A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn’t so much about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We rarely get the real thing nowadays.
Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.
Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
I recently looked into the BSDs for a desktop project before going back to Debian. I love the philosophy but they’re for the initiated.
The onboarding rails just aren’t there these days. Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.
One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience.
One way to look it is to approach it as a creative practice. A good part of any practice is devoted to developing technique.
Some are just fine with a standardized but unoptimized tool while others are fascinated by building their own high-flying TUI. The journey is the destination. If all you create is a config file, it still counts.
I’m exploring a similar implementation and am honestly torn between NixOS and a more monolithic experience like Debian or OpenBSD.
As much as I love the idea of declarative builds, I’m struggling to justify the investment of learning and maintaining Nix for an individual setup. I’ve dabbled with it and mostly encountered footguns.
Whatever makes a nice, clean slab is what I’m after.
I like the term “organic literature.” A significant amount of readers have no interest whatsoever in
generated prose, so there is definitely a viable market in human provenance.
An independent certification body is quite an old-world solution for a problem like this, but I’m not sure this is something that can be done mathematically. A web of trust may be all we have.
I struggled with a complex manuscript for years and tried all sorts of tools from Word to Scrivener in the process with no luck.
Emacs w/org mode was the only program that helped me make sense of the mess and finish the darn thing. I have never seen a program so elegant and yet so powerful, and I am forever grateful it exists if only as a counterweight to the modern tech paradigm.
I love seeing a Vonnegut writeup on HN. He’s my favorite author and his work had a major influence on me in my 20s. I guess we’ll see what I do when I’m old, whenever that is.