Yeah, but ddevault is well-known for being abrasive and disagreeable when people don't do all the things that he wants to do.

EDIT: I'm not excusing this behavior at all. I find it detestable. I'm just pointing out that ddevault is always like this.

Why don't you install it in a VM and try it instead of embracing biased presuppositions that may or may not be correct?

Also, I disagree that it has 0 improvements. For example:

1. Defaulting to the Windows key instead of Control for cut, copy, and paste out of the box is a nice touch that brings keybinding consistency across the terminal and other apps and makes transitioning over to Linux easier for Mac users.

2. Having Hyprland pre-configured as nicely as Omarchy is something few other distributions do, and none do as well.

3. I've used the AI integration to find and fix a segfault issue in one of the apps I regularly use, as well as fixing a LUKS issue on my laptop that all Arch-based distros exhibit. It took a couple of minutes and saved me hours of debugging. Very nice!

Yes, I could set all this up myself, and I have, but isn't the point of creating and using different Linux distributions to have things work the way you want them to, without all the hassle of doing it yourself?

I switch distributions all the time just to see what's going on in the Linux world. I've used Omarchy for about six months now and like it as much as any other Linux distribution (especially the 4.x release). I haven't found it or its community disrespectful at all. DHH is just enthusiastic about his latest interests. In my opinion, that enthusiasm has made him successful.

I'm a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and programming for a living, and I used to publish technical articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics—complete with em dashes—long before AI was a thing.

When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused mathematicians of churning out "calculator slop." A calculator is just a tool to make the complex work of mathematics easier. I now view AI as a calculator for writing, among other things. If the idea is good and the information is sound, I don't let the occasional awkward phrasing bother me. The truth is, most people can't write very well anyway, so if AI helps them communicate better—even if it is obviously generated by AI— more power to them.

My points of disagreement are

- At least to me, AI writing (especially from Claude) is actively painful to read. It's worse than the average person who has flawed English (or just sucks at writing) because of how verbose and stylistically repetitive it is.

- AI writing is a strong probabilistic signal that what I'm reading is going to be crap in terms of the actual ideas and content too, even if it isn't the case 100% of the time. I just don't want to waste my time on that kind of thing.

When I use it for writing I usually have an idea or thesis to explore already. I typically write it out stream of consciousness. The core idea is mine.

I'm not using LLMs to think for me, instead just edit the writing so it has proper grammar and the run ons are reduced.

Even better for something that has data. You can pull PDFs with encoded tables and extract the data into consistent units to compare. You can have it write code to do it and cross check the outputs. You can do that in a minute. Would take hours without an LLM.

There's a bit of a difference to me between a calculator and writing.. Creativity. Words aren't just a vessel for ideas. If there were different calculation structures etc and space for people to develop their own styles and approaches to calculate things, then sure.

A person's writing style is developed through what they read. And if human's writing style becomes more homogeneous through AI then that's sort of a shame.

People that don't communicate well can't fix that with AI. Turning one line of confusing thoughts into a 30 lines text make it worse, not better.

Somebody at $formerwork wrote a "skill" that takes a poorly/briefly specified Jira ticket, and "fleshes it out", purportedly so that when an agent picks up the ticket it has more context.

Really at that point, with head in hands, rather than try to explain the foolishness, I decided I was better out.

"Zoom and enhance" used to be a joke/meme, apparently it's now "engineering".

And mathematicians who don't understand mathematical theory can't use calculators to write proofs.

Focus on the content and the idea; not how it was written.

One line of idea spread into 30 is the worse way to convene an idea. Only people terrible at writing think using AI for prose is good. Most of the times, they also hate reading it, but love asking people to read their AI slop.

Calculating is not math. Calculators make mathematicians better mathematicians by allowing them to spend their time on actual mathematics.

Writing is thinking. LLM writing makes authors worsr authors and even dumber people overall.

Also a calculator gives the same answer as a human (except for human errors where the calculator isa strict improvement). LLMs absolutely do not give the same output as humans.

Isn’t that expected, though? If 100 of us were to write a five page essay on the chaffing mechanics of an Underoos wedgie, the likelihood that any of them are the same is pretty small, isn’t it?

They don't just give different implementations of the same categorical output, but categorically different output. LLMs do not write like humans.

Hello friend, do we anything subjective from a calculator?

[edit]:

Someone already pointed this out.

Except calculators provide verifiably good results. AI slop sucks up and wastes everyone's time with nothing verifiably worthwhile.

Vitamin D is a lifesaver for me. I'm severely deficient, and if I don't take about 10,000 IU a day, I seem to get colds every five minutes.

Have you tried going outside? Spend 15 minutes in the sun every day. It's not really that hard.

Yes. Basic emacs keybindings work pretty much everywhere in macOS. I have run into a couple of apps that don’t behave correctly, but 99% of the time they work.

And you've tested this in a textarea in Chrome or in vscode?

I have been using VSCode for teaching the last few years, and routinely use a VSCode without plugins for that purpose, and Emacs keybindings work fine in its text area (the code editor itself). If it doesn’t work for you, then apparently something is broken on your computer. Not all keybindings work but the ones listed under Text Editing here certainly works for everyone else: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650

I am typing this in a textarea in Chrome, and the basic Emacs navigation commands all work: C-a, C-b, C-e, C-f, C-n and C-p. (The M- equivalents don't, though. You just get some special chars: å, ∫, ´, ƒ, ñ (dead char for the accent), π.)

Chrome Version 149.0.7827.155 (Official Build) (arm64)

Very similar in Visual Studio Code.

(I started using macOS in 2010, I think, and the Emacs-style shortcuts have felt pretty well supported the whole time. I can't promise that applies to Chrome as well though, as I'm not a regular user.)

Yes. They work fine in Chrome. Mellel is the only app I can think of where they don’t work.

I was going to trade in an old truck and buy my daughter a Tiguan this weekend. I guess I’ll rethink that.

Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.

Conversely: the self-help nonfiction book existed because it was the only practical way to monetize "good advice" or "good ideas" at scale. Now you can do a podcast or a youtube series and try to make money from advertising/affiliates/etc, but for a very long time, "buy my book" was the only game in town

The article gives anecdotal evidence that combining personal stories with advice in a book is more effective than delivering distilled information.

The author even mentions this. Why watch a 20-minute video when you can just scrub to the 40 seconds you need?

A lot of self-help books fall into this category. But if you go to a publisher and say that you're going to publish a 20-page book, they're going to laugh you out of the room.

I use Karabiner-Elements on macOS, and finding keyd was a godsend on Linux. I cannot deal with standard keyboard mappings and the lack of hold/tap keys.

I made a modal editor, like Vim and Helix, in Rust that has some prose features I wanted, and with a keybinding system I find more logical and consistent.

I've found that if I apply for any company that uses Workday, it's an immediate rejection, so I don't bother with them anymore.

I would not be surprised if their system breaks somewhere between us clicking submit and some storage system. Their HR stuff is terrible.