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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Because using a gui is easier for novices

    To the extent that is true, then the novice doesn’t end up asking for help. The goal is that the capability is discoverable. Or if it’s really a bit harder, there are hopefully tutorial youtube videos that cover the use case.

    But when a user asks for specific help on a task they couldn’t figure out for themselves, or are asking for help with a ‘something went wrong’ dialog box, well helping with CLI is much more feasible than the involved mess of trying to basically make video tutorials ad-hoc, or screen share, or try to help them find the obscure log file an application wrote somewhere with the real error.


  • It’s relevant. From about 1995 to 2006, Microsoft was pretty much hard set on ‘cli is dumb, do nothing cli wise, cmd is a concession, but a crappy one’. As an artifact of that, you got regedit, a godawful ‘GUI’ that took a messy datastore model and just kept it ugly, in a way that would have been pretty much better as a CLI interface.

    Microsoft started getting the idea again, but in true Microsoft fashion, had to reinvent the wheel and did PowerShell to try to create a CLI ecosystem from scratch rather than trying to build anything vaguely familiar. To their credit, for first party stuff they did a fine job enabling it, though third party applications remain a mess to this day. It does highlight that even Microsoft figured out that CLI actually does make sense a lot of the time.


  • If it’s “oh, you can open up [application X] and it’s easy to figure it out, and there’s videos out there to cover your use case”, then ok.

    But if it’s to help a user with a very specific task and they want their hand held, well from a GUI perspective I’m either making a bunch of screenshots or maybe even a tutorial video or a screen share session… Or I shoot them a relatively short CLI command that does it and move on to other things.

    It is usually much shorter to tell someone the CLI to do something than it is to try to train them on a GUI for the same thing. If it’s well-trodden subject matter, well they probably already found a youtube tutorial and didn’t even have to ask.


  • Exception for helping someone who sshed into something and doesn’t understand what they are doing.

    It happens that someone without knowledge has no idea how to interactively edit a file on a system they can only ssh into. ‘run nano’ is easier than ‘ok, now I’ll show you how to WinSCP the file down edit it, and put it back, but make sure you don’t screw up the CRLF or permissions in the process…’



  • Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today

    This is hilarious, because every single facility of note, and especially datacenters has local, grid independent generators. Datacenters in particular have been noteworthy for pushing for ‘off-grid’ power plants to give them more control over their power and costs. In the more reachable territory, residential solar promises value by mitigating your exposure to eletrical rate changes, and in some cases combined with home energy storage, people are going off-grid. A lot of commercial interests also pad out their facilities with solar panels, because it is cheaper than sourcing entirely from the grid, and this was before the recent rate hikes inflicted by datacenter buildouts.

    His analogy is bogus because he implies off-grid energy generation is a thing of the past while AWS itself is a huge driver of off-grid energy generation in a world where off-grid energy generation is actually increasing.


  • You can’t to the same degree. If you let the user use a typical desktop environment like gnome or plasma., then they can set their wallpaper.

    Now if you want to make a kiosk thing, so much easier in Linux. But if you want to have a general purpose desktop experience but restrict stupid stuff like wallpaper, windows has got you.

    I would rather use and administer Linux systems at scale any day, but if you hated your users and wanted to lock personalization, then Windows has done the work to enable that.


  • Issue is that there’s one thing that organizations love about Windows that isn’t really catered to in any Linux distribution: Nannying the users and not letting them do their own things with their own systems.

    For example, no Linux distribution out there will help you prevent the end-users from changing their own desktop wallpaper, or what to show when the user locks their screen. When my company hands out laptops, the users are blocked from changing out the ugly propaganda slides they make our systems display. Just the tip of the iceburg for how much the enduser can be screwed with by a microsoft admin that just isn’t possible in any significant Linux desktop environment.

    So user may love Linux, but their employer still wants to make sure they are running Windows.








  • Note that 5th grade papers are always just horrible to read. This is why I don’t like LLM output, because it sounds just like 5th grade papers. Not a soul wants to read middle school papers.

    So I think broadly speaking the LLMs can generate middle school papers generally fine, at least they fit in.


  • Think it depends. Like a lot of other cancer stuff, there’s variability. Most of the common prostate cancer is that easy and in fact they don’t even treat it. My wife’s grandfather was told they would basically do nothing until it started getting bad., and he died of unrelated heart failure years later without his cancer progressing.

    Sounds like his was not so livable. Also unclear if he tried ivermectin instead of traditional treatment, or as an additional hail Mary. I’ve known people who had cancer and they tried anything and everything alongside their treatment, in case anything would help. I also knew one guy that thought just vitamin c would cure his cancer and declined any other treatment, and got killed by what may have been a supremely treatable cancer.


  • I’ve read mixed accounts of that.

    Yes, he did try that stuff, but I’ve read some claims that he did it alongside the treatments the doctors gave him.

    Like it was kind of pointless, but also kind of harmless because he didn’t let it get in the way of real medicine.

    At least when it came to cancer, I don’t think anyone cited him being a denier about more effective treatments, just he was in the “I’ll try anything” mode of having a terminal illness.

    Of course he had a lot of other problematic things as a die hard maga, including antivax and whining how white men have it so bad and saying Trump and friends lying was actually good because the lies were “directionally true”, but maybe just not overly bad stuff about the cancer.

    The cancer prodded him to actually break with trump on the specific matter of being mean to Biden over the same cancer Adams had.