Install Guix

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • I switched to LibreWolf from Waterfox. Happy with my decision! Even more happy with this announcement!

    It’s a little unfortunate MacOS support isn’t the best. However, I totally agree with their stance of not paying the Apple tax. I run Linux, but I can’t totally recommend LibreWolf to my non-techie family cuz they’re on MacOS…

    On the other hand, LibreWolf was one of the reasons I moved my parents to Fedora Silverblue!


  • Before we make an offer, we need to know you’re passionate about AI

    Uff! When I was interviewing a few months ago, I was honest in an interview and said I was lukewarm on AI. The recruiter threw me a bone and said, “When you talk with the hiring manager, make sure you say you’re really excited about AI.”

    I did not get that job… which was probably for the better.



  • I don’t know anyone who works in tech (not IT) that is allowed to use Wangblows for development. If you’re a programmer/software developer, you’ll 1000% have to use Linux, either directly or indirectly. From small hardware devices, to automous cars, to simple web sites, all of that uses Linux. Lots of places give you a Linux laptop or at the very least give you Mac—because they consider Mac close enough to Linux. I’ve never needed to use Macroshit Office Suite for anything related to work. Zoom and Slack are the standard in Silicon Valley and both work fine on Linux.





  • EZ

    I’m interested in the Steam Machine because I like playing on consoles. Steam’s ecosystem seems interesting because it’s more open than PlayStation’s (what I’m on currently). Additionally, I like Linux. By using SteamOS, I’m hoping bug fixes and improvements will benefit the general Linux ecosystem. I don’t want to install games on my regular computers. I want a dedicated gaming device. I don’t intend to use the Steam Machine as a PC.


  • simple boilerplate stuff pretty well

    1. It does not. My coworkers did some demos on this and it generated random, unnecessary, bloated, shitty, boilerplate. And worse, “because AI told me to” is now used to cement bad practices at my company. Just because it generates 1000s of LoC doesn’t mean you actually need that.

    2. If you really need “standard boilerplate”, we’ve had tools to generate deterministic code for a long time now. They’re called snippets or templates. Just setup a company git repo template for your ideal project or whatever and have people clone that. Plus, this template repo would be reproducible, fixable, and debuggable, instead of rolling the dice with AI.


  • AI tooling producing some things fast

    This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Yeah, maybe AI wrote a new microservice and generated 100s of new files and 1000s of lines of new code… but… there’s a big assumption there that you actually needed 100s of new files and 1000s of lines of new code. What it tends to generate is tech debt. That’s also ignoring the benefits of your workforce upskilling by learning more about the system, where things are, how they’re pieced together, why they’re like that, etc.

    AI just adds tech debt in a blackbox. It’s gonna lower velocity in the long term.







  • Yeah, I’m sure. It’s not something I would do frequently. My work had us on beefy desktops. But, I was totally fine with letting find+parallel+grep run for 30 minutes in the background while I searched docs or messaged people on slack. Depending on your team, getting a response from slack could easily take 24 hours so. Eh.

    The other thing I liked to do is directly edit the libraries in the monorepo! No need to figure out how hack some random decency manager. You have the code! Just edit and build!


  • On the other hand, using ordinary tools like find and grep are exactly what I like about monorepos! Yes, they may take a while, but at least I know I’ll find a file or code that I’m looking for!

    With multi-repos I’m constantly searching, but not finding where a particular piece of code comes from. Yes, it’s from library X, but where there heck does that live? Now I really can’t use ordinary tools. I have to rely on coworkers, docs, or GitLab to search for where a piece of code is actually defined.


  • AI coding tools definitely helpful with boilerplate code

    They’re really not. Just because they generated a starter template for you doesn’t mean you actually needed all of that mountain of slop. My coworker recently did a presentation where he generated a starter project for a Go project and most of it was shit and just not necessary. People assume you need mountains of boilerplate, but you may not need that. (Worse, AI is cementing bad practices at work.)

    But also, assuming your project does need to generate a ton of boilerplate, should you really be going to the casino and rolling for a fresh mountain of slop that is hopefully correct? We can already generate code: snippets (in your editor), templates (like cloning a template repo), and generators (like create-react-app) already exist. Aaand these are deterministic, debuggable, and fixable.


  • Have they tried coding a UI in a native library instead of the holy HTML CSS JS trifecta? It’s usually fairly miserable and usually extremely non-customizable by comparison.

    🙋‍♂️ I have. Exactly because Electron = bloat. Granted it was just a small side project that I spent like a month or so building. I wanted to learn GTK4, Adwaita, GNOME Blueprints, and Vala.

    I personally didn’t think it was too miserable (again small project, not a ton of specialized needs). However, I 10000% completely agree with the “extremely non-customizable by comparison”. I can totally see why companies don’t want to look like a generic OS app. Getting the Bitwarden app to look like Bitwarden on Linux seems like it would be waaay harder and more time consuming than just reusing their existing HTML, CSS, and JS codebase. At least in my month of messing with GTK, it seems like desktop UIs have wwwwaaaaayyyyyyy less control over the UI than webapps do, at least by default. I’m guessing you can write more Vala to get a more custom UI in GTK, but again seems like waaaaayy more work for something highly custom.

    By the end, I thought: Electron = bloat, but also Electron = apps existing at all.