I'm pretty sure he's just finding the most condescending way he can think of to "correct" people who have a lower tolerance for paper cuts than he has.
The author's message is really "You idiots that can't just ignore the friction you can't fix, and change your habits and workflows to match what the corporate overlords know you really need should just STFU with your tips and tricks for how to customize your power tools, because I don't do that, so why should you?"
They may not right now, but the whole point of Microsoft's Copilot+ PC standard (even though it's somewhat anemic) is to run models locally. Apple Silicon with enough unified memory is capable. Not to mention modern iPhones and Pixels have fairly capable NPUs and routinely run local models. So, we may not be to the point where most normal people have the hardware to run local models, but it is rapidly approaching.
As a big fan of WordPerfect on my first DOS machine (286 clone), I agree. I respect authors like GRRM for sticking with WordStar, but whenever I get nostalgic and wondering about WordPerfect in DosBox, I remember I use emacs and typst. All the good things about WordPerfect, but vastly superior.
LOL. In 2007, I did a side-by-side comparison of SVN, Mercurial and git with my codebase at work (~700k LOC). I know hg got faster eventually, but I still can't believe people say "hg should have won the DVCS war" with a straight face. It was orders of magnitude slower in my tests. Like, 20 minutes to commit large xml files (yeah, I know, but that's where we were). Not just a few ms slower, unbearably slow for several things.
I liked its features better, but chose git, and that was the correct decision.
I feel bad for people who reject Windows 11 on moral grounds. They'll likely fall behind, while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoral.
I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM employee that we would regret having majored in computer science because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged like milk.
Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My LLM experience makes me seriously doubt it.
If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.
I lost my "Clear Creek Bike Book" in the 1980's but eventually Sheldon made me not miss it at all.
It's not as comprehensive, and more corporate than Sheldon's site, but I currently love Park Tool's youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@parktool). They shamelessly mention their tools, but they frequently give alternatives like, you can get this park tool for pushing your disc brake pads back into place, or you can just use a plastic tire tool.
Samourai wallet has been on HN several times, but this interview with the creator just before he goes to prison for writing open source code is very interesting.
The author's message is really "You idiots that can't just ignore the friction you can't fix, and change your habits and workflows to match what the corporate overlords know you really need should just STFU with your tips and tricks for how to customize your power tools, because I don't do that, so why should you?"