planish

Well how do you think it should work then?

I think the article is probably right. A software developer should be able to make software to do whatever needs doing. Maybe not good at any given thing, but able to do it. Eventually. Nobody wants a software developer who isn't themselves Turing-complete.

Will they always do it the Right Way if they spent 10 years learning compiler design and you want them to program an ESP32? Of course not. But if you hired a compiler engineer who cannot teach themself to solve a user's ESP32-shaped problem, then you have hired a compiler engineer who can be completely incapacitated by a sufficiently leaky abstraction.

Sooner or later when doing any one thing in software development, you are going to run into a problem that requires you to dig into something else that you don't actually know how to do. The abstraction leaks and suddenly how file handles work or the fact that an ESP32 needs to go to sleep sometimes is now impinging on your compiler design problem and the users are not able to do the things because of it. If you have an expert on whatever the thing is, sure, you call them in and they help you out. But if not, you learn enough to make yourself useful and you hit the problem with research and analytical thinking until it stops bothering the users.

Hello I am writing the firmware for MotherBoard 2021, a definitely completely different product than MotherBoard 2020, I am going to ship in in 2 weeks for Christmas, and I am going to write an image decoder on top of bare metal, and it is "not" going to let you hack the pants off the computer.

Said no one ever.

But if "You can fork it and do whatever, even remove the “please donate” thing, but if you distribute any spy/malware versions they have legal avenues to force it to get taken down", that sounds like open source to me? You can indeed modify and redistribute it in almost any way you would like!

What? I can't hear you.

Hacker News has an RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don't really surface that anymore I guess?

They also have like different filtered feeds for things with like a certain number of votes or something, which I have seen people using.

Sounds more like open source but not free software?

We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.

The death of the device and the return of the system.

A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.

A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.

A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.

It's really useful for distributing podcasts.

You could also use it to follow things, if you want to follow them. People often cross-post to social platforms when they publish a new thing, but if you don't want to try and agree on a platform (or on ActivityPub) with everything you want to follow, you can use RSS.

And it doesn't cause other problems like outsmarting the brain systems that are supposed to be attaching your intelligence to the interests of your body? Or the people inconveniently stopping you from snorting cocaine constantly until you die? And there's no level of intelligence you reach where you note that higher levels are unlikely to be any more use to you in achieving your actual goals, versus spending that button-pushing time on other tasks? And all this intelligence is free and doesn't require any energy input to run in your head? And at some level you become intelligent enough to impart these abilities to your descendants or to just never die? And you reach a level of intelligence where you can fight off the CIA before you reach a level of intelligence where you interest the CIA?

People don't generally reason about things like "intelligence" as an abstract value from zero to infinity, because we don't encounter such things very often. What we do encounter is people trying to scam us. If you present someone with something that appears to be a 100% obvious perfect move with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever, they mostly correctly conclude that they just aren't smart enough to understand the catch.

You probably want to run the command as nobody, the special system user who daemons become when they don't want to have root permissions.