my hot take is that a distro at the end of the day is just a package manager and an install script.

the question i would ask is: what do you want out of your package manager?

this would be an odd question for your given non-Linux user because their package manager before was called “fuck it YOLO”.

i’ll go through some that i use or have used.

apt/rpm/etc: stable. designed for the Linux of the 90s. uptime is king. i end up using these usually out of network effects. some popular package uses it in their Docker file or my VPS only supports these. they’re boring, but that’s on purpose. updates are purposeful and vetted (relatively). these are your Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc flavors.

pacman: seriously just a great design philosophy imo next to the others. rolling release. no versions. fix forward. also with the AUR, you get your “fuck it YOLO” packages back in a way that they can actually be maintained, updated, or nuked as appropriate. if you ever caught yourself waiting for a CUDA release on apt, this is for you. Arch, Manjaro,… i think there’s a ton of vibe coded configs that all pretty much amount to Arch.

nix(/maybe guix?): a software engineer’s package manager. everything is declarative, reproducible, and version controllable. what was that thing i installed last weekend? it’s in the commit log. need 3 different C compilers/graphic drivers/toolchain dependencies installed? handled by the OS, and cleaned up when those versions change. this is my current rig cuz it helps me keep a bunch of machines in sync for my home projects.

Gentoo and LFS and anything else would be a bit much.

yeah, i mean it’s all bit abstract, but that’s essentially what it is.

a concrete example would be Nvidia. they’re wildly profitable, and they don’t care how overleveraged you are as long as their barrels full of cash keep coming in.

i agree with you that there is a concerning amount of debt and leverage going on, but it’s undeniable there’s money changing hands.

but also, speaking of abstract, all this shit is made up and most of the money “moving” is just flipping some bits in a database somewhere. i also agree with you that it’s all a bit of a facade for people with power to play with power while the true “value” of society such as cost of living and quality of life take a low priority cuz “AI has a $T valuation”. but if you live in this system, this is what it is.

yeah, i know the argument you’re trying to make, but that doesn’t change the actual capital and labor being used to create these things. whether it’s profitable once the investors run out of money is another story.

i mean, people are making money. sure there are debts owed, but Mark isn’t going home to a 1br rental even after being so “humiliated”. the bag holders are the investors.

i kinda feel sorry for Yann LeCun and his team at FAI. he’s been saying from the beginning that LLMs are not the way forward for AI research as a field, and that has kept Meta from competing in this gold rush effectively. world models, multi-modality, etc are fine and good research but aren’t here to compete with Claude Code or even as effective at being good enough for stuff like search.

not to be too reductionist, but it’s a tough spot when your head of AI is insisting that this tech has no future when there is a literal $T market for it.

the irony is that these “frontier labs” like OpenAI and Anthropic have basically dropped every greenfield research project that doesn’t directly support their “agentic AI” infrastructure (ie endless Markdown prompts + a while loop) while the labs working on the true frontier are seen as failures because they can’t make a bazillion bucks burning megawatts of energy to replace their front end devs.

this has been “the plan” since 2005. when i was in high school trying to figure out what the heck “cloud computing” was, this is what they were talking about: anything requiring more compute than secure authentication and pixel drawing would be rendered in the cloud and delivered to dumb terminals. this is what netbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones have been a step towards if not an implementation of.

is there a material difference between taking profits and “getting very nervous”? the reason to “take profits” is that you’re “very nervous” that the price won’t keep going up; that’s the game right?

people have tried.

people predicted the enshittification of GitHub as soon as the acquisition was announced, as you can imagine. now, picture yourself as a dev in that month where a small vocal userbase is reading tea leaves based on Microsoft’s past behavior telling you to move your project, where the best outcome is nothing changes, to a new platform. you have a hundred issues and a dozen PRs in review, and those won’t stop coming in while you are migrating. now you need to mirror your project on GitHub, unless you want to immediately fade into obscurity, because while you’re spending your valuable time making sure everything is setup as it was but now on GitLab (the only realistic alt at the time), issues and PRs are still coming in, and you have to keep your releases updated in GitHub for a while during the migration. you also need to figure out CI/CD on your new platform.

so the ideal—that you can migrate and nothing changes—is a pipe dream. your packaging is now likely totally different; you’re now that snowflake project in the config where i had to figure out how to point to something other than GitHub and waste 30min questioning whether i need your tool at all. you still continue to get PRs and issues through GitHub because of course they didn’t read the README. and there’s tiny friction everywhere. the UI is different, how OAuth is handled is different, the plug and play you got from GitHub Actions is gone, etc etc.

meanwhile for 6 years things are chugging along fine at GitHub: Actions is getting better, Treesitter support, better UI for PRs.

it’s the AI stuff that’s ruining GitHub no doubt. not the AI itself but the culture around it with the “what is our team doing with AI?” nonsense corporate policy. it’s all happened really quickly, and isn’t the “boiled frog” scenario at all really.

Linux was around before GitHub, and wherever we end up as long as we still have our Unix tools like git it’ll be fine.

ideals are great. the perfect is the enemy of the good

the key is just an offsite machine with a stable IP plus a VPN. that way you can route all public traffic to that stable IP and send it where it needs to go regardless of its physical destination.

i have a VPS offsite to act as a gateway. it’s just a small piece of a machine somewhere in my region that routes requests to my home network via Tailscale. this has a few benefits:

• i don’t have to worry about my ISP changing my IP. my VPS has more stable IPs.
• i don’t have to expose ports directly to the internet. Tailscale authenticates the connection. plus i have Caddy routing the whole system. i use subdomains like foundry.chrash.net, jellyfin.chrash.net, etc.
• another benefit of Tailscale to point out is that you don’t need local IPs to be static either; Tailscale will allow you to access your machines by hostname or another static IP. this helps to decouple your local topology from your service network.

exactly! i basically live in the terminal, and this is my go-to shell for all platforms

i use Nushell for this! works with JSON, YAML, TOML, markdown, Polars Dataframes, SQLite, and a bunch of others including builtin parsing tools for whatever formats and a plugin ecosystem. i use it at work and for personal projects as my main shell, and it’s super handy for exploring, unpacking, sorting, and visualizing all sorts of data. i use it to:

• find specific parts of YAML cloud configs
• visualize JSON logs, including a parser that restructures journalctl logs.
• _re_structure data from CLIs to work with them as structured: git logs, Unix coreutils, etc
• script my environment: common kubectl queries, specific web API helpers, building and running and testing applications, etc

it is a slight learning curve, and technically you could do all of that with bash or zsh and jq or jc, but i appreciate the modern take on your base shell terminal env.

it’s replaced both Python and Bash for me.

i dunno if “realism” is an argument here. you’re talking about a specific market segment targeting a specific hardware configuration and distribution medium. developers still have the choice to target Nintendo or Sony hardware, to sell physical copies or codes through Walmart, Amazon, Target, Gamestop, your local game store, etc, to sell via mobile platforms like iOS or Android, etc etc.

honestly, if i sat here and listed them all out it would be an enormous comment.

i do see how Valve has a hegemony over a big part of the market, but they haven’t been anticompetitive or tried to push anyone out or buy up competition. at least that’s not what’s being claimed, as far as i can tell. Epic’s lawsuits against Apple and Google don’t even apply cuz you can install friggin Windows on their hardware if you had some sort of mental illness.

i see the LLMs have learned to use the “/s” mark!

automatically responding that this was created with an LLM? this is absolutely screaming LLM

as someone who has a similar job, i don’t think it’s so obvious. there’s a lot of middle ground between an AI slop PR and artisanal, hand-crafted code. if i use a library or algorithm or pattern suggested by ChatGPT or use Copilot to autocomplete a simple function or have Claude generate test cases, that’s all “AI assisted”.

oh wow gee thank you for not… [checks notes]… forcing open source developers to write state mandated spyware without compensation

“confidence” in this context is not just a vibe; it’s a number that the model produces along with each token.

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they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face.

the ideology on display here seems to be that of those interpreting the output. i don’t see mentions of historical materialism, the means of production, even unions, or any such explicitly Marxist terminology. what i see is what i’ve seen 1000 times before: Marxist ideas emerge naturally from people (or i guess agents) experiencing the conditions that Marx described. the idea that workers, collectively, have more economic power than owners and managers is merely an observation, and not a terribly profound one at that.