WolfeReader

I truly hope you're buying books as well - authors (and editors, illustrators, translators, etc) should be rewarded for their art.

The Kindle scene is a disaster that shows the dangers of prioritizing DRM. Meanwhile, I'm buying DRM-free books and keeping them in Calibre and reading on KOReader. It's a great experience.

Mercurial has a more consistent CLI, a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg), and the ability to remember what branch a commit was made on. It's a much easier tool to teach to new developers.

Everything you said after "with paper" applies to ebooks, provided you get them without DRM. Your objections are to DRM, not to ebooks in general.

First, let me step on my own foot for the sake of accuracy: people retain information slightly better when they read paper than screens, so textbooks definitely aren't an example I'd go with. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8715975/

That said, I can come up with far more than a few counterexamples for why ebooks are good, besides combustability:

- Paper books are dense. This adds difficulty to moving and maintaining large collections.

- Paper books take up space. Bookstores and libraries must necessarily remove books to make space for new ones. With ebooks, there's basically no need to remove old ones.

- Paper books are dense and take up space, so when travelling, the reader must carefully select one or two to carry. With ebooks, I can carry my entire ebook library in my pocket.

- Paper books require more effort to duplicate. My e-library is replicated across many devices, including two different offsites. If I spill sauce on a paper book, I need to buy another copy (assuming it's still available).

- Paper books have accessibility issues. As I get older and my vision deteriorates, I will need specialized optical hardware to read small print. On my e-reader, I can just turn up the font size.

In spite of all this, I would never say that ebooks are objectively superior; both are good. I just take issue with all of the people who assume that physical books are so obviously inherently superior, without ever saying why. (See your own post for example.)

Cherry picking is just convenience for something that anyone could do manually. If it didn't exist in the VCS, people would do it anyway and make tools to do it.

Fossil's implementation is the best, since a cherry-picked commit always points back to its origin.

Speaking as a former Darcs user (Darcs is another patch-based VCS that Pijul draws inspiration from):

"This is a useless property because the graph is only encoded at the patch layer. In the real world you have far more semantic dependencies than patch dependencies. ie, I have a patch that adds a function that calls a function added in another patch. Pijul doesn't know about that."

Darcs solved this in two different ways.

1. Dependencies. While Darcs patches would inherently "depend" on the last patch which affected the same lines, the committer could specify other patches as dependencies, handling exactly the case you described.

2. Practicality. In reality, there's no scenario where someone is pulling your "use function X" patches and also not pulling the "define function X" patch. They could if they really want to, but this would be a lot of effort for a deliberately bad result. It would be like, in Git, cherry-picking the "use" patches without the "define" patches. In neither system would this happen by accident.

"Conflicts coming back is not an issue in git. For some reason people think they need to use rebase when they should almost always be using merge."

There's a big difference between "conflicts shouldn't come back as long as everyone does what I want" and "conflicts don't come back". As long as you're using Git with other people, the rebase-lovers and their problems will be a perpetual issue. I've been on 3 teams in a row with this problem.

I deliberately moved away from Darcs after a few years - the benefit of snapshot VCS is that you don't just have the change, but you have the whole context in which the change happened. (Also branch discovery in Darcs basically doesn't exist; Pijul fixed this, at least!) I love Fossil and Mercurial for their adherence to accurate history.

Physical books burn - just ask the Library of Alexandria. Ebooks have so many more ways to be preserved and replicated.

I buy "licenses" to read DRM'd ebooks all the time. Even though I disagree with DRM, I still want to reward the author/editor/illustrator/translator/etc for their artistry.

As for whether I leave the books in their DRM'd state or not? No comment :)

"Reading on a E-device is a bother, I have to sift through all the "sponsored" books and whatever other crap the ebook reader company decides to add, and be at the whims of whatever they decide they want to do with "your" device that day."

My fellow, you are on Hacker News. Think like a hacker, not a consumer.

Plenty of savvy e-book customers here don't have the experience you just described. Look up how to put KOReader ( https://koreader.rocks ) on your current device, and learn how to get your books without DRM. Your e-reading experience will be so much better.

Weird thing to say about an article with over 600 comments.

This is the only sane reply on this entire comment tree.

To me, the verbosity of both Git and JJ commands to do these things are an indication that neither of these tools are meant to do them.

Super Mario Bros. is a movie [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Super_Mario_Bros._Movie

1-based indexing is great. It's just _different_ - from C, where the array index is just sugar for pointer arithmetic, and from other languages which borrowed the practice without reasoning.

I cannot fathom why anyone would use a code freeze. Just create a branch at the commit you want to "freeze" and let dev teams keep working with their regular branches.

"The hardest part of learning any creative skill is that your taste develops faster than your ability."

I needed to read this sentence. Thank you!

Nope, its a well-researched article which shows its sources and qualifies its conclusions. You may not like the conclusions, but that doesn't make it FUD.

Same. I've managed to convince exactly one person how great password managers are; the others just let Chrome handle it. (It's always Chrome.)

Thanks for the correct link! AST-based version control sounds like a great idea.

Darcs did this decades ago with the "replace" command. It's not a legitimate semantic replacement, though - it's more just telling your VCS to do a find/replace.

The behaviors of NFT advocates and AI advocates are shockingly similar.

Remember how NFTs were supposed to be the future or art ownership, and all it amounted to was awful pictures of bored apes and ahegao lamas? The NFT bros proudly displayed their shitty art - not because it was good, but because it signaled their allegiance.

Now go on to any pro-AI blog. Look at the images. They've stopped trying to edit out the AI errors - they proudly display images with garbled text and bad anatomy. Just like before, it signals allegiance to AI consumption.

Even the last sentence of your post is the same sentiment as "have fun staying poor" was for the crypto bros.

I wish I remembered the source of this quote: "If you didn't take the time to write it, I'm not taking the time to read it." This saved me from reading the story.

My favorite part was the illustration from inside the car. The rear-view mirror clearly shows un-mirrored store signs.

Prompts in, garbage out.

"it's boring to see how a human and an AI bot can collaborate to create writing like this."

FTFY

Encrypted messaging like Signal and Briar is so much more accessible thanks to smartphones. People who would've never touched GPG can get a lot of its benefits thanks to smartphone apps.

(Which doesn't mean we have to give in to big corporations. Gotta love GrapheneOS!)

Why would you want to be non-political in 2026? The current administration is awful in ways we couldn't have imagined. There's no sense in not talking about it.

You should spend less at Amazon. $100 less per year.

I am simultaneously grateful that you told us about this, and also kind of wish I didn't know. There's so much.

It happened not too long ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729

People who agree with you are right-minded and sensible, and people who disagree with you are "jumping on the bandwagon".