Comment by Karrot_Kream
3 years ago
It's funny, the older I get the less I care about this stuff. I like to use technology to, well, live my life in a more effective, effort-free manner. I have lots of friends who aren't other nerdy techies. In high school I refused to use "proprietary, inefficient WYSIWYG garbage that disrespected the user" like Word and typed up all of my essays in LaTeX instead. Now I get accounting spreadsheets for vacations going on my smartphone using Google Sheets. I still love writing code but my code has become more oriented around features and experiences for myself rather than code for the sake of code.
I love exploring low-latency code but rather than trying to create small, sharp tools the suckless way, I like to create low latency experiences end-to-end. Thinking about rendering latency, GUI concurrency, interrupt handling, etc. Suckless tools prioritize the functionality and the simplicity of code over the actual experience of using the tool. One of my favorite things to do is create offline-first views (which store things in browser Local Storage) of sites like HN that paper over issues with network latency or constrained bandwidth leading to retries.
I find suckless and permacomputing to be the siren song of a type of programmer, the type of programmer who shows up to give a presentation and then has to spend 10 minutes getting their lean Linux distro to render a window onto an external screen at the correct DPI, or even to connect to the wifi using some wpa_supplicant incantations.
It's the cycle and not just in software. Younglings are idealists and try a thousand things, some of which happen to change and improve the ever-turning wheel of software, while elders turn the wheel and ensure the system, practices and knowledge continue and get transferred.
Fully agree. When I was younger I used to care more about privacy, and would use nothing but FOSS apps and OSes no matter how much it inconvenienced me.
There's a significant opportunity cost for zealotry.
OpenBSD it's just "sh /etc/netstart if", where if is the network interface once you set /etc/hostname.if
No WPA incantations, the OS handles multiple connections seamlessly.
With that, magicpoint/sent and xrandr you just don't care, it works.
OpenBSD is actually a good example of a system that envisions a holistic experience. Sure its experience is that of one for a techie nerd, but it's still very experience oriented. This is a pretty big contrast from suckless which creates small tools that only kinda work together and claim the code as documentation. OpenBSD docs are wonderful.
(Though in my experience modern Linux kernels have much better networking throughput than BSD kernels. It confounds the overall performance argument of this thread chain, but the overall OpenBSD experience leads to on average a more speedy experience.)
“A person's primary task should not be computing, but being human.” - calmtech.com