Well, I admit I’m being a little facetious.

But that fact that “normie” users have zero tolerance for friction is a real problem. If you can’t do anything that’s not spoonfed to you, then you are prey for corporate abuse. The only people who really care about minimizing friction are the people trying to exploit “normies” for profit. Most open-source software is built to solve problems that are more important than “how can we exploit the general population a little more effectively?”

I don’t think the solution here is for every single open-source project to devote a large percentage of their time and resources to eliminating friction. That would be a huge drain on teams that have more important things to do.

Rather, the solution is for users to be willing to spend a few seconds here and there to understand what they’re doing and what their options are.

less friction is better

I strongly but respectfully disagree.

Who are you callin’ fancy, cowboy?!

I’m offended!

:P

Generative AI or not

It must be. It looks very morged.

I could believe an AI made the template and the text was pasted in. That would explain the misaligned purple underline.

Right. You can still put that through a linter; the linter just wouldn’t be concerned with human-readability.

In any case, my editor would not hardcode my display preferences, so if I open and save a document, nothing changes except what I actually changed.

I’ll go a step further: formatting for human-readability is the job of the reader, not the writer. Hardcoded line breaks, spacing, etc. are never going to be a good solution because the idea is wrong from the start. This is a display issue, not a logic issue. It needs to be solved at the display end.

Use a syntax-aware editor that formats code the way you like it. Save it any goddamn way that is syntactically valid. Anyone else who opens it will see it any way the like in their own syntax-aware editor.

“But my editor doesn’t do logical formatting!” Yes, because the entire world has been insane for several decades, and shitty editors are normalized. If the world had realized this 30 years ago, there wouldn’t be a code editor in existence today that didn’t do this properly. Demand better and better will be normalized.

It’s a matter of degrees, and of use case.

If your use case demands 100% accuracy, that’s a dead end.

If you can’t validate the output, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

I keep going back to the same rule of thumb: if you can’t do it without AI, you can’t do it, period. It’s a time saver, not a magic wand.

If you’re not an idiot, and you (nevertheless) use LLMs, they probably meet most of those criteria.

I don’t like how the author buys into anthropomorphization. LLMs do not act on their own.

He’s right that tools don’t “go rogue”. Neither do LLMs. That’s just a lie to try to avoid accountability. ChatGPT didn’t hack the Australian government; PEOPLE did, and those people belong in prison.

I never understood the hate for semicolons, until I read Moby Dick.

Let’s grab our popcorn and watch Adobe fight AI companies on this. Because if this isn’t legal, then what does that say for everything else generated by AI?

I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.

Well… if it was a 4-day vibe-coding project, then that’s not a lot of effort, and I don’t think GIMP wants to deal with that scale of AI contributions anyway.

I’ve heard of similar techniques using masks on the back of your head to discourage tiger attacks in villages close to wild tiger populations.

As I recall, it gets less effective over time because tigers are not stupid, just risk-averse. They learn with repeated exposure.

I’m going from memory. I’ll try to dig up sources when I have time.

Edit: Found it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarbans#Precautions

Fishermen and bushmen originally created masks made to look like faces to wear on the back of their heads because tigers always attack from behind. This worked for a short time, but the tigers quickly caught on to the ruse, and the attacks reportedly continued. One local honey gatherer, Surendra Jana, 57, summarised the general feeling of the tigers adapting to their efforts: “Before we could understand the way they attacked…We don’t feel safe any more, knowing our brothers have been attacked in spite of the tricks we use.”

some combination of sort, wc, cut and grep

Word of warning: none of these tools are CSV-aware. You can hack together something that will work for basic files, but once you get something with quotations or escapes to include commas within the text of a field, you will really want a true CSV parser.

sqlite3 can import and export CSV files directly.

Python’s csv module is great.

VisiData is a cool CLI spreadsheet/csv/database viewer.

Docker.

Only half-joking.

Oh, I hope it didn’t sound like I was arguing with you. Your post was totally reasonable. I’m just venting at the subject and the state of the world. :)

I really hate the “em-dash = AI” myth. I’ve probably been typing em-dashes since before half of y’all were born. I am not a cat bot. I will not cede the em-dash to AI!

As with most ills of the tech world, I blame Microsoft for this. Windows makes it unreasonably difficult to type em-dashes (and most non-ASCII characters, really), which is probably why most people don’t. It’s always been easy enough on Macs going back to the 80s — option-shift-dash. It’s easy on iOS and Android too. Linux is a mixed bag, I guess — I’ve edited my keyboard settings on Linux and I forget the defaults on different distros/DEs.

At least AI doesn’t use parentheses as much as I do. I’ve still got that going for me.

Closed source.

I’ll pass.

That’s correct. Wine, which is what Proton is based on, is not a VM or emulator. It is a re-implementation of key windows APIs so Windows EXEs can run. Assuming you’re on a x64 PC, the code is executing natively.