Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce8/19/2023, 12:53 AM

Nire Bryce @NireBryce

Nire Bryce @NireBryce8/19/2023, 12:49 AM

I don't actually care that moving from less or curl or vi as defaults would break scripts

we're stuck in the 90s at best for Linux cli tool defaults in ways that really hamper new users who can't dedicate a hobby to learning the Linux cli until after they've already gotten comfortable in it

I understand how much labor it would take, it def is one of those things that needs a movement behind it, getting to the point where the Linux utility ecosystem isn't stuck on 1990s conceptual updates to 1970s programs for "but i like it that way" reasons.

just have less and other not-actually-discoverable commands exist as optionals, or they're even small enough to just be in some utils package or whatever.

but I'm so tired of any talk of improving the experience ending in "yeah but updating these would break scripts", so we're stuck at the earliest version some high-uptime-on-the-mailing-list person wrote their load bearing config file on.

but as more and more Linux users come from non computer backgrounds, whether it's people joining IT or software dev or security or 3d printing or scientific research or etc, we really should be thinking of this as an actual "digital divide". Not just in terms of access to computers but in terms of access to spare time you can dedicate to a thing that could otherwise get you running and you learn the rest as you go.

#linux #ranting #I simply want linux to be an OS that understands the passage of time instead of being chained to it's loudest people and interests #I understand this is "more of a distro thing" but we cannot actually move on until it's got wide adoption because of the labor some of the rewrites would require to iterate enough to actually get right #I do not wish death on any of them #but the people who hold the strongest opinions here are going to die of old age soon.#and so will the only maintainers of these utilities with full knowledge of their contexts #someone said the previous two tags are ageist #but I'm talking the realities -- we're losing the people who can maintain the entirety of it in their head for a lot of these tools.#and we're going to need to grapple with that.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce8/19/2023, 12:53 AM

relatedly I'm so tired of learning cool new emacs flags that make it much faster, TWO MAJOR VERSIONS AFTER THE FEATURE WAS RELEASED, because it would ruin people's configs if they ported them to a new install. They could simply do the opposite and flag legacy, there's few of them and more of everyone else.

but at least it's understandable there because it's not presented as someone's OS default tools that the OS and everyone else has told them to use

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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

sage @wavebeem8/19/2023, 12:52 AM

i mean, pretty much none of the command names are good anyway? you could keep the existing tools for old scripts and replace them with better named tools that don't feel like trash? or even go the python route and call it vi2 :)

Nire Bryce @NireBryce8/19/2023, 12:55 AM

the issue is not that I could do that, because I'm fine with alias.

it's that people starting to use it are met with a learning cliff.

web search is great but it's no replacement for actually having a humane OS someone can transition off of to "either an ancient dev's idiosyncrasies or a programmer on day 3 of an all-nighter" logic of most of the tools we currently have

sage @wavebeem8/19/2023, 1:27 AM

yeah...

Nire Bryce @NireBryce8/19/2023, 2:11 AM

(but yeah, good idea -- there's already https://github.com/uutils/coreutils, which doesn't fix the naming problem but does mean you can probably have some stub that is a new command with custom flag names...)

The Pnictogen Wing @pnictogen-wing8/19/2023, 1:22 AM

the extreme conservatism of computer culture has...excited my puzzlement, let's say—the disparity between the premise (i.e. "we're on the bleeding edge baby! we're innovation and change personified! nothing is sacred with us!!!") and the reality (i.e. "don't touch that you'll threaten my livelihood") is especially obvious with computer stuff.... ~Chara

legitimate dolphin @rngDolphins8/19/2023, 1:28 AM

...will die of old age soon

Hey, this is not only incorrect, it's agist. I wrote and erased several angry replies, but it's enough to say that I feel hurt by this comment and leave it.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce8/19/2023, 1:46 AM

edit: oh, nm, I guess someone blocking you also removes their comments on your view outside of your notifications that came before the block.

rngdolphin's now-deleted [see edit] comment brought up that the tag about the maintainers dying was ageist, but I want to clarify (as I have in the tags) that I'm not saying I'm hopeful they'll die or anything -- but that the people with the full context of the program in their heads are at the point where we have to consider they will die eventually, and whether after that context is lost, the program can really be maintained in any state that goes with the 'visions of the utility'.

and might as well go into it, since here also is off-the-post in the same way tags are, which is what I was trying to accomplish in the first place w/r/t not clouding the topic.

many of these are still maintained by the people who wrote them 50 years ago, or handed off to apprentices who have been deep in them and are now that age themeslves, but languages have changed enough that it might be worth rethinking how we do succession-of-applications, if only for the fact that once the oldest set of core maintainers die, the people with the strongest opinions outside of them (That is, outside of the people who have maintained it for decades) no longer have someone to check them against. So they're going to change anyway. Rewrite vs try and hold what's there vs people who think the purpose of the tool is whatever their particular use is, is going to be a thing we have to make choices on, regardless of what those choices will be. So it's a good place to be thinking about it now, in the same way we were thinking about what happened if guido van rossum or linus torvalds or some other single point of whole-context was "hit by a bus" until succession stuff was established.

I guess maybe she was reading it in connection with the tags above it, but they're... separate thoughts, which seemed separated enough by having the qualifier there.

I'm so tired of people getting angry at things that I haven't actually said.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce8/19/2023, 1:50 AM

I do wish people would try to actually talk about things to see if they've misread, but alas.

that said I don't think the tag was particularly misreadable as-written in a way I could anticipate, the tag immediately after it was there, I just added the most recent one.

It's already under a 'see all' in whole, so the context is there. But it's sorta infuriating how many people come to my posts and decide they've read the opposite of what I'm saying because they ascribed their own meanings from previous interactions with completely different people.

signal eleven @widr8/19/2023, 8:44 PM

interpreting acknowledgement of the reality of death as hateful is... defying my search for a suitable descriptor.

The one and only @transgendercrt9/15/2023, 4:55 AM

I mean, at least emacs has CUA-mode which maintains similar bindings! Explained a solid 13 chapters into the manual...

To be serious, I don't think that these cli tools will ever die out or be renamed. Legacy and history are powerful factors (for better and for worse) so grep, less, vi, are probably not going to be replaced by search, read, and edit on a wide scale.

I'll be the first to admit this is a patch on top of a bigger issue about elitism in the linux community (RTFM only makes sense when you can actually read the manual after all) but some kind of "sane layer" of aliases in bash or universal help to make things easier would be amazing. Sure you can have a full DE and have it Just Work, but there are problems that require a terminal and maybe making it easier for people who don't often use the terminal to interact with it.

Sorry for the scattershot response, this really struck a chord with me who didn't, and still doesn't, fully understand the cli environment (i never got my head around sed, awk, or find, and i doubt i ever will).

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