VeeSilverball

Arch is always “latest and greatest” for every package, including the kernel. It lets you tinker, and it’s always up to date. However, a rolling release introduces more ways to break your system - things start conflicting under the hood in ways that you weren’t aware of, configurations that worked don’t any longer, etc.

This is in contrast to everything built on Debian, which Mint is one example of - Mint adds a bunch of conveniences on top, but the underlying “how it all fits together” is still Debian. What Debian does is to set a target for stable releases and ship a complete set of known-stable packages. This makes it great for set and forget uses, servers that you want to just work and such. And it was very important back in the 90’s when it was hard to get Internet connectivity. But it also means that it stays behind the curve with application software releases, by periods of months to a year+. And the original workaround to that is “just add this other package repository” which, like Arch, can eventually break your system by accident.

But neither disadvantage is as much of a problem now as it used to be. More of the software is relatively stable, and the stuff you need to have the absolute latest for, you can often find as a flatpak, snap, or appimage - formats that are more self-contained and don’t rely on the dependencies that you have installed, just “download and run.”

Most popular distros now are Arch or Debian flavored - same system, different veneer. Debian itself has become a better option for desktop in recent years just because of improvements to the installer.

I’ve been using Solus 4.4 lately, which has its own rolling-release package system. Less software, but the experience is tightly designed for desktop, and doesn’t push me to open terminals to do things like the more classical Unix designs that guide Arch and Debian. The problem both of those face as desktops is that they assume up-front that you may only have a terminal, so the “correct way” of doing everything tends to start and end with the terminal, and the desktop is kind of glued on and works for some things but not others.

Not dead, just sleeping. It’s a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:

Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.

And that’s it. You don’t have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can’t solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone’s database and hoping nothing happens or they’re too big to fail. It’s just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.

Neuro Sama - Take on Me

The thing about larger-scale architecture is that you can be correct in any specific sense that it’s more than you need, but when you actually try to make the thing across a development team, you end up there because the code reflects the organization, and having it broken up like that lets you more easily rewrite your previous decisions.

At the small scale this occurs when you notice that the way in which you have to approach a feature is linguistically different - it needs conversion to a substantially different data structure, or an interface that compiles imperative commands from a definition. The whole idea of the database having a general purpose structure and its own query language emerges from that - it lets you defer the question of exactly how you want to use the data. The more configuration you add, the more of those layers you need. When you start supporting enterprise-grade flexibility it gets out of control and you end up with a configuration language that resembles a general purpose programming environment, but worse.

Casey Muratori talks about this kind of thing in some depth.

In the end, the point of the code is to help you “arrive in the future” in some sense - it’s instrumental, the point of automating it is to improve the quality of your result by some metric(e.g. fewer errors). For a lot of computations, that means you should just use a spreadsheet - it aids the data entry task, it automates enough of the detail that you can get things done, but it also gets out of the way instead of turning into a professionalized project.

Coming soon: rebranding /r/piracy to “pirate cosplay”

I’ve had some thoughts on, essentially, doing more of what historically worked; a mix of “archival quality materials” and “incentives for enthusiasts”. If we only focus on accumulating data like IA does, it is valuable, but we soak up a lot of spam in the process, and that creates some overwhelming costs.

The materials aspect generally means pushing for lower fidelity, uncomplicated formats, but this runs up against what I call the “terrarium problem”: to preserve a precious rare flower exactly as is, you can’t just take a picture, you have to package up the entire jungle. Like, we have emulators for old computing platforms, and they work, but someone has to maintain them, and if you wanted to write something new for those platforms, you are most likely dealing with a “rest of the software ecosystem” that is decades out of date. So I believe there’s an element to that of encoding valuable information in such a way that it can be meaningful without requiring the jungle - e.g. viewing text outside of its original presentation. That tracks with humanity’s oldest stories and how they contain some facts that survived generations of retellings.

The incentives part is tricky. I am crypto and NFT adjacent, and use this identity to participate in that unabashedly. But my view on what it’s good for has shifted from the market framing towards examination of historical art markets, curation and communal memory. Having a story be retold is our primary way of preserving it - and putting information on-chain(like, actually on-chain. The state of the art in this can secure a few megabytes) creates a long-term incentive for the chain to “retell its stories” as a way of justifying its valuation. It’s the same reason as why museums are more than “boring old stuff”.

When you go to a museum you’re experiencing a combination of incentives: the circumstances that built the collection, the business behind exhibiting it to the public, and the careers of the staff and curators. A blockchain’s data is a huge collection - essentially a museum in the making, with the market element as a social construct that incentivizes preservation. So I believe archival is a thing blockchains could be very good at, given the right framing. If you like something and want it to stay around, that’s a medium that will be happy to take payment to do so.