate more processes.
- It's all good enough, and rightly or wrongly, it doesn't have the Microsoft "smell" -- a lot of my non-technical peers are in my experience quite resistant to Microsoft-anything, even though they arguably have a much better track record of not killing products.
The cons:
- I don't trust Google anymore. I expect them to kill or radically alter any of these core products at a moment's notice.
That one con completely obliterates all of the above very compelling pros.
There's honestly nothing else quite like Google Workspace. AWS is massively beyond our needs or budget. Microsoft 365 is perfectly fine for mail/calendar/Office/etc but not for the Google Cloud side of things (I sure as hell am not touching Azure, and their 365 API documentation is a mess).
The only other option is to roll our own set of modular services, which is something we've looked into quite a bit, but there's always a show-stopper somewhere, not least of which is the thought of someone else eventually inheriting this stuff if/when I move on. At the end of the day, rolling it yourself and maintaining it simply requires more chops and time on the part of the employee(s), and I shudder at the thought of essentially building a cathedral that others allow to rot once I leave, one big reason being that the middle of the venn diagram of "the skillset of people who would find themselves applying for my position" and "Linux sysadmin chops" don't really overlap at all.
Philosophically, I prefer moving the monetary cost from closed-source platforms to the salaries of developers collaborating on open-source products; but for our company's particular use-case, we're ultimately not a tech company, we're a media company, with a lot of tech-focus, yes, but not in terms of building products -- rather, we simply do as all companies in 2023 probably should do, and leverage as much automation as possible to keep things efficient, organized, scalable...generally, keep it on the up-and-up.
I'm sure that I'm not alone in feeling this way. There is a vast, vast I-dare-say "silent majority" of companies out there that are in this weird middle ground -- too small for AWS, not tech-focused-enough to build it themselves, but still need a solid suite of...everything required to run a business, and the tools to automate processes as needed. I know that Google Workspace is in the "enterprise" side of things and thus is less likely to be killed off, but...also, who knows? Google is so obviously completely aimless that I truly do not trust them anymore, and yet I don't see a truly viable alternative.
The dude replying to you with “Sibelius” apparently doesn’t understand that, like all other DAWs and notation programs…Sibelius uses MIDI, because of course it does.
Yeah, what's the deal with this iOS developer not wanting to start a competitor to checks notes one of the largest websites in the world? Surely you just up and did that last week, it's no big deal.
I guess I should start getting used to saying "Jesus christ, HN" now that I won't be saying "Jesus christ, Reddit" anymore.
Ultimately, this is symptomatic of trying to monetize a service that either a) isn't something people want to pay for, or b) monetizing it in a way that kills the spirit of the service. A common problem with the internet, sure, but also smacks of a complete lack of creativity on the part of the suits. If this were an issue of maintaining Reddit's longevity, they could find a way to have their cake and eat it too. No, this is a clear attempt to raise their value before their IPO, so that a few suits can jump ship when the value is at its highest, as we've seen time and time again. And they're too stupid to see that their efforts fly in the face of their obvious goal.
Reddit got popular for lots of reasons; a big one was that it was fun and still felt freewheeling in a way that the increasingly corporate internet wasn't. It was still anonymous (if you wanted it to be), weird, communal, much like the early internet that was seemingly disappearing before our eyes, and yet still decently mainstream albeit in a nerdy way.
Something changed when people started referring to it as "social media." I've always been confused by that label. It's "social," yes, and I guess it is indeed "media," but it's not "social media." It has little in common with Myspace or Facebook or Instagram. It has much more in common with internet forums, albeit with an IMO better interface (the tiered comments design is simple and brilliant, much easier to navigate and keep parallel conversations going than your standard in-line forum). We don't call forums "social media" -- that label is quite loaded and comes with a number of connotations.
But alas, they tried to monetize it via the same model that all other "social media" is monetized -- with ads, clamping down on the weird, etc.
This kills the Reddit. Remember Tumblr?
My prediction? Reddit is going to limp on, but as even more of shadow of its former self than it's already become. It will become the Facebook equivalent of this kind of "social media" -- a distinctly non-hip, safe, boring, corporate place, with an ever-aging user base. One day it will be sold for a comparatively measly fee to someone social media giant that doesn't even exist yet.
Those who long for the Reddit of old will go off to other places. I myself already spend most of my time on HN anyways -- it's basically everything I want from Reddit and none of what I don't. It's got the "old.reddit.com" interface, doesn't require a mobile app to use on a mobile browser, is information-dense, clean, fast. Content-wise HN and the tech-related subreddits I frequent have a huge amount of overlap both in terms of content and I presume users. For everything else...meh, I can take it or leave it. The hobby subreddits are great, the /r/all comment threads for huge events are great, but all that was the cherry on top, not the cake.
I'll probably just continue to mostly spend my time here, and check out, say, the various fediverse clones of Reddit. But just like Mastadon with Twitter, it'll be too fragmented to truly replace what everyone is jumping ship from.
It's sad, but I suppose this is the way of all things. It's new, it's fun, it matures, it's stable, then it decays. So it goes.
Right, the problem is not a technical one, it's an app ecosystem one. Urs has spoken about this at length on KVR. This IMO is a great reason for Ableton to have not gone the iPad route, because it's a problem that doesn't look like it'll be solved anytime soon.
> Good luck running a dozen instances of Diva if you don't care about the CPU
Good luck running...most plugins, u-he or otherwise, on an iPad.
That said, the question of which plugins will/won't work running directly on the Push is an interesting question. It runs Linux, no? u-he is one of the few "big" plugin devs that supports Linux, but if I had to guess, the standalone Push 3 will run first-party Ableton plugins only.
The most fundamental appeal of the Push is that it is a very nicely-integrated hardware controller, and -- this is the big thing -- has physical knobs, buttons, pads, etc, a massive selling point to loads and loads and loads of musicians.
An iPad by definition lacks the latter, and will never approach the integration of the Push no matter how much work you put into whichever controller app you're using (TouchOSC, etc). And that's even before you consider the fact that the Push also doubles as an audio interface.
Literally no one in the Push's audience is looking to replace/upgrade the Push's hardware. No one cares what CPU it has. I'm honestly surprised that Ableton published the specs, because it just doesn't matter. It's not a "computer" (even though, yes, technically it is indeed a computer). Depending on which model you buy, its raison d'etre is as an accessory to a computer, more specifically a very specific application; or an appliance designed to run one app and one app only. You might as well be saying that you'd rather buy an iPad over a Tesla because the iPad has a better CPU.
The reality is that it isn't hot vs cold, it's all of the things climate change are affecting -- hotter weather, yes, but colder weather too, less predictable weather, more extreme/frequent storms and natural disasters, crop failures, the associated geopolitical fallout, loss of habitable land, water shortages, and the countless downstream effects of all of the above and more. And I'm pretty sure that all those things are deadly.
Also, putting literally all of that aside, hot weather kills people too, so if it even were as simple as "hot vs cold," more frequent and hotter hot weather would also kill more people too. Look up wet-bulb temperature if you'd like to find a new source of nightmares.
The fact that you apparently don't see any of this and just think "hot = better because more people die from cold weather than hot" is why you're getting downvoted to oblivion. It's a surprisingly braindead argument even by HN's all-too-frequent "can't see the forest for the trees" lapses in judgement.