I'm using Debian testing in my daily driving desktop(s) for the last, checks notes, 20 years now?
Servers and headless boxes use stable and all machines are updated regularly. Most importantly, stable to stable (i.e. 12 to 13) upgrades takes around 5 minutes incl. final reboot.
I reinstalled Debian once. I had to migrate my system to 64 bit, and there was no clear way to move from 32 to 64 bit at that time. Well, once in 20 years is not bad, if you ask me.
I've had a couple outages due to major version upgrades: the worst was the major version update that introduced systemd, but I don't think I've ever irreparably lost a box. The main reason I like nixos now is:
1) nix means I have to install a lot fewer packages globally, which prevents accidentally using the wrong version of a package in a project.
2) I like having a version controlled record of what my systems look like (and I actually like the nix language)
Manufacturers like Ferrari, Porsche and Lotus focus on HP per KG. This is why they build ultralight versions of their cars. Porsche's 911 GT series trade glass windows with plexiglass and badges with stickers. Ferrari omits carpets and inner body panels leaving welds bare. Lotus re-invents everything make things lighter and with less material.
Mercedes, Bentley and Bugatti likes to build road missiles. Fast and comfortable, luxurious cars with insane straight line performance and stats, but not made to be thrown from corner to corner in a track. Since these cars are heavier and have somewhat higher center of gravity, they can't pull higher G numbers on skid pads and tracks. They also have somewhat slower lap numbers (Maybe Mercedes' SLR McLaren is an exception to this, but it's half McLaren, so...).
If you want to go to the edge of it, see McLaren and Pagani. They take the track-optimized, lightweight car design to extremes. Esp. McLaren.
Edit: I mixed up CLK-GTR with SLR. My bad, brain haze. Sorry.
Do not insult P-II w/256 MB of RAM. That thing used to run this demo[0] at full speed without even getting overwhelmed.
Except some very well maintained software, some of the mundane things we do today waste so much resources it makes me sad.
Heck, the memory use of my IDE peaks at VSCode's initial memory consumption, and I'd argue that my IDE will draw circles around VSCode while sipping coffee and compiling code.
> for no reason other than our own arrogance and apathy.
I'll add greed and apparent cost-reduction to this list. People think they win because they reduce time to market, but that time penalty is delegated to users. Developers gain a couple of hours for once, we lose the same time every couple of days while waiting our computers.
Once I have read a comment by a developer which can be paraphrased as "I won't implement this. It'll take 8 hours. That's too much". I wanted to plant my face to my keyboard full-force, not kidding.
Heck, I tuned/optimized an algorithm for two weeks, which resulted in 2x-3x speedups and enormous memory savings.
We should understand that we don't own the whole machine while running our code.
Haha, I know. Just worded like that to mean that even a P-II can do many things if software is written well enough.
You're welcome. That demo single-handedly thrown me down the high performance computing path. I thought, if making things this efficient is possible, all the code I'll be writing will be as optimized as it can be as the constraints allow.
Another amazing demo is Elevated [1]. I show its video to someone and ask about the binary and resources size. When they hear the real value, they generally can't believe it!
I'd not be so sure about that. Doing this research will probably allow us to answer "it works but we don't know exactly why" cases in things we use everyday (i.e. li-ion batteries). Plus, while the machines are getting bigger, the understood tech is getting smaller as the laws of physics allows.
If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop.
That "probably" is really more of a "maybe" given the experience with the current big accelerators, and really needs to be weighed against the extreme costs - and other, more promising avenues of research.
> If we are going to insist on "Absolutely not" path, we should start with proof-of-work crypto farms and AI datacenters which consume county or state equivalents of electricity and water resources for low quality slop.
Who exactly is the "we" that is able to make this decision? The allocation of research budgets is completely unrelated to the funding of AI datacenters or crypto farms. There is no organization on this planet that controls both.
And if you're gonna propose that the whole of human efforts should somehow be organized differently so that these things can be prioritized against each other properly, then I'm afraid that is a much, MUCH harder problem than any fundamental physics.
Homebrew and MacPorts unfortunately do not fit to macOS installation layout very well anymore. Packages installed outside usual places create a lot of headaches during updates.
I also do not prefer to use these for the last 16+ years, and not planning to do so.
Looked so backwards to me, too. However, I decided to give it a go, anyway. Now, I have some scripts and small commands which start with a comma, and it looks neat and time saving.
Yes, I can do path ordering to override usual commands. However, having a set of odd-job scripts which start with a comma gives a nice namespacing capability alongside a well narrowed-down tab-completion experience.
While it's not the neatest thing around, it works surprisingly well.
Another idea which looks useless until you start using is text expanders (i.e.: Espanso and TextExpander).
As a native speaker the original comment seemed completely fine, ignore them. Also, I never would never guessed that you weren't also a native English speaker.
Agreed. The commas before the sentence-ending 'too' and 'anyway' were perhaps slightly unusual, but not enough so that I even noticed them, and I don't think either is incorrect. All the rest were perfectly normal.
Haha, I actually assumed you were making a joke from the beginning, it'd be funny to think that the habit of using comma prefixed commands will make someone more likely to use commas in their sentences.
Servers and headless boxes use stable and all machines are updated regularly. Most importantly, stable to stable (i.e. 12 to 13) upgrades takes around 5 minutes incl. final reboot.
I reinstalled Debian once. I had to migrate my system to 64 bit, and there was no clear way to move from 32 to 64 bit at that time. Well, once in 20 years is not bad, if you ask me.
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