BwackNinja

5 ms·

1.
by BwackNinja 1y ago
Zawinski's Law, when taken literally, argues that programs all eventually need to be communicated with by people and other programs using a generic protocol and without using program-specific or domain-specific libraries to do so. Unix
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by BwackNinja 1y ago
It's easy to agree that the AI assisted email writing (at least in its current form) is counterproductive, but we're talking about email -- a subject that's already been discussed to death and everyone has staked countless ho
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by BwackNinja 1y ago
The professional matchmaker angle as a contrast is fascinating. The subscription model not only removes the incentive to provide quality quickly -- it reverses it. Doing a worse job is encouraged if you can leverage that to convince people
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by BwackNinja 1y ago
> The same applies to PAM word for word. That's one of the reasons that OpenBSD is rather compelling. BSDAuth doesn't open arbitrary libraries to execute code, it forks and execs binaries so it doesn't pollute your program
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by BwackNinja 1y ago
There is no distinction between system and program libraries in Linux. We used to pretend there was one before usrmigration, but that was never good to take seriously. The distro as packager model ensures that everything is mixed together i
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by BwackNinja 2y ago
Complexity has always been less respected the more it is separated from the experiences of the average person; or more personally, your own experiences. Unfortunately, that's the very nature of complexity itself. Dependencies increase
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by BwackNinja 3y ago
This is only looking at the problem from one side. If there's a crisis and you're not treating it as one, you are committing two sins. Not only are you wrong, but you're wasting time more valuable than your own. On the flip s
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by BwackNinja 3y ago
This seems emblematic of the general direction of technology. It's an approach to managing system complexity that works by adding additional complexity and handling that combination well as long as you use their tools. Nix isn't s
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by BwackNinja 3y ago
Requiring that you sit further back is built on the notion that you need to be able to see your entire workspace at once, which was never true with an actual desk and largely implies that you want a single document to take up the whole scre
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by BwackNinja 3y ago
MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops
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by BwackNinja 3y ago
With regards to abstractions, the perceived quality of code depends heavily on who will be expected to read it. "Principle of least surprise" isn't universal, it's subjective because you're hiding complexity not act
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by BwackNinja 4y ago
Or alternatively, should we be predicting that there will be a John Henry of AI?
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by BwackNinja 4y ago
On an ad-supported site, you're not the customer. The advertiser is the customer, you're the product. Making that even worse is social media, where being good on a technical level is only meaningful when we're talking about h
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by BwackNinja 4y ago
You /can/ package python applications into a single binary -- just a zip file prepended with a python shebang. You can do much the same with the base python libraries. No one does it, I presume, because the community is against ve