Comment by hatradiowigwam
7 days ago
This appears to me like a solution in search of a problem, like many others before it...the quote below seems relevant to this effort.
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer
I hired a programmer and after giving him his Linux laptop let him set up a few things. A couple hours later he asked me where he could get PuTTY for it, and I recognized a huge gap in my interview coverage.
Indeed, a new hire should be able to use Google to find https://puttygen.com/download-putty#Download_PuTTY_on_Linux_... in short order
evil grin
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
puttygen.com looks super fishy, the disclaimer:
> Puttygen software is not created, nor supported by Puttygen.com. The program has been tested and is believed to be safe. [...] The use of Puttygen through Puttygen.com is done at your own discretion and risk
Edit: or is that the evil grin?
multiple issues right
apt install putty seems... useful? Don't get it.
3 replies →
or just ask an llm
Ever hired someone who, when you ask them to send you an ssh key for access to something, sends you their private key? Yeah, that's happened more than once.
Who's sending ssh keys around anymore? Just get theirs off gitHub.com/username.keys and shove it in their user account.
http://gitHub.com/fragmede.keys, for example. Stick that in authorized_keys to let me into your server.
2 replies →
Gotta auto-reject anyone listing Windows experience on resume
wow, what a way to prejudice against people fluent in multiple paradigms
works for me. are you hiring? :-)
I dislike this story and it’s because I can believe it.
Any experience with ‘programmers’ not knowing git?
That's more ageism than anything else. I mean surely real "programmers" know the new hotness "ghsfgusdfu", right? How could you live without?
I know companies running on SVN and they're fine. In fact, it's a better fit for them. Yes, Git is not always superior.
I'll give you a helpful concept to navigate these issues: "Cargo culting refers to the practice of imitating the superficial aspects of a process or practice without understanding the underlying logic or reasons behind it. This phenomenon is often seen in software development, where developers may adopt certain coding styles or methodologies without grasping their true purpose."
8 replies →
Honestly, I suspect you'd find a lot of self-taught people have random gaps in their knowledge that someone with a mentor/degree won't.
1 reply →
When I went to college (early 2010s) professors were still encouraging students to use SVN, so I probably have a fair number of peers who didn't learn git until they got out into the real world
2 replies →
Had experience with programmers not knowing VCS in general.
No. It’s just that now more people are using Linux the more the ux decisions that were made 40 years ago will be questioned.
Almost all dev facing machines have ssh server installed and accessible.
Why ssh terminal has to look like character-only trash from 1960s? Why a TUI is the best thing we pipe through ssh? Why I cannot watch a 4k movie in the terminal or browse the web using pinch to zoom ?
A terminal UI is the best thing we pipe through SSH because it's the tool we built specifically for piping a terminal UI. Abandoning Xorg has admittedly made streaming a GUI over SSH less simple, but still not impossible, and you can forward whatever data you want (a VLC stream of a 4k movie) with tunneling.
I do agree that new Linux users who have different needs from their computers might cause some incentive to change some of these 40 year old UX decisions. We don't really have a modern, capable remote desktop solution at least on par with RDP.
> Why a TUI is the best thing we pipe through ssh?
`ssh -XC` (look up SSH X forwarding). You can also easily tunnel remote desktop over ssh.
> Why I cannot watch a 4k movie in the terminal or browse the web using pinch to zoom ?
Kitty, sixel, and iterm2
It's not 4k, but ssh to funky.nondeterministic.computer if you're using a modern* terminal emulator program. (aka ghostty)
>character-only trash from 1960s
You take that back!
>Why a TUI is the best thing we pipe through ssh? Why I cannot watch a 4k movie in the terminal or browse the web using pinch to zoom?
The old magick speak of X forwarding. The newer wizards now use waypipe.
Because content is orthogonal to form. Development at its core is virtually pure content. The form, the fonts, the graphics, the "pixels". It's noise with regards to the task at hand. It's not useless, because surely we have eyes and need to witness text on the screen (for now), but it is orthogonal to the main axis of resistance we are trying to overcome (for which we get paid).
People that don't understand the separation between content and form cannot separate between data and rendering, between models and views. They stuff JS in CSS and CSS in databases.
In short, they make shitty architects and are to be shunned from programming important software in general. No offense.
because it is TEXT
you want your GUI then set up VNC
The problem with VNC is the same as the problem with IRC. The new user experience is trash. They're both on the level of protocols, like SMTP is, so you get variable support for user quality of life features and users bounce because those features aren't built into the protocol. For VNC, it's per window support and image compression format/acceleration. For IRC it's pre-join-history scrollback, and anything you need a moderation bot for. SMTP's problem is spam. (Doesn't matter if that's a problem with the protocol or the wider situation and should be managed at the application level, it sucks for users.
> Why ssh terminal has to look like character-only trash from 1960s?
We should re-implement it with Comic Sans and happy shiny buttons to click everywhere? Click here for "ls -alh" ?
No, but I wouldn't mind if keyboard worked properly.
1 reply →
that seems a little harsh. I think there is a real usability gap which this takes a crack at.
Some ideas like using viewing a linux dir over _ssh_ using native UI components.. seem cool.
I do agree, some of these do seem like they have already been solved in other ways (like an sshfs mount).
That is exactly what X was designed to do. And part of why X is considered insecure today.
I mean, I do this all the time via sshfs. I don't think these tools or ideas are bad, they just mostly aren't new, the innovation is maybe a particular ux or a particular bundle of toys?
> "Those who do not understand Unix
Funny enough, that right there is the actual fundamental problem here.
I am reminded of a post or blog long ago that talked about programmable thermostats and how awful they are for most people to use despite how powerfully in the weeds one can get with them. Basically summarizing the issue as something like “People do not want to learn your arcane system, they just want the benefit it’s advertising”. A good UI knows how to minimize that gap.
as someone with a fancy IoT thermostat... yeah.
I want to set the temp. Maybe set a schedule and a timer. Once I have to start navigating multiple, deep menues with a thermostat I stop giving a shit.
I miss old VCRs that had 8 buttons and only those 8 functions
I mean that's true but the number of UIs which simply don't add access to necessary features in the name of "simplicity" is enormous.
The poster child of this is the Microsoft Office ribbon.
This resembles Plan9 more than UNIX. I wouldn't put UNIX up on a pedestal.
Plan9 is funny because it's what UNIX might look like if the people working on UNIX understood UNIX, i.e. everything is a file and simple primitives are composed into complex systems.
They had the benefit of hindsight and bigger hardware, but UNIX got too popular and now we're struggling to move past it. It would have been interesting to see what the fourth try would be like (though looking at Go I would probably not completely like it).
yea, as sibling said. p9 was not possible on pdp11. what was possible there was .. v7 and 2bsd. see https://github.com/felipenlunkes/run-ancient-unix
p9 was done when "current state of unix" was already fixed in form of aix, sysv and bsds, it suffered the same fate as say beos.
1 reply →
i mean they did understand unix, both in that they created it, and created plan9 to be closer to their original vision.
but unix got widely adopted and you go with what sells not blue-sky woulda-coulda
1 reply →
this kind of dismissive comments is why many apps have an awful usability. If someone thinks a web interface would be easier than a text terminal, there's at least one customer in need for a product (which either doesn't exist or they could not "googlify") - it's also why I welcome AI generating apps on the fly, "replacing" engineers who "know better" ;)
Why learn to do anything?
compilers, IDE, syntax highlighting too, everyone should learn assembly, ed, and stick to b&w
> there's at least one customer in need for a product
just because whales exist does not mean feeding them is a goal to aim for as a society. 99.9% of technology could disappear tomorrow and life would become better.
hyperbole: a lot of tech we give for granted today, started as niche products for "whales" like government agencies, so I suppose computers and Internet shouldn't exist and life would be better
1 reply →
>"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." ~Henry Spencer
I need something like this for network management tools.
I think this is a `There’s no such thing as bad publicity`
It's like they decided to reinvent webmin
UNIX/GNU/LINUX is not TUI. Period.
That quote does not have anything against GUIs, does it?
Or did you mean it in another way?