I was born too late for that era of computing, but I've spent enough time programming that I can easily "run" a program in my head and reason about how it works, find bugs, etc. I would imagine that muscle was even more developed for the people who had to do it out of necessity, though.
Agreed. I'm a late-comer to KDE, having used Linux for over 20 years but only switched to KDE in the past year. Too many annoying design decisions in GNOME and I got sick of wasting time configuring the trendy minimalist WMs. I find KDE to be a breath of fresh air. It's got sensible defaults, gets out of my way for the most part, and it's improved a lot since I last tried it in the mid-2000s.
>If this tech is so revolutionary how come nothing in my life has changed positively.
That's a bit of a myopic view. Imagine someone asking the same question a few years after the invention of the printing press.
It's not hard to find examples of how AI is changing things. To take just one example, look at how it's revolutionizing research in science and mathematics. I wouldn't expect this to change the average person's life overnight, but there are absolutely going to be huge breakthroughs in the next few decades.
Most of average person's life struggles are not a result of lack of breakthroughs in science or mathematics. Similarly, most of problems with modern digital services or products are also not caused by lack of breakthroughs in engineering or technology.
We already know solutions to many current problems, and we knew them before AI - but those solutions are not being applied by people who are in charge. AI won't change those peoples' incentives.
Almost all of the improvements in standard of living over the past 400 years have come from scientific breakthroughs. Newton's laws probably seemed like an abstract mathematical puzzle at the time, but we wouldn't have steam turbines or skyscrapers or modern transportation without them. There are similar stories for advances in agriculture, medicine, energy distribution, communications, and the list goes on.
Most jobs that people do today in advanced economies wouldn't exist without science and technology. It's bewildering that this needs to be explained on HN of all places.
I did read it, and I responded to the specific claim you made about the extent to which scientific breakthroughs affect day to day life. It's pretty obvious that scientific progress does in fact change many aspects of life, including how long people live, the conditions they live in, and the kinds of work they can do to make a living. For the rest, I'm not sure what to respond to, since there are no specifics or examples given, just vague platitudes. On the other hand, you haven't responded to any of the specific points I've made, so I could just as easily claim that you haven't read my posts.
That's one factor, but how much of the increase is actually attributable to inflation? Other possible factors could include increased demand for luxury vehicles or decreased supply of inexpensive vehicles for a variety of reasons.
It's this ^, and both, in the US at least, the makers want/need to make their margin. Inflation - they try to keep the sticker price similar to last year's, but jack up "destination fees". Ford, GM, Ram - up to $3K destination fee on top of the MSRP. And then... then paint protection, rubber mats, etc.
Why is it bemusing because you happen to have a use case for it? It's a 30 year old piece of software that only supports X11, which is itself rapidly becoming legacy software.
There's a reason why GNOME and KDE Plasma dropped support for X11. It's terrible on a modern desktop where you want multiple monitors, fractional scaling, and high performance hardware acceleration without tearing. I have no problem if some people still prefer it or find uses for it, but it's weird to pretend like it's not a dinosaur by modern computing standards.
Is the conflict of interest in the room with us? Every major distribution has greenlit Wayland and introduced into their stable releases as the default.
Original X was forked as XFree86 and included in all the major distributions.
Xorg was a fork of XFree86, and subsequently included in all the major distributions when some devs/sponsors wanted to take it in a different direction.
XLibre — if that's what you are referring to — is another fork in a long line of forks.
So when you say X11 is not being developed but a fork is, which one are you referring to?
Weird framing is injecting decades old semantics to an issue most people already understand as X11 vs Wayland. Since everyone has defaulted to X11/Xorg prior to Wayland, it is known as xorg and x11... Not that fork of "XFree86".
X11 and Xorg, as we know it, are not in active development but maintenance mode. They have planned to wind down for a while, and this has been old news for over six years now... The code rollback and freeze inquiries should've signaled people off.
You seem to be confused between X11 as a protocol (and, used loosely, its many implementations) and a specific X11 server.
Within the Linux community, the primary X11 implementation has been the XFree86 server, which forked into XOrg over licensing disputes, which forked into XLibre over the development roadmap.
Other implementations include XQuartz (also based on XOrg) and Xlibe (not a traditional server but implements X11 by translating into native Haiku graphics API calls). There's also Xming and android-xserver (written in Java!), among many others.
XOrg may be abandoned. That doesn't mean the entire ecosystem is.
Red Hat and Canonical made their calls, and basically every other desktop environment outside of their control as well. Some were late, but are now here. Outside of legacy systems, I just don't see why people are going out of their way to get back on X11/Xorg outside of perceived FOSS politics and posturing. See - XLibre code of conduct and the Arch fiasco.
> Red Hat and Canonical made their calls, and basically every other desktop environment outside of their control as well.
Thankfully, that's not really how open source ecosystems work. There are still people interested in both using and developing X11.
> Outside of legacy systems, I just don't see why people are going out of their way to get back on X11/Xorg outside of perceived FOSS politics and posturing.
Well, when Wayland supports the features that people use on X11 I suppose we can discuss it. As of the present day, moving "forward" to Wayland would mean massive regressions in a11y tools that I'm not willing to give up just yet, and accepting a fragmented landscape where questions like "how do I change the keyboard layout" or even "is it possible to change the keyboard layout to anything but us+qwerty" are "It Depends™, what compositor do you use" (because Wayland deeply believes in reinventing the wheel over and over again, forever).
Yes, X11 is a protocol, which is still slowly developed by adding extensions to it. Whether it does or doesn't need to be actively developed is a question of what features you do or don't think it needs.
This is actually the thing that drove me to the GUI. You can just setup connection via ssh without thinking about it. A lot of my projects either live in a VM or VPS and so using herdr was okay, but the latency was getting to me and swapped to Codex and Claude Code desktop which make it super easy to just add remote machines over ssh and then there is no latency etc.
You can run claude/gemini daemons on remote boxes and then use claude desktop app or antigravity or even just the web browser to drive the workflow from your preferred endpoint (laptop or even mobile phone). For me personally this is the best of the both worlds, especially considering that daemons run on env that is close to production, and my client is just a view into it, and GUI part of it allows for more efficient and more rich experience of going through the requirements, spec writeups, code generation and finally experiments. Writing, compiling, debugging, testing or profiling the code manually is no longer done by me directly, and this was the main use-case for me previously preferring and using TUI based tools such as tmux+vim.
The Doors/Snoop Dogg "Riders on the Storm" really takes me back. There are some games from that mid-2000s era that really imprinted themselves on my brain, and apparently this is one of them.
Yep, this is the insight that so many ideological purists are missing, in the privacy space and in free software more broadly. A 90% solution that "just works" is infinitely better than a 100% solution that nobody is going to use.
I think both are true to a certain extent. We admire the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel both for the idea and for the execution. If we learned that Michelangelo had hired an anonymous artist to do the physical act of painting according to his precise instructions, it might detract from some of the credit we give him, but it wouldn't detract from its beauty or value as a work of art.
Why don't we credit the ceiling to the Pope, then? It was his idea to hire a guy to paint it.
I think the question is: What level of detail would Michelaelangelo have needed to give the anonymous painter, in this story, for us to still give the creative credit to Michelangelo? If he micro-managed every brushstroke and color, then clearly it was his vision. What if he just said, I want this finger reaching out here and that finger there? Or just, hey paint Adam and throw in God, make it fit this ceiling, maybe tone down that blue a little?
When we say who "made" a movie, outside the movie business, it's usually the director we're talking about, not the producers. They had input, sure, but they didn't control every individual choice.
To keep the sweater analogy rolling, proof of effort is a real thing when you get a gift for someone. If you tell your secretary go buy a sweater for my wife, that's a lot less meaningful than if you go out shopping for it yourself, right?
Maybe we credit the people without whom we believe a thing could not have been made?
Presumably, another pope could’ve commissioned the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling just as well as Julius II did, but we assume not many artists of the time could have done what Michelangelo did. So we laud and aggrandize those without whom we believe something could not have happened, especially when, like in his case, they did nearly all the work with their own hands.
Directing a movie is—except in very rare cases—the art of delegation in service of a core vision. And we believe only Stanley Kubrick could (or would) have maniacally orchestrated a space odyssey with effects that still hold up half a century later. Or what have you, I’m not a film buff by any means.
I think you're sort of agreeing with me? Proof of effort is kind of a meme right now, generally to mock the idea that delegating is fundamentally any less creative than hands-on work. That's not a new idea ...producers refer to "their" TV shows. Bassists say "my band" (and I say "my bassist", which I've actually gotten shit for once or twice).
There aren't many examples in the modern world of a piece of work as large and magnificent as the Sistine Chapel which was done by one guy. A movie or a AAA game requires hundreds of people, and arguably the results would be noticeably different if any one of a few dozen of them were replaced by someone else. Changing screenwriters could be as big a change as directors, so in that sense without the delegation of the producers, the thing couldn't or wouldn't have been made as it is.
But the more you micromanage the design decisions of a thing, the more you're the person without whom it couldn't be done, right? I've been on enough commercial sets to see directors juggling every decision and detail with the crew; the crew is their toolbox, or their brushes, the actors are their palette. I think if someone uses an AI like that, it's at least them without whom it couldn't be done. Perhaps "proof of effort" is just a not-nice way to express who had creative control. Once you delegate the design decisions themselves, you enter a category where you're not really essential.
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