rewgs

Snow Crash. A few decades late, but man am I loving it.

He bought a car company and convinced everyone he founded it. But that's not the problem, really -- the problem is that everyone fawning over him and calling him the "real-life Tony Stark" wasn't enough for his blackhole of an ego.

He's a Sieg Heil-ing man-baby who's so fragile he paid people to play video games for him. He called a a guy trying to save children a pedophile just because the guy rightly pointed out Elon's idea was stupid. He has a weird breeder fetish, while disowning children who call him out for his hateful, moronic politics and horrendous parenting (or lack thereof). He's illegally influenced elections and very potentially put his thumb on the scale. I could go on and on.

The only thing that worries me about him being one of the most hated people on the planet is that not everyone thinks so and that he still somehow has fans.

Good. Classrooms need very little: good teachers, books, chalkboards, and pencil/paper. That's it.

IMO the _material_ being taught is secondary; what truly matters is teaching kids to think, to be bored, to engage with something they don't love but do a good job anyway, to find things they _do_ love that might exist on the other side of some amount of difficulty. They need to be taught how to think, and to have some grit.

Clearly vibe-coded. Hard pass.

You are indeed being a Debbie Downer.

If you can't see that AI is not merely "automation" but rather fundamentally aims to usurp human labor, you probably shouldn't be saying who should or shouldn't be speculating.

The explicit definition of "paycheck to paycheck" is in the name.

Correct. The ultra wealthy are effectively building "fully automated luxury communism" for themselves.

Found PG's alt account.

Wanted to quickly try this but I couldn't get password authentication to work. No password field appears, and I can't save the server entry since it can't authenticate.

Ha, I know. I just picked up strong Gibson vibes.

Intentional or not, you nailed Gibson's writing style.

Completely agree. Once again, the answer is protocols, not platforms.

A website where one views and interacts with all of these things does not necessitate that all of these things run on the same system. Since this most recent GitHub outage, I'm looking into modularizing my git server, issues, and actions; there's no reason why one going down should bring down all the others.

I've seen plenty of DIMMs fail ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm specifically calling out the wording "nobody needs to do it." That is patently false.

> We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.

The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.

Immich is the best self-hosted app I use. Hats off to the developers!

Do tell! Specifically the DAW latency problems. I love the idea of running a DAW in a VM on Proxmox.

GP clearly isn’t talking about 60 year olds who were full stack devs and get on Hacker News.

Yup. For a while I was switching between all three to see which I liked most, and I always end up coming back to Wezterm. The only issue I’ve encountered is that releases on various package managers are routinely broken, but building from source solved that.

Considering we can't even get corporations and the ultra wealthy to pay even _close_ to their fair share of taxes, forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of the idea that a utopia, should it come to pass, will be evenly distributed.

Right there with you. I regularly use Claude for all sorts of tasks, but I am extremely against letting it write loads of code _for_ me. And like you, I find prompting to be a pretty unenjoyable activity, regardless of the task at hand.

AI is _certainly_ not useless and definitely not bad, far from it, but if I could snap my fingers and make it disappear, I'd do so in a heartbeat.

Writing code is my favorite thing to do. Digging into a problem and getting into the flow is my favorite thing ever, and it seems that the world is completely hell-bent on taking this away from me.

I can already hear all the usual responses: "but you can still write code in your spare time," "you were never paid to type anyway," etc etc etc. That's all true, but it doesn't change the fact that writing code in your spare time and being paid to write code for the plurality or even majority of your waking hours are two completely different ways of life. And yeah, there's a lot more to being a software developer than just typing, but the quality of the time spent has completely and utterly changed. It's quickly becoming unrecognizable compare to even just a few short years ago.

I am of the belief that how you spend your days is how you spend your life, and given that so many of our days are now spent doing completely different activities, with a completely different, much "louder" quality to them (I find prompting to be almost _socially_ exhausting, and hate that it more or less completely destroys the ability for oneself to enter a flow state), I think it's completely fair to say that AI has radically changed, or perhaps even ruined, our lives, or at least our livelihoods.

And in my specific case, I already completely changed careers once. Long story short, I was a lifelong musician and well on my way to becoming a successful film/TV/video game composer before I developed hyperacusis. Going through that was horrific. I consider myself extremely lucky to have found a vocation and avocation in programming that, against all odds, I love even _more_ than making music. And once again, I feel that I might just have to change careers. Again.

So yeah. I'm not naive enough to think that it's going to go away. But my life and work were 100% better before it, no question.

> There's too much to memorize, and the standards are too varied. When I go to a project site for maintenance and it's a C++ project, I instantly lose energy — because it's just too difficult.

I've been feeling this way about web dev for a while now, and sometimes look at C++ devs with jealousy, wishing that the crazy amount of memorization/varied standards/rough maintenance/high difficulty I experience were only limited to the language that I write.

Perhaps this will end up being the mythical MacBook-like hardware that I can install Linux on (Asahi notwithstanding).

Err, nope, it is 100% Cross Desktop Group: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/

That said, you are correct that it has nothing to do with Windows (and I never said that it did).

> I have a Mac, not an XDG desktop. I would only expect and want X applications I run through Xquartz (all zero of them) to follow that.

XDG has nothing to do with X11. XDG stands for "Cross-Desktop Group," and is designed specifically for any Unix or Unix-like operating system, which includes macOS.

"gen 2x2" is Microsoft level bad naming.

Is there a right kind of anthill to sit on?

I'm a lifelong musician, went to music school to study jazz and orchestration, was a professional film composer for 15 years prior to pivoting to programming. I've read quite a few books on the intersection of math and music.

And not once have I ever felt that these so-called intersections were anything other than contrived.

Of course we can interface with music from a mathematical perspective, but that doesn't mean that we should or that there's anything particularly illuminating to gleen from doing so.

Beyond the very basic math (honestly even that's perhaps too strong a word -- just because something is expressed in numbers doesn't make it _math_) of time signatures and some harmonic concepts up to maybe some of Slonimsky's work, doing so is IMO a fool's errand that exists only to fill space on a TEDx stage.