[–] 11 points 7 months ago (4 children)

This rings 100% true for me in regards to anarchism, communism, capitalism, socialism, feudalism... Pretty much any organisational structure that mankind has or will ever conceive.

People are difficult, irrational and unpredictable. Put a whole bunch of people together on a plot of land, multiply that 1 billion times over and you get the unfathomable clusterfuck that is modern civilization. Not even being defeatist about it, just pointing out the factual reality that the perfect society does not and will never exist, far from it. I am aware I'm rambling on and pointing out the obvious here.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    IT guy here. The CLI is not something I'd expect the average computer user to use at all. However, for power users and professionals it's a force multiplier at least, and a prerequisite often.

    There are several reasons for this. Firstly, IT system and server administration, in the cloud or your own hardware, is often done via the CLI. This is because it's not that common or convenient to hook up every server in a rack to a monitor to click on stuff. But dialling into it remotely via SSH or even a serial port to perform bootstrapping procedures, troubleshooting and even routine management tasks sometimes, is very quick , easy and reliable.

    The other main reason is automation. If I buy 10 servers to power my website, they all need installing and configuring a whole bunch of software, e.g. an Apache web server, DNS, SQL, Active Directory, AV, firewall, networking, and a host of other services. Now imagine doing all of that by hand. You don't even need to be a professional sysadmin installing server racks for a living for this to be important. Even if you run a couple desktop/servers/Raspberry Pi/NAS at home, they'll need updating, upgrading or replacing every once in a while. Having to click your way through everything every time you need to (re)configure them gets old very quickly.

    GUIs are extremely poor at providing a consistent, predictable, automatable way to do things. They force you to do mostly everything manually and be present to supervise the whole thing. With the CLI you can script out pretty much any task and let it run in the background while you go do other things. I really don't see CLIs going anywhere anytime soon. I'd say it's actually the opposite. PowerShell was Microsoft's way of acknowledging this very fact years ago. The primitive Windows Batch scripting language wasn't cutting it for anyone, especially Windows Server users who had to painstakingly configure every Win Server install they did manually through a GUI wizard.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I installed Zorin OS on two family laptops today. Hope it works out. They also run Ubuntu Cinnamon on another one and I was amazed to see a crusty 2005 laptop I'd last booted to install Debian on in 2018 start up for the first time in 7 years just fine. The thing just bloody worked, no drama.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I mean sure, OP's title is somewhat clickbaity but it's kind of true though. YouTube have broken compatibility with all existing unofficial clients. It's good that yt-dlp are managing to work around it. I expect many other clients will follow suit but some of them may be unable to install additional dependencies and remain broken.

    Ultimately, what is the last straw that will break the camel's back? Every client/consumer will have their breaking point.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I tried GPT-5 to write some code the other day and was quite unimpressed with how lazy it is. For every single thing, it needed nudging. I'm going back to Sonnet and Gemini. And even so, you're right. As it stands, LLMs are useful at refactoring and writing boilerplate and repetitive code, which does save time. But they're definitely shit at actually solving non-trivial problems in code and designing and planning implementation at a high level.

    They're basically a better IntelliSense and automated refactoring tool, but I wouldn't trust them with proper software engineering tasks. All this vibe coding and especially agentic development bullshit people (mainly uneducated users and the AI vendors themselves) are shilling these days, I'm going nowhere near around.

    I work in a professional software development team in a business that is pushing the AI coding stuff really hard. So many of my coworkers use agentic development tools routinely now to do most (if not all) of their work for them. And guess what, every other PR that goes in, random features that had been built and working are removed entirely, so then we have to do extra work to literally build things again that had been ripped out by one of these AI agents. smh

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