Attempting solidarity pragmatically.

Also @cakeistheanswer@lemmy.world @cakeisthenanswer@lemmy.fmhy.ml

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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Cisco has been clueless for awhile. The people who want speed don’t trust them to do basic network stacks, they want to do something more complicated?

    The HFT industry noticed Cisco was messing with routing stacks, and you can essentially look to the entire market cap of Arista as a direct result. Specifically people wanting to avoid the headaches of the nexus line (EOS is nice!).

    They are the victims of their own success to the point they long ago cannibalized actual product innovation. A lot of the industry still wants their certs, but nobody I know who values speed (local stripped back switches) or stability/availability (AWS and minimal office equipment) would chose them for much. A lot of the purchases are from big players with long contracts, the “Nobody got fired for IBM” of network equipment.

    This just screams moving deck chairs on the Titanic.




  • This is my one of my favorites for exactly this reason. Agreed, other than the triumph of what little humanity Ted has at the end there’s not much in the story.

    But despite being a famous asshole it always seemed Ellison loved this story, right down to actually re writing a happy end to the “I have no mouth…” adventure game in the early 90s.

    Speculation on my part, but I always thought for a famous pessimist he thought his warning might make a difference, which is its own kind of hopeful.



  • Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

    I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

    Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

    Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

    The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

    Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

    You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.






  • Tldr and tealdeer in the arch repo are both helpful, but Ill do you one better since someone already beat me to it. I found fish shell’s tab completion with either tool to be immensely helpful if you’re not trying to stay stock standard. But if you’re working on a lot of remote machines you don’t own stick with bash/zsh.

    There’s some easy to find fuzzy search and linting for for history plugins that mean if you found it once you can do it again in whichever shell.

    Its mostly familiarity, but i don’t think I could function without fzf.


  • I’ve kind of come and gone full circle on this one. It fits in the same space as the terminal, way more useful when you know what you want.

    Some config files are a lot easier to get the behavior I want, but editing a poorly formatted (or in some some cases pointlessly complicated) config is a quick nope out.

    Too many options to learn a new language.




  • I’m a bigger defender than most of Consider Phlebas than most, but it’s a product of age.

    If you grew up with Star Trek and Neuromancer, the first book kind of splits those wickets on utopia/dystopia neatly in a way I don’t think holds up as well afterwards.

    Player of games is a much neater intro, but the ambiguity of the first book felt intentional, and it’s always interesting to me to see peoples reactions to that called shot.

    I must have read that description of ‘damage’ a dozen times.




  • I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

    On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

    If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

    If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.