In the context of Omarchy, the salient desire is to avoid affiliation with fascists. Which NixOS hasn’t exactly excelled at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NixOS#Community_controversy

(I say this as someone whose main laptop, desktop, and homelab are all NixOS.)

Doing so would expose the lie at the heart of the neoliberal proposition — that if we gave up our dignity as workers, we would regain it ten times over as consumers.

If you have to do gig work on top of your two conventional jobs, but you still have to be frugal? Well, then it starts to seem like maybe workers sold their rights away for nothing.

The 99% doesn’t want to believe that. But more than that, the 1% really doesn’t want the 99% to believe that.

You’re not wrong. But you’re also not going to see Americans change their thinking on that anytime soon.

<3

No no, ==3

Code is a liability. The only thing that balances it out is people who understand the code. The people are the asset.

If you contribute LLM-generated code but not your understanding, you’ve essentially taken out a loan in the maintainers’ names.

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”

Over the past 5 years or so, I have really come to despise the phrase “just a tool”.

The second graph doesn’t really even tell the whole story either, because it’s just by release. You need to see how the number of bugs detected/fixed changes over time for each release.

Otherwise super-new releases get an unfair advantage just by virtue of not being exposed for as long. And super-old releases get an advantage too, by falling out of use at the same time more resources are allocated to detection.

gain nothing

Oh really?

In a Q&A, Yanis Varoufakis was asked something like “you say you can have markets without capitalism — if capitalism and markets are not equivalent, then what constitutes capitalism?” and his answer was “easy: anonymous transferable shares of ownership”.

I thought that was an impressively concise explanation, cuz every single word is significant.

IIRC, they said something like “we intend to open source it, but because of licensing and other IP concerns, we need to be careful how we structure the codebase, so we’re waiting until active development levels off”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

The “it’s just a tool” (with optional add-on “what matters is how you use it”) thought-terminating cliche makes me put my face in my hands a little bit deeper every time I see it.

Daily life in 2026 would be completely unrecognizable to a person from 5,000 years ago, and the difference is not just how we use our tools. The production, existence, and proliferation of the tools shape what is easy or hard, or even what is possible or impossible.

To think that you can reshape the contours of the decision-making terrain and that has no effect on what people do, or how they think of who they are… you’d have to accept that someone in the bronze age could just wake up one day and decide to be a telecommuting web developer on HRT and Ozempic.

To be fair to the original commenter: They did bring up copyright in the context of “what makes this a different kind of tool”, which is an empirical claim and not a normative one.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the author sticking to the level at which he’s an expert. If everyone had to chase down the lowest possible level, we’d all be physicists (or maybe philosophers, depending on your take there).

Besides, isn’t the “materialism” portion of “dialectical materialism” about interrogating the implications of present world you find yourself in, rather than evaluating what-ifs of alternate histories?

However generative AI might have emerged differently under a different regime, this is the version that we have access to inspect and, crucially, the version we must contend with if we want to influence its future trajectory under any regime.

Edit: But I do have to agree that he is much better at diagnosing the problem than he is at prescribing the solution. That seems to be the way of things. People tend to be good at either analyzing problems in detail, or rallying people around a tractible plan of action. It’s very very very rare to see someone who is good at both. So I don’t mind it too much.

Ehhh, probably the most pragmatic option for someone in his position, but I’m not gonna take that as an even-handed analysis of AI in open source, the software industry, the economy, or civilization writ large.

There was a post earlier today that directly counters the “just a tool” trope. (And if you’re thinking “but this is Linus! What credentials could this rando possibly have?”, allow me to preface their essay+video with a note that this guy has experience at high levels in the industry and then quit the industry to get a PhD with a focus on the social impacts of software development tools.)

And Cory Doctorow has a book (and many blog posts and speaking engagements covering the same content) about the precise harms (and non-harms) of AI.

Dr. Fatima (on Youtube) also has a pretty well-rounded take.

And Baldur Bjarnason makes some good points from a cognitive science perspective, though I think he’s ultimately out over his skis quite a bit.

Jokes on you, I just did a load of laundry this morning.

After forgetting it in the washer last night and having to re-run it.

And I actually brought it down to the laundry room the day before that.

And I put it all in a hamper the day before that.

Okay what I’m saying is, I have a system and it apparently works eventually so nyah.

I’m disappointed by Linux on almost a daily basis. And MacOS. And iOS. And Android.

(I haven’t used Windows in a long time, so I guess it’s the only major OS I’m not routinely disappointed by? Whoa, that’s a realization…)

But this is just what happens when you’re constantly messing with stuff.

Since “do one thing principle” is pretty abstract, I’ll give you one example of a downstream consequence.

I wanted to set up a NixOS microVM using docker sbx. Turns out, it was basically impossible (nothing is actually impossible, it just depends how much you want to modify/rebuild things).

Much of NixOS depends on systemd to manage lifecycles of this or that, but systemd only works properly if it’s the first PID, and when it runs in that mode it also wants to initialize hardware.

But the hardware is all managed by the microVM, so systemd blows up. All it needs to do is nothing, but that turns out to be very difficult to achieve.

If these were like 3 or 4 distinct utilities, there would be obvious seams where I could separate them and only activate the stuff that’s relevant to my use case. But it’s all one big ball of mud.

They are a joke, yes. I worked on some server side code back in the day when a game server could be a nice self-contained executable on an EC2 instance. Even back then, I think it would’ve been a formidable task.

Now that game mechanics often necessitate more complex cloud infra, there’s a lot more going on that you can’t just Charles/mitmproxy your way through because it’s invisible to the client.

At the very least, you’ll need more than one dev, and that means coordination. For a ragtag group of hobbyists, AI is more likely to be a poison pill that kills the project before MVP.

Caching is an MFer

Mmmm, most of my stress about tasks is from tasks that:

• I’m not sure if I need to do at all
• don’t need to be done yet
• I can’t work on yet
• are less important/urgent than other tasks