The terms on the right to use user data in section 4.1 are also a bit surprising. I’d expect that from a social network like Facebook, but not from a text editor.

Oh, and I suggest to search the Arch wiki for suggestions for Linux software that match what you want to do. The packages named there are usually available in other major distros, too!

That also happens to be good advice if you want to reduce addictions that are caused by “addictive by design” platforms and parasocial media.

In a nutshell, it is like controlling smoking: Not doing it at all is often easier and costs much less energy, than controlling the extend of usage.

One reason for this is that such a decision shifts your sub-conscious fous from "Should I do this on Linux or Windows??“ to: “How do I do this in Linux - or what might I enjoy doing instead?”

You’ve inherited a 300k lines of spaghetti code. What do you do now?

Quit.

The grain of truth in this is that organizations which have accumulated a lot of technical debt tend to continue to be organizations which accumulate a lot of technical debt.

Let’s say you take a new student job as a kitchen helper in a restaurant, and on day one, you learn that people there don’t really wash the dishes - they just make them look somehow clean.

Do you walk to your boss and tell him: “Hey boss, I got an idea, we could wash our dishes, what do you think?”

It is different if you have more of a say, as in, you are the chef. You could leverage that good chefs are hard to find. You could point at customer reviews with complaints.

But as an apprentice, I would advise to look for a better kitchen. Especially since tidying up 300 k lines of spaghetti code will take many person-years.

Fix the warnings first. By all experience, later is never.

First specs, then a (perhaps semi-formal) API description, then implementation, then first tests, then fix warnings, then rigorous tests, then fix all bugs before adding more features. It sounds contra-intuitive, but you go faster this way.

My feeling is that might be a lack of choice here. So, just my 0.00002 cents, to supply you with a few more options:

• Just use Debian. It is boring but it will work.
• Or, Tumleweed has been named. But it is not maximally stable. Better, use Tumbleweed in a VM on top of OpenSuSE leap. That way, you have both superb stability and a very current system.
• You could also sell your nvidia card (let’s be honest, it probavly will only bring you grief), and get a AMD radeon which is fully supported by a libre kernel. Then, you can install Guix on it. Then you have a truly reproducible, very lean and organized system.
• If dropping the nvidia card sounds too extreme for you, you can also install Debian, and install Guix as a package manager on top of it. That will work because the Debian kernel supports the hardware. But don’t forget that NVidia is a nuisance, often. Well, you might have luck.
• Let’s say you are short on money and you don’t want a system that consumes too much RAM, since that has gotten expensive, man. So, you could get Debian with XFce as Desktop environment. Or, even leaner, you could get ICeWM.
• Or in case you want a very fast Lisp-based window manager with very fast, manual tiling, try StumpWM, say, on Debian.
• Or, if you want an automatic tiling WM, give i3wm or sway a try. Or GNOME with paperWM extension.
• GNOME would also run on Ubuntu, or on Mint. Actually, it is all Debian under the hood, mostly. Just easier to install.
• Or you want a privacy-focused Distro. Try Trisquel.
• Or, you just want to keep it simple, perhaps. In that case, I’d recommend Debian. Or, perhaps for the start, Debian-derived distro that is easy to install. There are plenty.
• But when you want to have it even simpler, get rid of the nvidia card. This really simplifies things.

You have to imagine Alice, Bob, and Carlos 25 years later, working on production code that was created like this.

XKCD on this: https://m.xkcd.com/2730/

By the way, I am currently working on a 20 year old code base that was in production use all the years and was continuously adapted. At least the people who wrote this were (more or less) knowing what they were doing. I guess I should ask for a pay rise…

Wait, you guys still haven’t tried cocaine?

Using it you can work with much more energy and focus! You don’t get tired either!

The thing is… to test such code, you often need to modify it first.

You see the problem?

You could try the Mikado Method. It is good for disentangling code with a mess of complex interdependencies.

I want that one:

How is the distro called?

Can you explain why? I am from Germany … we don’t have that kind of pickup.

But when Copilot can share it, it was already exposed?!

I learned programming on Apple II and the fast keyboard reaction felt really good. I hate it when keys lag.

50 ms is clearly noticeable. Dan Luu mentions 2ms in the original post.

Try in a terminal

read a; sleep 0.02; echo $a

and vary the number.

Actually, the time resolution for visual sensations is at least 5ms and for sound it is even smaller - a drummer in s band needs to practice a lot to get the right beat.

Do you have a picture?

Yeah I think it is a bit optimized for comfort.

What I love about his approach is that he first thinks about what are his own requirements, before choosing his solution.

Oh, and you should absolutely try Common Lisp. In the 80ies, when I learned programming, Lisp had a reputation of being expensive to get licenses for, extremely resource-hungry and unusable on microcomputers. Today, it is a language that is more powerful than Python and open source implementations like SBCL compile Lisp to native code with roughly about the speed of Java.

Yet another article that depicts the demise of human software development as inevitable, based on the unrealistic speculation that AI generated code will become “just good enough”.

A speculation based on wrong facts does not become truth if it is repeated a thousand times. It just becomes misinformation, based on the strategy that people tend to accept as a given what they are used to hear (also the reason why advertising is so repetitive, it preys on that familarity breeds irrational sympathy.) But no, the millionth picture of Stalin holding a kid does not mean he is a kind kid-loving person, it just means he is violently trying to control your mind.

I also see on lobste.rs a flood of articles that seem to be critical of AI use and at the end mention that the author of course uses GenAI for this or that, as it is claimed. This is the same misinformation strategy, which is depicting ai use in coding as inevitable.

Also be wary of the statements which claim “AI is just a tool” which makes “experienced developers more productive”. That is just another attempt of trying to sell it, from another angle. At the same time it is sold to the C-suite as capable of replacing expensive people, and to juniors as capable of writing boring stuff and boilerplate. Or generating “demo code” which would then become software without any designed architecture. Clearly, ai tries to be everyones darling. What ai really should be good for remains elusive.

BTW advertising and misinformation should be banned from this community. It is not only boring but it tends to drown good content, and as such is harmful.

What do they mean by using the word “confidential” ? Considering the word in computing means something like “technically strongly protected against unwanted access by third parties” ?

Debian is also one of the most secure distributions in terms of user control and security against vulnerabilities, since it is the same OS that runs most of the servers in the world - and therefore gets very quick and reliable security updates.