kevin

kevin, 7 months ago

Upgrading/tinkering doesn’t void your warranty. Explicitly.

And their customer service is top notch. I thought I bricked my gazelle when I upgraded the memory, but their customer service walked me through how to fix it - didn’t even bat an eye.

kevin, 7 months ago

I did not know that - my point is that system76 is not at all sketchy about it. They actively encourage tinkering, make it clear that you won’t void your warranty, and have extensive technical documentation to explain how to do upgrades etc

kevin, 7 months ago

Yes. The only things I use regularly that aren’t aliased to or replaced by a rust-built tool are mkdir, ln, and rsync.

• cd: zoxide
• ls: eza
• cat: bat
• grep: ripgrep
• find: fd
• sed: sd
• du: dust
• top/htop: btm
• vi: helix
• tmux: zellij (or wezterm mux)
• diff: delta
• ps: procs

Probably some others I’m forgetting

kevin, 7 months ago

they either don’t improve upon or add functionality that’s not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.

The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don’t lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn’t have them, I’m a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.

The principle exception to this is actually fd - I now find find (har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that’s because fd is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.

kevin, 7 months ago

What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don’t mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like alias ls=“eza” is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I’m on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.

Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I’m forced to use the basic ones, I’m actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn’t make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?

I mean, for helix/vi it’s even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I’m going to be crippled anyway, so…

kevin, 7 months ago

I don’t have any particular allegiance to rust, though once it’s set up, being able to install through cargo rather than being to figure out whatever package manager or build system is nice, especially on various HPC environments where I don’t have sudo.

Btop does look cool though

kevin, 7 months ago

You are of course welcome to your opinion. Use whatever tools bring you joy. But I’m a huge fan of helix, and think zellij is great (though I prefer wezterm’s mux server when I can use it).

kevin, 8 months ago

Wow, reading that left me quite confused until I realized that it’s elder scrolls and not Buddhism en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(time)

Your point stands regardless 😅

kevin, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (tldr.sh). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.

kevin, 8 months ago

Oops, thanks for the heads up! No idea where that came from

kevin, 8 months ago

“May” is doing a lot of work here. This is a low-level regulatory element of a systemic protein. It’s a neat result - this kind of biochemical investigation is hard and worthwhile - but it’s miles from any kind of therapeutic AFAICT

kevin, 8 months ago

I can understand why it seems the way. But the people doing academic research by and large could make a lot more money working less hard at some company, but choose instead to try to advance human knowledge.

The incentives are just terrible. When I was a PhD student, I railed against this system, but when it came time to publish, I was overruled by my PI. And I know now that he was right - success is built off publication, and the best journals have this shitty model.

I used to think that when I became boss, I wouldn’t participate in the bullshit, but if any of my trainees want a career in academia, that stance would be screwing them over. The rules need to come from the top, but the people at the top, almost by definition, are the ones that have prospered with the current system.

kevin, 8 months ago

I do these things. I also refuse to review for-profit journals and paper mills, post all of my code in open source repositories, and advocate for these practices whenever I get the chance. When I had a popular science blog over 10 years ago, I was writing about this stuff a bunch.

But as long as hiring committees are scanning CVs for the number of Nature/Science/Cell journals, and granting agencies aren’t insisting on different practices, this shit will continue.

kevin, 8 months ago

And if these smart academically inclined people can’t reason about the merits of the system beyond whether it has worked for them, then they are as I accused them … unintelligent or childish.

Nah, it’s really hard to notice things that are against your incentives to notice. And if all of the people around you are prospering in the same system, extra hard. The myth of meritocracy is extremely compelling, possibly to an even greater extent in academia than elsewhere.

success in academia is its own reward with prestige that should not be underestimated.

No doubt. And listen, I’m on the tenure track job market at this very moment, having said that last year was definitely going to be my last attempt. There’s some kind of cultish nature, all the more inextricable in that I can see it, and it doesn’t stop me.

I guess my point is that it’s obvious to most of us that that success is extremely rare, and getting rarer. The thing that keeps me in it is the sense that I can do more good pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake than work that is easier and more remunerative but less fulfilling. Call that stupid or childish? Maybe 🤷.

kevin, 8 months ago

I’ve also got a gazelle, nearly 5 years old - no complaints! I occasionally need to use it on battery and it’s pretty power hungry, but if you turn off Nvidia graphics for those times, it’s quite a bit better.

kevin, 8 months ago

You said a bunch of things you like about cinnamon, and nothing that you don’t. Is there something motivating you to switch?

kevin, 9 months ago

The man has a way with words and is righteous about giving credit where due.

kevin, 9 months ago

OpenSUSE for pried from my hands because the college I work for set up a Cisco proxy server / 2FA that I couldn’t get to work with openconnect, and Cisco’s AnyConnect won’t run on it.

After a few weeks on Rocky, I am desperate to go back.

kevin, 9 months ago

I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.

A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).

The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.