Person interested in programming, languages, culture, and human flourishing.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • As with all things, there’s a trade off: how much do you value the [convenience/ecosystem/insert other thing that proprietary system offers you] compared to the ongoing cost - monetarily but also in terms of privacy, market manipulation, environmental impact, etc. of supporting and relying on the proprietary system.

    You can’t do your work without connecting to Exchange because Microsoft has leveraged decades of monopolistic gains to make Outlook the default option for any “serious” business, and has invested even further in making inconvenient (or soon impossible) to connect to Exchange from outside their sanctioned walled gardens. Demanding that Linux solve that for you is akin to demanding that the person commuting on bike undo a century of automotive-centric urban expansion in the US so that they don’t interrupt your commute. It’s not their fault they can’t solve the problem and it doesn’t help anyone to get mad at them for doing their best to behave rationally in a system stacked to only serve the 1%’s corporate interests.





  • I switched from Zsh to Nushell almost two years ago and I have never looked back. If you need POSIX compliance, Nushell is a no go. But it sounds like your real problem was just that Zsh was familiar whereas fish was not. Nushell strikes the perfect balance of offering the commands you’re used to but letting everything just make intuitive sense. Plus, its help command is so far above and beyond other shells. I rarely need to open the Nushell docs (even though they’re really good), and I never have to go the community (even though it’s awesome), because I can figure pretty much everything out just from interacting help within the terminal.


  • The major car manufacturers have literally been collaborating for the better part of a century, along with oil companies, to keep Americans dependent on cars. It’s a well-documented fact. Even long before Citizebs United made corporate bribery legal, they’ve been using the state’s power to quell protests, destroy non-car infrastructure, and outlaw use of our streets for anything except cars.


  • I’ve been daily driving for right around a year now. There have been less breaks and difficulties than I expected from pre-1.0 software and it has made my shell experience so delightful!

    I find that when I want to do something simple quickly, nushell enables me to do it with no context switching, little to no friction, and no googling. I can just open/http get my data, pipe it through a really straight forward pipeline that practically writes itself with how clear the commands are, and save it in whatever format is convenient to me. I don’t have to monkey around with Python and packages and virtual environments, and I don’t have to spend 75% of my time googling and debugging insane bashisms. Nushell just works, and the help is so convenient I almost never have to go to the docs.

    My absolute favorite feature is that it’s truly cross-platform. I don’t have to install a compatibility layer like minGW on Windows, I can just make it my default shell and it works great. Then I can use it the exact same way in WSL, macOS, and Linux.

    The reasons to not be interested in nushell imo are:

    1. You’re already comfortable to the point of mastery with bash/zsh/fish, so the ease of use and quality of life improvements from nushell won’t be as valuable to you compared to the cost of switching.
    2. You spend more time in the shell on random servers you don’t want to customize than you do in your own shell. Obviously we are (infinitely?) far away from nushell becoming a default on any platform, so if you aren’t gonna be able to install in the places you would want it most, you’ll just end up infuriated that nothing else is as good as it.

  • I can’t claim full understanding, but what I took away from it was that NVIDIA somehow ended up using GPL-licensed code in their proprietary drivers, possibly in a way that could incriminate the Linux kernel if not handled properly. My best guess (as someone with no kernel programming experience) is that NVIDIA sometimes contributes code directly to the Linux kernel that exists solely to support their proprietary drivers (the shims mentioned in the article). Apparently, these shims were exporting GPL-licensed code for use inside the proprietary drivers, which would be a violation of the GPL (unless NVIDIA made the source code for their proprietary drivers freely available in compliance with the GPL).

    TLDR: (I think?) NVIDIA essentially infected the linux kernel with license violations to support their proprietary drivers, and the linux kernel devs are working to excise the violations and prevent anything like that going forward.