I use it for letters too. It is a breeze to use.

LaTeX is by far easier to use than “word processors” if you want consistent formatting.

Arch is often pictured as some Uber hacker magic which it isn’t. It is a useful collection of software packages with great documentation.

Arch is for example useful if you want to program with new Rust versions, tools like jujutsu, cross-compile for your Sailfish phone, and so on.

(By the way, Guix features now a recent Rust/cargo version, too!)

And both Debian and Arch have advantages / disadvantages, so both are useful for different tasks. Learning Arch is really not a big step or costs much time if you know the foundations of Linux.

>= 33 years

• Unix
• C
• the shell and commands like cd, ls, find, xarg, cp, mv, ln, df, du

>= 32 years

• vi/vim
• LaTeX
• tar

>= 28 years

• Emacs
• awk, bash
• C++
• Linux

>= 26 years

• Python & Numerical Python
• screen and tmux
• rsync
• ssh
• InkScape

>= 20 years

• git
• literate programming tools

>= 17 years

• Thunderbird & forks
• Debian & Ubuntu
• GNOME

>= 15 years

• MeeGo, Maemo, Sailfish & siblings
• Lisps (Clojure, Guile, Racket)

>= 11 years

• tiling WMs (i3)
• Arch (as second system)

what I use now and will very, very likely still use in 10 years

• Rust
• Guix
• Gollum wiki
• Gemini protocol

EVs already are much safer than ICEs

That’s new to me. Why exactly?

That’s misinformation,. Rob Pike, Co-Author of the first Unix, described in The Practice Of Programming, a book published in 1999, how they were fuzzing these tools.

It seems that the whole age verification movement is promoted by big US tech companies. The move the problem from the product being fundamentally unsafe, to the user’s age being the problem.

It would be better to prohibit addictive design.

In a sound bite on Iran, he threathens

On 23 March, Donald Trump said that if things didn’t go to his liking in Iran, “we just keep bombing our little hearts out”. source.

Given what is known from the Epstein files, I find “our little hearts” creepy as fuck.

I am using Unix/Linux for over thirty years now, and the older I get, the more I like it simple.

Debian with Arch in a VM, and Guix as extra package manager on top of both for programming projects. I use Debian for stable stuff and Arch for new stuff.

Stumpwm as manual tiling window manager, or i3wm, or Sway if the first is not available. Somtimes GNOME.

Emacs with language server (lsp-mode) for programming. Vim frequently at work for embedded tasks.

Gollum wiki or Zim wiki for knowledge management.

I am thinking since a while that AI tools, as useless as they are generally, could for once become helpful in checking freshly developed code. Even if the actual code is smart, most bugs are in reality pretty dumb.

By the way, in the medium term, generalizing this development from the kernel to general distro packages, this could be a good argument to prefer using a rolling-release distro like Arch, SuSE Tumbleweed, or Guix over “stable” Distros like Debian or Ubuntu.

Debian has real advantages (it has one of the fastest response times to security vulnerabilities), but rolling release distros do have the advantage not only that they in theory can update fast, but that the dependent packages only need to be compatible with the latest version to ensure stability.

You could think that this development puts open source projects at a disadvantage.

But this does not seem to be the case: AI tools can also be used to automatically disassemble and even decompile closed-source code machine code, leaving it open to the same kind of analysis.

And trolley buses, which are cheaper to install and more flexible for lower volumes of passengers. They don’t need a battery either, alternatively can use a very small one, and this saves a lot of weight.

Yes, the blog and its sources explain in depth that this is not caused by individual faulty engineering decisions but by the security culture of the organization and the culture and incentives driving it.

For example, the decision to not test the heat shield in full tests under real conditions, and to not make full physics models of the processes in it are mayor decisions. And the decision to make a crewed flight without these tells a lot about values and priorities.

Can’t we not shit on good news just for like a microsecond?

Not if paid by fossil industry.

Slowing down isn’t typically a good strategy for either of those animals in my expexperience

With the picture, the article author of course alludes to Aesops fable The tortoise and the hare where the tortoise wins a race between the two, after the hare mocking the tortoise for its slowness.

There are many variants. A German variant is between hare and hedgehog where the hedgehog, which turns out a bit smarter than the hare, teams up with his identical-looking wife. When the hare arrives at the goal, they are waiting saying “I m here already”, and suggest the astonished hare to repeat the race over and over, back and forth, until the hare falls dead.

And organizations have super high pain tolerance.

The organization slowly evolves along with the complexity in a demented kind of synergy and learns how to deal with it.

That rings so true.

But the thing is, pain is a warning signal. If you go jogging completely drunk and hit a tree with 6 mph, it will be painful, yes, but the pain will warn you not to do it again.

But what if you move 12 times faster?

If you drive a light motorcycle completely drunk and with no helmet, and hit a tree, pain will not be able to save you.

For company legacy codebases, yes they are dysfunctional but they have found a kind of precarious equilibrium in so far as they exist because they are making money and thus are useful by some metric. The slow movement and requirement to work somehow balances the unstoppable (with in company practices) growth of entropy and messiness.

And in a way, the money is an analgetic for the pain. Or more sharply, big companies act like junkies on a money drug because money is the only thing that ever counts.

Figure what happens if entropy is grown 100 times faster…

• The Jepsen project, which performs heavy testing of distributed database engines, and often finds bugs, is written in Clojure: https://jepsen.io/
• The Maxima computer algebra software is in Common Lisp
• The ITA flight fare search and pricing system is in Common Lisp
• and my beloved tiling window manager, stumpwm, is also written in Common Lisp

Emacs, for configuring the whole editor. (Has an own dialect, Elisp.)

Emacs has its own Lisp dialect because it is one of the longest-running software projects in existence. Work is underway to port its core to Guile, while maintaining Elisp compatibility.

Clojure, Racket and Guile are really nice. But especially Common Lisp is underrated - it is an interactive, compiled, high-performance language. What Lisps often suffer from is a lack of libraries compared to Python. For example, Clojure and Kawa run on the JVM. Guile has good POSIX bindings. Steel is implemented in Rust and can call into it, which means it can use its libraries.