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Current iteration of my blog is pure Elisp (org-publish). It is very simple. I like that I understand effectively whole thing bottom-up, and making any changes to machinery by advising Elisp is ridiculously easy. Being able to export the whole buffer with exact looks and feel of my Emacs theme is cherry-on-top. I like the overall feel of the thing, it has everything I need and nothing more.

My only gripe is that it is quite slow. My blog is pretty small, so having to wait on Emacs to build the whole thing is not fun. If my blog ever gets in the range of needing to compile hundred plus posts, I'll be seriously looking at alternatives. But until then, I get to enjoy just writing posts and exporting them with single keystroke.

I've been reading and reading about DeVault for more than a decade now. If I can point to one person on the internet and definitively say that their today's version is better than a decade ago, it would be him. (Yes, I can say that he appears to have improved better in this time than I myself have, which can be interpreted in a more than one way).

In fact, Andrew Kelley, whom I respect fair bit, also chose to stand behind redict, Drew's fork of redis with similar observation.

People change over time, some of them for the better, and I personally like to give them a chance. Some of Drew's opinions and expressions are still a bit much for me, but that is just us both being human.

> a better build system is sorely needed - one of the things that Go / Rust did right

Honestly there are only two reasons I wouldn't pick up Java for personal projects, difficult to build single executable (Graal is still very un-ergonomic), ridiculous build systems.

I can kind of live with former, but Gradle is so very extraordinarily terrible that I don't know where to begin. Problem is, it solves some real problems (in extremely bad way) that people keep using it.

I long of a cargo-style revolution in Java world. (No, the newly popped up alternatives haven't really cut it so far)

> It should be a distillation of the session and/or the prompts, at bare minimum.

Huh, I thought that's what commit message is for.

> How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?

Oh they don't! In exactly the same way US didn't. Right now, a lot of factors have put enough tailwind into Chinese economy and the inertia is a bitch to retreat, as can be seen with US itself. These tailwinds are strong enough that they lift everybody up, even considering the corruption taking its share.

> all come out at “question mark in a box” (Chrome, Edge) or “codepoint hex in box” (FF) on the old Win10 box that I'm currently trying to retire. The come out find on a similarly default Win11 setup.

This is pretty funny to me, because on plain ol' Firefox on NixOS everything looks just fine!

We've come pretty far from the days when things were randomly broken on Linux..

> we remember the days where systems only had vi and not even nano was a default

What are you talking about? I'm still living those days in modern day AWS with latest EC2 machines!

> Après moi, le déluge

That phrase is chilling, and perfectly describes what I've been feeling like where the society at large is heading.

Thank you for introducing it to me.

> for me that's _peak incompetence_

Empires always fall from within. It was inconceivable for a young me to ever think of day when MS Office would be unworkable. Advance couple of decades and MS 365 Copilot is just the thing that just doesn't work. Not because somebody exploited a bug and created unviewable doc, but because MS decided to pile on bugs while leaving old ones in..

> Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal recourse.

To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.

Hallucination is all an LLM does. That is their nature, to hallucinate.

We just happen to find some of these hallucinations useful.

Let's not pretend that hallucination is a byproduct. The usefulness is the byproduct. That is what surprised the original researchers on transformer performance, and that is why the 'attention is all you need' paper remains such a phenomenon.

The zeroeth law of Wikipedia – The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.

As the other comment said, LLMs are not an abstraction.

An abstraction is a deterministic, pure function, than when given A always returns B. This allows the consumer to rely on the abstraction. This reliance frees up the consumer from having to implement the A->B, thus allowing it to move up the ladder.

LLMs, by their very nature are probabilistic. Probabilistic is NOT deterministic. Which means the consumer is never really sure if given A the returned value is B. Which means the consumer now has to check if the returned value is actually B, and depending on how complex A->B transformation is, the checking function is equivalent in complexity as implementing the said abstraction in the first place.

I hope it does that, as I hope the same for USA.

simply staying on stable channel makes this a non-problem :)

Besides, Nix is even better for such breakages. If GCC breaks you packages, the system does not build and never gets into broken state, all the while old system remains available and kicking.

Hetzner charges extra for IPv4 address, as I believe most of them do. I know because I went through the same crap.

The morons who want to replace developers with these so called tools already feel like developers need babysitting. Partly because they suck at giving requirements or sticking to them or both. It will be fun to see them finding out the devs do more that bashing code.

LLMs did not destroy copyright. They inky destroyed copyright for the little guy. As I understand it, neither of the FAMANG have put their main codebase in training dataset. If I train an LLM on the leaked sources I'll get sued right down to my undies. But all the LLM vendors took my code, betrayed the license term about attribution/viral licensing of derived content, but I am told to get stuffed.

I am assuming you are commenting in good faith, but it does tingle my gaslight-senses.

Yes.

I always licensed my projects under GPL variants. That contract was broken by LLM vendors. So now I'm taking my toys and going home.

All my new projects are hosted on Sourcehut. I trust Drew when he says they are not letting LLM bots have at it.

Its not just the dev either. I'm no longer posting any content on blogs. Almost all of my other online interactions have moved to private channels and closed forums. I'm no longer giving my work away for free, unless you've passed the entry tests.

When I told them the movie came out before they were born, yet depict their life damn near exactly as they were living it, their enlightenment lit the room anew hah.

Someone please save my soul..

Recently $DAYJOB has been moving more and more towards Office Space. But none of the young'ins are aware of it. So I just showed them the scene with the Bobs. Their faces were priceless. I doubt any of them came to office with same mindset again.

That's what I used to think too.. but Spec Ops: The Line is entirely based in desert, even has a shot of sarin horror and while 'pretty' isn't the word I'd use, it is stunning.

KDE has been lighter than GNOME for a few years now.. Their continuous iteration and polishing approach instead of break-the-world-and-remould-it-in-our-image approach from Gnome also shows up in any real-world use.

> LLMs are the first step in the movement away from (...) the logic based language

This dumb thing again.. The logic based language was and remains a major improvement [0] in being able to build abstractions because it allows the underlying implementations to be 'deterministic'. The natural language misses that mark by such a wide margin that it is impossible to explain in nicer language. And if one wants to make the argument that people achieve that anyway, perhaps you reading through one [1] will put that thought to rest :)

[0] www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/te...

Anecdote, but at least for tiny little server hosting single public repository, none of these companies had 'well behaved' bots. It may be possible that they learned to behave better but I wouldn't know since my only possible recourse was to blacklist them all AND take the repo private.

> who is the president every four years...could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?

A president cares about election every four years. Private sector cares about it every quarter. I doubt privatization is improvement if you want to focus on long term.

'forcing' anybody to do anything means they don't like doing it, usually because it causes them more work or headache or discomfort.

You know, the exact opposite of what AI providers are claiming it does.

IIRC Jobs was the single largest shareholder of Disney after acquisition, so that checks out.

Found the source: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/01/6038-2/

Nix cache (cache.nixos.org) does in fact maintain older versions[0]. In fact, they maintain so much older stuff (binaries and associated source), that they are used in both research[1][2] and are having issues with gigantic cache size[3][4].

And yes, their reasoning implies NIH and just unfamiliarity combined with unwillingness to really understand Nix.

[0]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-long-is-binary-cache-kept-...

[1]: https://hal.science/hal-04913007

[2]: https://luj.fr/blog/is-nixos-truly-reproducible.html

[3]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundations-financial-su...

[4]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-nixos-foundations-call-to-...

It is one of the reasons I love Andor so much. Rogue One was so good that it elevated a A New Hope and Andor in turn (especially after S2) elevates Rogue One in similar fashion. The movie/show on their own are some of the greatest, but they don't limit their achievements to themselves and like a rising tide lift whoever they connect to. It is really really hard to pull that off, and people in Andor somehow managed that twice.