My view: The nether update was fabulous with so much new stuff. After that they seemed overconfident and promised way too much. They delivered but it took three new versions rather than one. Each of those versions was awesome in my opinion. But the community got sour because they were promised this stuff faster. I think part of the reason was that certain features, especially the Warden, Deep Dark and Ancient Cities was extended in scope, with awesome results. But then Mojang started promising less and moved to smaller feature drops. The autocrafter seems fun, but all in all, the updates from 1.20 onwards have been so boring that my interest have just dwindled out.
Certainly not the only one making things worse. Software has become an enemy of the people in the last 10 years. Remember when the internet was nominated for Nobel Peace price?
I've felt it through my guilty pleasure of scrolling instagram reels periodically. They've obviously changed their algorithm from time to time and it's crazy how I've intermittently have gotten endless right wing stuff and leftist ridiculing and thinking there's a lot good points. Then it's suddenly just convincing leftist material again or at best you're-all-dumb content.
It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.
A thought in the other direction though. A lot of fields don't really have kids playing their way towards skill. Still people find their way to the frontiers and push on.
> Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with.
A point that I've often tried to convey among friends and family. No! Todays kids aren't natural tech wizards because they grew into it. All they know is pressing buttons where the UI/UX norms are good enough that you'll figure it out quickly, especially as a kid.
In my early days I'd press commands out of the back of a manual in order to see what my commodore 64 was all about if I didn't load a game. Turned out I was programming basic (at the level you'd expect from a clueless kid, but still)
Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem?
Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).
And I think I was born too late for the best of lessons.
I like it. Remember when people used to have badges on their sites? Like HTML5 or XHTML or Apache or whatever. Maybe we could bring back one for "made by humans".
"If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus
My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing.
And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.
> But before Zig, there was C. For fifty years, C has been the foundation of modern computing.
And for fifty years, language theory has made progress. While C, brilliant as it once was, has given us never ending problems with security and reliability. The software world is saturated anyways. It's time to revise rather than just layering new junk in chase of profit.
> This article does not aim to dismiss Zig. Its focus is on the fact that C never stopped evolving.
It didn't stop but it certainly slowed down to glacial pace. There's plenty of fundamental issues that will never be fixed.
That said. I wish the software world would just keep its cool and not commit to Rust so fast. Rust was the first in a trend of new low level languages. It snowballed and now we may not get to make an informed decision on how the future of low level programming should be. I personally like Zig a lot more. Unfortunately people seem to be neither adequately scared of complexity nor sufficiently impressed by simplicity.
I've worked for a company with a large code base in Visual Basic .net. Product been in development since the 90's, with rich customer that only cares about their software doing its job. It's a surprisingly productive language combined with Visual Studio. Even though, as a language enthusiast, I barfed a bit now and then. Dev team would like to switch to C# but it would have been a multi-year effort taking away from lucrative feature requests.
Ports is a meta build system, from which packages are created. Gives a lot of convenient power and flexibility. For ready built packages, the FreeBSD equivalent of dpkg or whatever five different package commands Debian is using now would be pkg.
Addendum:
I've used FreeBSD as my daily driver (I hate that term) since around 2004. Including through cs/math university. With Windows in a VM for "I need it".
The longer I've used it the more I'm annoyed by the trivialities of Linux distro management. And the bugs that happens between ill fitting parts composed by underfunded distro developers.
And I didn't mean to imply that FreeBSD is stale. There is big stuff happening continuously. Right now it's compatibility with Linux Wifi drivers, which will make FreeBSD more laptop-able. And pkgbase, which brings some of the compile-your-self flexibility of FreeBSD to binary management, and merges the two tools that decides what makes up your system into one. And kinda makes FreeBSD into the slim system that people already claims it to be.
My pet conspiracy is that pkgbase happened because the powers that be didn't want the 1000 battles to remove junk. Any time anyone wants to remove something there's always one or two guys on the mailing list claiming their livelihood depends on not having to do "pkg install Ø". With pkgbase its all gone.
PF seems to me like pretty much the most well regarded firewall there is -
with a nice, sensible DSL for config. If you don't like like it, you can use use IPFW or IPFILTER, which are alternative, built-in, firewall front-ends.
- In the end, it was just too much having to re-invent the wheel for common server tasks
Maybe you have built your routine around a system that have reinvented the wheel? I think FreeBSD knowledge degrades more slowly than that of Linux distros.
- I'm just not an OS dev.
That's how I feel when I enter the chaotic Linux world. Do you think my life revolve around keeping up with this shit? :)