Nix, but I’d only recommend it if you share my same brand of mental illness

Make computers do stuff for what purpose?

I joke to my family that I just name things for a living. When you take away all the incidental stuff like files and pointers and ports, that’s really all it is. “This sequence of events with these properties is called <this>, and when you ask our system what to do about it, it does this other sequence of events with these properties which we call <this other name>.”

It’s kinda like those ancient stone tablets that are the first example of writing, and they’re just like “Ramses owes Jeremiah 5 chickens” or whatever. It’s just how we manage abstract concepts moving around our civilization. Yeah there’s math involved, but every endpoint is a human being in one way or another.

Yeah…

Human mistakes tend to 1) look like mistakes, and 2) are surrounded by lots of hints that the author had trouble with that section of code.

AI mistakes tend to 1) look like regular code, and 2) look just as confident and effort-ful as the rest of the code.

Tech bosses have well and truly lost it.

Consider that:

• Code is primarily to communicate from human-to-human, and only incidentally for computers to execute
• A codebase that is 30+ years old has an absolute shitload of learnings incorporated into it, much of it very subtle
• Languages are, in fact, different. So some things cannot be directly translated with exactly the same semantics, so devs will need to fully understand the intent and resolve ambiguities
• A million lines per month is a lot of text for someone to successfully interpret and translate without losing any subtleties

Why?

The language itself is… fine. It has some bad decisions baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And it has a pretty mature security model, which is a big help for embedded devices.

And given that so many embedded devices these days are talking to cloud services — that are probably running JS, but are at least communicating via JSON — being able to share some cross-platform code or tooling can help things go quicker and/or safer.

Edit: This is probably not a route for teams that are chronically tight on memory and choose to solve that by spending hundreds of dev-hours on optimizing code rather than adding BOM cost. But for teams that could stand to increase BOM cost as long as the savings on dev-hours make up for it… it could be an option.

An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse

Edit: Also, important to note up front… This is a policy problem. Anyone who recommends individual decision-making (voting with your wallet) — or worse, actively blames users for their own abuse — is (probably unintentionally) doing the work of tech bosses for free. Their entire goal is to create platforms that are unavoidable and inescapable. The fact that they’ve done so well at this speaks more to the quality of the regulatory environment than to the scruples of the consumers who suffer their regime. You can’t shop your way out of an oligarchy.

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Why would you expect that?

iPhone’s design is more secure than Android (partly because of OS+hardware integration that just isn’t practical in a multi-vendor space), but they still have plenty of zero-days in their implementation. iPhone 7 is old enough that official security patch support is EOL, though Apple has still shipped some critical fixes past EOL.

Meh. They’re dealing with two orthogonal problems here:

1. There’s a right amount of documentation. It’s not zero, but it’s also not “every thought you’ve ever had”. The more your documentation can be generated or validated automatically, the more you can reasonably sustain.
2. It’s expensive to be wrong. You can deal with that by either doing pre-work in order to reduce the chance you’ll be wrong (which increases the cost of later finding out you were wrong), or sprinting towards a deliverable in order to minimize the cost of being wrong (which increases the chance that deliverable will be wrong).

You’re probably better off looking at each of those problems independently first and deciding where on the spectrum your team would thrive. RFCs might hit the sweet spot for both. But if you don’t ask the deeper question, you might just make things worse.

if you want to, say, stop LLM server if available mem is under 8GB and start it again when it’s over whatever LLM needs (in my case it’s 64GB):

So this is the guy that bought all the RAM.

Yeah, we need to be careful about distinguishing policy objectives from policy language.

“Hold megacorps responsible for harmful algorithms” is a good policy objective.

How we hold them responsible is an open question. Legal recourse is just one option. And it’s an option that risks collateral damage.

But why are they able to profit from harmful products in the first place? Lack of meaningful competition.

It really all comes back to the enshittification thesis. Unless we force these firms to open themselves up to competition, they have no reason to stop abusing their customers.

“We’ll get sued” gives them a reason. “They’ll switch to a competitor’s service” also gives them a reason, and one they’re more likely to respect — if they see it as a real possibility.

It’s pretty apt, honestly. It’s just the next step of the climate-denial and cancer-denial playbooks.

We know that the tech bosses are aware of how harmful their stuff is. We know that they hire experts specifically to make their stuff as addictive as possible. We know they bribe the hell out of politicians to avoid getting regulated. We know they cook their books and launder money like crazy. We know their financial models are predicated on getting everyone to use an ever-increasing dose of their stuff. We know that people suffer horrific conditions to help build their devices and moderate their content cesspools.

It may seem crass to compare tech bosses to narco kingpins. But that’s because their methods are crass. They want to seem sophisticated and unique. But they’re not.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Using an LLM to work with facts is like using JPEG to store x-ray images. Utterly reckless.

Be really obnoxious about the ballot format in the Florida 2000 election until they either fix it or news outlets do a good job educating people about how to correctly vote for Gore

Eh, it’s fine. It has some bad choices baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And JS in 2025 is miles better than JS in 2005.

I wouldn’t choose it for every project, but it’s a reasonable choice in many cases.

And unlike a regular Linux distro, you’ll have zero leftover systemd units or config files floating around in your FHS dirs. (You’ll have the binaries for Gnome sitting in /nix/store until you do a GC, so you can still quickly switch back if you want to.)

I’m always on unstable. Any time I try to stick to stable, I invariably need something-or-other that’s only on unstable.

These guys live in a bubble, huffing each others’ farts