> The group is also aging and isn't getting new blood.
This is very sad, because the GNU project pioneered a way of software design that's very different from anything we see on proprietary platforms, or even common Linux/BSD applications for that matter. This is best exemplified by Emacs - hackable to the core, with more than enough documentation and context help baked in to help you do just that. You can see the same philosophy at play in the Guix OS, the Shepherd (init), GNU Poke (semantics-aware binary editor) and many many other GNU software. It can be used easily by anyone, but it's absolute heaven for those who like to poke around (not a pun) the system. It nudges normal users towards becoming system hackers. The difference between GNU software and corporate-sponsored components (like systemd, avahi, gnome, policykit, PAM, Chrome, Firefox, etc) is stark. I have heard similar things about NetBSD and OpenBSD to a lesser extend, but I'm yet to give it a good try. The only other alternative I've seen is the suckless suite of software where the configuration is done in the source code itself, before it's compiled. But it can be slightly daunting even for power users. With the loss of that knowledge and philosophy, an entire generation will grow up without ever knowing a different way of computing that treats you as something more than just a consumer to be squeezed for every last penny, and the true power and potential of general purpose computing.
A tip for those who both use Claude Code and are worried about token use (which you should be if you're stuffing 400k tokens into context even if you're on 20x Max):
1. Build context for the work you're doing. Put lots of your codebase into the context window.
2. Do work, but at each logical stopping point hit double escape to rewind to the context-filled checkpoint. You do not spend those tokens to rewind to that point.
3. Tell Claude your developer finished XYZ, have it read it into context and give high level and low level feedback (Claude will find more problems with your developer's work than with yours).
If you want to have multiple chats running, use /resume and pull up the same thread. Hit double escape to the point where Claude has rich context, but has not started down a specific rabbit hole.
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
> Energy independence and HSR are indeed poor metaphors for each other.
It's not a metaphor. You're reasoning very sloppily. The absence of high-speed rail in the US is caused by a societal breakdown in technological and economic development. That breakdown also causes other effects. One of those effects is that over the last 20 years the US not only failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers; it lost the world-leading native industry of solar panel manufacturers that it already had. There's no strong reason to believe that a blockade would reverse that breakdown rather than accelerating it.
> In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail.
Yes. That's because the US doesn't have high-speed rail, even 60 years after the Shinkansen went into service. If the US did have high-speed rail, one would be able to travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper by rail than they could in a car. And the difference is not small.
The fastest trains on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line average 290km/h, about 3–4 times faster than a car in the US and 50% faster than even the fastest Autobahn car speeds. The peak speed is 350km/h, but as in a car, some time is wasted speeding up and slowing down at stops at the beginning and end of the trip, and along the way.
Maybe in China cars are cheaper, in which case driving would only cost 10 times as much, I don't know. But it clearly isn't going to be as cheap as taking the high-speed train.
A consequence of the US's deficits in transportation is that a large fraction of the mental energy of its professional and intellectual classes is devoted to operating cars in traffic rather than to developing vaccines, improving Wikipedia, creating video games, or even selling ads.
60 years is a long time in terms of technological development. 60 years after the Wright Brothers achieve controlled powered flight in 01903 was 01963, when both the US and USSR had orbited cosmonauts, and the Apollo Program was well underway. 60 years after the first stored-program computer was delivered in 01949 (either the EDSAC or the secret Manchester Baby) was 02009, when Intel and AMD were shipping billion-transistor six-core processors. A wealthy country not being able to deploy the already existing technology in that time frame shows that it's experiencing not slow technological and economic development but slow collapse.
More expensive in what way? "Cost" is what everyone quotes about why nuclear isn't great, but isn't the whole idea behind shelving fossil fuels and switching to alternatives due to downsides that are secondary to cost?
To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?
The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.
Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).
The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.
"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue.
IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.
I'm sure you feel the same way about cutting down on cell phones right? How about we just let people keep their cars (preferably EVs), but feel free to go live in a dense cell block and eat bug juice if that is what floats your boat.
>Apartheid, genocide and war crimes are not "culture war" issues.
"Culture war" doesn't literally mean culture stuff like religion. It basically covers any controversial issue over ideology.
From wikipedia:
>A culture war is a form of cultural conflict (metaphorical "war") between different social groups who struggle to politically impose their own ideology (moral beliefs, humane virtues, and religious practices) upon mainstream society,[1][2] or upon the other. In political usage, culture war is a metaphor for "hot-button" politics about values and ideologies, realized with intentionally adversarial social narratives meant to provoke political polarization among the mainstream of society over economic matters,[3][4] such as those of public policy,[5] as well as of consumption.[1] As practical politics, a culture war is about social policy wedge issues that are based on abstract arguments about values, morality, and lifestyle meant to provoke political cleavage in a multicultural society.[2]
Of course, everyone thinks their issue is a Super Serious Issue that isn't culture war, and their side is so obviously correct that the idea controversy exists at all is absurd, so you really can't take someone's word that it's not a culture war issue. The Wikipedia article agrees with this. It lists such serious issues as trans rights, education policy, and obamacare. I'm sure if you asked strong supporters/opponents for those issues, they'd scoff at the characterization of "culture war".
If you are accusing me of being absurdist or reductionist, know this: floor mats were the official cause of "sudden acceleration", where they would slip off their pegs that were holding them to the floor (usually due to human error), and would jam the pedal to the floor. Or sometimes between the brake pedal and the floor preventing correct operation of the brake. In fact, Toyota and NHTSA issued an urgent recall in 2009 to remove all floor mats from vehicles due to this very issue: https://www.safetyresearch.net/toyota-and-nhtsa-issue-urgent...
So yes, the line was very obvious because these are events that happen in real life, risk that you say you wanted to eliminate by absolutely playing it safe: "_anything_, there is no such thing as excessive 'playing it safe'"
I can only assume that your original comment was reactionary and hyperbolic, but then got upset over where that kind of hyperbole lead in the past.
I think there is one big difference that will differentiate between principal/lead devs and euqally experienced senior devs working with AI.. AIs are not people. Lead/principal developers are good at delegating work to, and managing, people. People and AIs have very little in common and I don't think the skills will really translate that well. I think the people who will really shine with AI are those at the principal level of skill but who are better with computers than people. They will be able to learn the AI system interaction skills without first having to unlearn all the people interaction skills and I'm not sure if the "leadership skills" that are prized in principal devs can even be unlearned they seem to be more a natural affinity than a skill.
The libertarian bent typically suggests that the government must be funded to the extent that it can protect private property. This means it must be able to recognize private property and litigate against its theft, including bodily harm. Therefore I shout from my safe stable, but my prerequisite is that the government exists to provide that safe stable.
It also exists to provide public goods, which are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable, such as national defense (where I would only suggest it be provided insofar as the workforce be entirely voluntary).
Redistributibe policies such as PFML or universal healthcare, are indeed theft. You take from Person A to give to Person B when Person A would otherwise not do so. Please help me understand how that is not theft?
2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff
2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law
2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
2031: Australian ISPs must enforce the login restrictions because some sites are refusing to and there are loopholes
2033: Australian ISPs must provide the government with a list of people who visited this list of specific sites, with dates and times of those visits
2035: you must be logged in to visit these other specific sites, regardless of your age
2036: you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
2037: all visits to all sites must be logged in
2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded
2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age
2040: all visits to all sites will be reported to the government
2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Australian politicians, police, and a good chunk of the population would love this.
Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It's all "beer and barbies on the beach" but that's all actually illegal.
Doesn’t turning off SSID broadcast result in devices that have the wifi network saved repeatedly broadcast a request for the AP to identify itself in an effort to establish a connection?
For a more-classic, more-human experience (i.e., computer flags potential issues, you decide and correct if necessary) there are proselint and vale.sh.
>The C pillars are too large and the body too high for you to get good sight to anything behind you in a modern vehicle.
Which is the work product of the 2000s era of "legislate to make cars better" advocacy.
90s SUVs rolled a lot, so they changed the rules to require them be strong, Strong made them hard to see out of in reverse so they added cameras. Now because both are regulatory required, at substantial cost, you can't even make a small vehicle that doesn't have both.
It's not like the Subarus and Volvo wagons of the 00s were lacking in rollover strength or rear visibility, but now that you have to have the features by law and when all the dust of engineering tradeoffs settles the modern analogues wind up just as bad to see out of as everything else, because why wouldn't you if you're required to have the mitigation technology. No reason for 2020s Subaru shove that stupid steel bar in the pillar (at great expense) to keep it sleek and skinny when they have to have the fat pillar mitigation tech installed by law.
How many times we gonna run laps of this feedback loop before we decide the problem is systemic?
Thanks for your comment! I had been wondering where this 'sudden' push toward web accessibility came from: good 'ol US litigiousness!
Of course it's a good thing to be mindful of from a humanist perspective, but if fear of lawsuit is driving the change, it's not a very "love thy neighbour" kind of thing, but more of a fascist dictation, no? Especially if you are not in the US.
I'll be doubling down on my efforts to ensure better compliance nevertheless.
I presume the web standards you mention are part of some US legislation, yes? :S The web is becoming a crazy place, it seems that every country is writing laws that affects the whole web... and we as developers are assumed to know them all, from UI requirements (US) to security implications (Australia), to privacy concerns (GRPR)...
Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit.
The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehumanizing in spirit: sprinkling them with the waters of "consent" doesn't change that, as the subjective cannot abolish the objective. We've reduced sex to something that is merely pleasurable and contradicted its intrinsic and essential function which is procreative by employing an array of technologies that impede and interfere with healthy procreative processes. This creates a mindset not unlike that of a drug user who is obsessed with getting another hit with no thought given to the damage, or the bulimic who wants the sensual satisfaction of eating, but not the calories.
The psychophysical reality of sexual intercourse is much more than some passing physical pleasure. It mobilizes processes in us that are completely oriented toward bonding and the strengthening of the relationship in preparation for children. Whence the stereotype that men will often exit quickly in the morning after a one night stand with a strange woman? Because both can feel, if only subconsciously, that the processes of bonding are taking place, and who wants to bond — and in such a profound and intimate way — with someone they've just met? In this regard, the character of Julianna in Vanilla Sky makes an astoundingly profound and accurate remark for a movie coming out of Hollywood: "Don't you know when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?" Our capacity for sexual intimacy is likewise dulled.
(Masturbation is even worse. Those processes bond us with a fictional harem of the imaginary and close us within ourselves. For social animals like us, this is a recipe for misery.)
We thwart and ignore our biological nature to our own detriment. The procreative prime spans the mid-twenties into the early 30s. Statistically, most people should be having families by their mid-20s. Our culture confuses people and creates a pointless obstacle course that leads them to postpone such things either because they're too immature (and encouraged to remain so, also by this unserious dating culture) or because they believe they must achieve some arbitrary milestones first. Furthermore, family and community support has been dashed by a culture of hyperindividualism.
The causes of demographic decline are not a mystery. People simply either don't think deeply enough, or they don't want to make the cultural changes necessary to restore normalcy.
Still, backed by pretty solid statutory authority[0] (one created by Democrats and signed into law by Carter, in point of fact). Congress wanted the President to have this power.
I'll get scorched for this, but: I never once read a word of complaint about separation-of-powers, when Biden was sanctioning objects left and right for his own, self-declared, national-security emergencies. I don't recall reading once, i.e. at the time of the sweeping China or GPU sanctions, a peep of protest along the lines of, "This should *not* be something a President should be able to do unilaterally! That's far too much discretionary power in the hands of one person! Congress should have to debate it". We didn't invent an imperial presidency in 2025; it's the agglomeration of decades of civic apathy.
Same here. My gold standard for this is hardware that comes with the open source Tasmota firmware (or which can be flashed to Tasmota). All 75 light switches in our new house run Tasmota firmware and to me it's the perfect combination of simple, flexible and yet deeply powerful. Devices can be controlled via MQTT, web requests, webUI console or serial and not only does it avoid any cloud dependency, Tasmota devices aren't even dependent on having a router to coordinate locally with each other! They can be set so that if they don't see a wifi router, they'll form an ad hoc mesh network.
To me, this is the ultimate in reliability because even if the internet connection is offline, even if the Home Assistant Raspberry Pi crashes, even if the wifi router crashes - as long as there's power, the lights will still always communicate and work together in their device groups. When we built the house I just ordered cheap ($15) wifi light switches from Amazon, flashed them with Tasmota, configured their device groups, labeled where they went, and gave them to the general contractor's electrician, who knew nothing about home automation. So we didn't pay anything extra for special installation, design or programming - in fact we got a $5 per switch discount because they didn't need to supply the dumb switches.
The only slightly tricky part was convincing the very old-school electrician he didn't need to run traveler wires for all the three, four and five way switches. Even after I explained it to him, he didn't quite believe me that they would work so he could test them with just his temporary construction power in an unfinished house with no internet, wifi or controller hardware. I just told him to start by installing the fixtures and switches for a hallway and he was amazed when switches along the hallway controlled fixtures they weren't connected to - including sharing dimming memory and the behavior of the micro-LED strip on each light indicating brightness and status!
This is a common response here and elsewhere. Generally every state allocation of funds is presented as incredibly vital. This is exactly the attitude I was speaking to in my comment above. It would be rare to find a spending program which the proponents didn't claim was incredibly valuable. Here on HN we have an interest in technology. It fits that we value some of the discoveries of NASA.
Down thread, you'll find others suggesting that defense spending should be cut. It isn't hard to imagine nor would you need to look far to find a hawkish interventionist. These communities will assure us that defense spending is vital, absolutely vital not only to our own well-being, but to support the globalized trading system as well.
Choose a topic. Pick a niche. Under every rock from K Street to Capitol Hill, you will find a bureaucrat, politician or lobbyist to justify more spending. Some may like to spend more here and less there. Others might like to spend more everywhere. Almost all of them will have particular issues for which spending cuts are beyond consideration.
>...research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections.
This is a good point. What is missing here, are the missed opportunities in the private sector, which would have also been, unexpected. We don't know the things which were not built. We do not know what all of those scientists and engineers may have discovered or built, had they not been allocated into government funded research. For me, this is a problem with the post-hoc rationalizations.
Since the 1960s, revenue from total taxation as a percent of gdp is unchanged. Not also the difference in tax revenue between Europe and America stems mostly from policies that tax the middle class not the "rich":
The U.S. already taxes the rich—measured by both tax rates and tax revenues—at levels roughly equal to the OECD average. Yes, the other 38 OECD nations collect tax revenues that, on average, exceed the U.S. by 7.5% of GDP (at all levels of government). However, nearly this entire difference results from the other 38 OECD nations hitting their middle class with value-added taxes (VATs) that raise an average of 7.2% of GDP. And while the progressive avatars of Finland, Norway, and Sweden exceed U.S. tax revenues by 16% of GDP, that gap virtually disappears after accounting for the 14.5% of GDP in higher payroll and VAT revenues that broadly hit the Nordic middle class. Europe finances its progressive spending levels on the backs of the middle class, not the wealthy.[37]
This plan should be a must read for people from any spot along the American political spectrum.
Only a small minority of farm workers owned the farms they worked on even back before tractors. And the tractors didn't do much to help most of those owners either. Industrial farm equipment increased the area a single farmer can work so far beyond what he could before that it made no sense for owners of the time to each have their own equipment and most sold their land and consolidated the industry into much larger farms. Farm employment went from 90% of all workers before the industrial revolution down to a bit over 1% today in the US.
And maybe it happens to software engineers next. So what? The economy looks completely different today than it did 50 years ago, which was completely different than 50 years before that, and that shouldn't stop just because some people feel childishly entitled to do the same work for their whole lives even it if it is obsolete. I'll just change careers like I have done twice before. There's a massive shortage of electrical/plumbing/hvac contractors. There's a massive shortage of nurses / doctors that will only get worse as the population gets older. Not as cushy as my mid six figure tech job, but I have no god given right to that. And there's plenty more opportunity beyond that for anyone willing to take it, so if any other engineers want to cry about it, their tears will be wasted on me.
Just like with human engineers, you need to start with a planning session. This involves a back and forth discussion to hammer out the details before writing any code. I start off as vague as possible to see if the LLM recommends anything I hadn't thought of, then get more detailed as I go. When I'm satisfied, I have it create 2 documents, initialprompt.txt and TODO.md. The initial prompt file includes a summary of the project along with instructions to read the to do file and mark each step as complete after finishing it.
This ensures the LLM has a complete understanding of the overall goals, along with a step by step list of tasks to get there. It also allows me to quickly get the LLM back up to speed when I need to start a new conversation due to context limits.
It's the economic issue AND a dogs issue AND a birth control issue AND porn a porn issue.
Sperm getting launched into socks or condoms instead of vaginas, not enough money and maternal instincts being assuaged by puppies all contributes to the problem.
The mechanisms that force the population to expand are designed to go against our judgement. Sexual instincts, birth control and maternal instincts are all designed to override our judgement and push the population forward at the detriment of of the human individual. Are you poor? Evolution does not give a fuck, it designed you to be horny and to have maternal instincts so you will increase the population no matter how fucked up your situation is.
But thanks to modern technology we've learned to conquer these things. Puppies, condoms and porn. All contributors to the issue.
Bro, I own a dog. I love dogs and condoms. Doesn't mean I'm going to let my love of dogs and condoms cloud my objective reasoning. Also I'm still going to use a condom when I fuck some random hot girl because my individual situation is more important To Me then the overall population problem. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
> the kind of people who treat them as a human equal.
No, they treat them as better than people.
Because in their value system, animals are moral objects but not moral subjects. By that, I mean that actions done to animals can have moral weight. If you take a sick kitten and nurse it back to health, you are a good person. If you kick a puppy, you are a bad person.
But the animal itself (according to this culture) carries no moral responsibility. If a dog bites someone, it's not an evil dog. It's not the dog's fault. It was just raised poorly, or traumatized as a puppy, or the owner should have kept it leashed better, etc.
Thus animals are always morally pure, but people can be bad people. I kind of get where the value system is coming from: animals really are on the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to power and agency, so it does make sense to think of them as mostly receivers of moral actions. But some people take that really far.
I live in Seattle where the local highly progressive animal-centric culture is probably the vanguard of what this article is talking about. I think about it all the time.
I believe there are a few things leading many people to choose pets instead of children to fulfill their desire to nurture:
1. The trauma theory of psychology.
Pop psychology today seems to assume that babies are born perfectly mentally healthy, except for any genetic mental illnesses they inherited from their parents. Then at some point, if they're unlucky, they experience some sort of trauma, often at the hands of their parents. That trauma inflicts a mental illness on them. They can treat it with therapy and/or meds, but the assumption is that the illness is irrevocable. (Don't believe me? The next time you're talking to a friend and they bring up therapy or mental health medication, ask them when they think they'll be cured and can stop.)
The implication here is that as a parent, you've got basically nowhere to go but down with regards to your kid's mental health. If you are yourself perfectly mentally healthy and pass on no predispositions to your kid, and you parent them flawlessly 24/7 for eighteen years and dodge every possible trauma, then congrats you didn't fuck them up. Anything less than that and you're a bad parent. Which leads to...
2. Impossible parenting standards.
Media is constantly filled with all of the various ways a parent can do a bad job. Start the car moving down the driveway before they have their seatbelt on? Bad parent. Let them walk to the park on their own and risk being abducted? Bad parent. Give them access to junk food? Bad parent. Don't put them in enough extracurricular activities to pad their college application letter a decade from now? Bad parent. Too many extracurricular activities so they don't have enough free time in which to learn initiative? Bad parent.
It is unending and demoralizing the ways in which parents are made to constantly feel they are inadequate. When I was a kid, if another kid fell playing and broke their arm, it was just "OK, kids get hurt." Today, it's "Why did you let them do that?" Parents have never spent more time with their children than they do today, but our culture still tells us it's not enough. Or, if it does, they tell us it's too much.
Mix that with the previous point, and having a kid with any mental health challenges is not just a tragedy but your fault as a parent.
3. Long-term pessimism.
I know many people who truly do believe the world is fucked because of climate change and politics. Not only do they not believe any potential children of theirs would be raised in a world worse than they one they grew up in, they don't even have faith that world will be functionally habitable at all.
Best case, they believe their children may thrive only because they happen to be born into privilege while other children in poorer locations will suffer catastrophically from climate change. So the best outcome they can imagine is a profound failing of moral justice.
Meanwhile, consider pets:
1. Rescued from trauma.
Most pet owners get their pets from shelters. The animal may actually have had trauma before being adopted, but the owner wasn't morally responsible. Instead, they are the rescuer that saved the animal from further trauma. If the animal bounces back and has great behavior, then it's a testament to the amazing resilence of animals and the benefits of compassionate ownership. If the animal always has behavioral issues, well it's not their fault they were traumatized and what a good owner they have to take care of them in spite of those challenges.
2. High but meetable standards
Standards for pet ownership are certainly high here too. Long gone are the days of putting the dog in a doghouse in the backyard and giving them a scoop out of the giant cheap bag of Alpo every day. Pets are expected to be fed healthy food, kept inside and safe, given good vet care, and lots of interaction and enrichment.
Those standards are high but attainable. You can just do those things and feel like a good pet owner. And the pet will certainly make you feel like a good pet owner. Their expectations are low and it's easy to exceed them.
3. Shorter life span
If you believe the world is doomed, then a living being that will never outlive you and have to figure out how to make its without your support is a blessing. You don't have to feel guilty about the fact that in a thousand tiny ways, you contributed to climate change that will end up harming a loved one decades from now.
I use bash within tmux heavily, and got irked that a command I run in one shell session is not immediately available as a history item in other concurrent shell sessions. So I wrote a history plugin based on bash-preexec to track everything to two files: a per-directory history file, and a global history file.
I have a bash function which does history selection for me, by popping an fzf selector to look at the directory-specific history file. A keybinding within fzf allows me to switch to looking at the global history file instead.
Boring commands such as “cd”, “pushd”, and a few others don’t get logged. The log entries are in json format and include basic metadata; directory, timestamp, and pid.
Within the fzf history picker, another keybinding allows me to edit whichever file I’m actively using. So if I fumble a few times to construct a command, then when I get it right I just pop into the selector, edit the relevant file, and remove the lines I don’t want to misfire on again.
I’m sure this is basically what atuin does; now that I’m at the spot where directories are the unit of history relevant history, maybe I should give that tool another look.
One really interesting upside of all of this is that I now tend to make “activity-specific” directories in my repos. For example, I have a “.deploy” directory at the git root of most of my projects. There are no files within that directory; but my tool creates ~/.bash.d/history/home/belden/github/company/project/.deploy.json which contains the history of ~/github/company/project/.deploy/
Empty directories are invisible to git, but for me the directory “has” content: the log of how I need to deploy this service or that service.
It’s a weird way to use my shell, and just sprung out of the initial grief: I shouldn’t have to exit a shell session to have its history become available.
AI is both a privacy and copyright nightmare, and it's heavily censored yet people praise it every day.
Imagine if the rm command refused to delete a file because Trump deemed it could contain secrets of the Democrats. That's where we are and no one is bothered. Hackers are dead and it's sad.
Thank you. I enjoy relating them. There are other airplane junkies who come to our monthly D Coffee Haus meeting, and we often wind up talking shop about airplane engineering.
This is very sad, because the GNU project pioneered a way of software design that's very different from anything we see on proprietary platforms, or even common Linux/BSD applications for that matter. This is best exemplified by Emacs - hackable to the core, with more than enough documentation and context help baked in to help you do just that. You can see the same philosophy at play in the Guix OS, the Shepherd (init), GNU Poke (semantics-aware binary editor) and many many other GNU software. It can be used easily by anyone, but it's absolute heaven for those who like to poke around (not a pun) the system. It nudges normal users towards becoming system hackers. The difference between GNU software and corporate-sponsored components (like systemd, avahi, gnome, policykit, PAM, Chrome, Firefox, etc) is stark. I have heard similar things about NetBSD and OpenBSD to a lesser extend, but I'm yet to give it a good try. The only other alternative I've seen is the suckless suite of software where the configuration is done in the source code itself, before it's compiled. But it can be slightly daunting even for power users. With the loss of that knowledge and philosophy, an entire generation will grow up without ever knowing a different way of computing that treats you as something more than just a consumer to be squeezed for every last penny, and the true power and potential of general purpose computing.