Total Annihilation… couldn’t get enough of it. Even playing strategy games today I desperately miss the elaborate control and mechanics of TA.

It’s restricted right now. Most recent post is 10 days ago.

I think my best advice would be to make a philosophy out of it. Learn how to solve every problem you come across with the CLI. Only use Google or ChatGPT when you hit a wall, and utilize the man pages to understand why the answer works.

Make a habit of automating common tasks using shell scripts. Over time you’ll accumulate a library of cookbook code for doing common things that you can always refer to. Write comments in them to save time when you come back and refer to them. It also saves time to automate common things.

Long ago I followed the Linux From Scratch guide and it was very enlightening. It walks you through installing a working Linux system from scratch, starting from within another installation. So you could e.g. install Debian to a VM, add a second virtual hard disk, and follow the guide to iteratively install each bit of the system on the second hard disk until you can boot it and use it. This is an intense (or at least time-consuming) process but it’s worth it.

Although it’s terribly outdated now, I got a lot out of the book The Unix Programming Environment. It lays out the history of the system really well. In general, anything written by either of those two authors (Kernighan in particular) is just gold, they’re both excellent teachers. It helped me intuitively understand concepts like pipes, “everything is a file”, shell programming, awk, etc.

I’ve been using Linux since ~1996; I used to wonder about this a lot.

The tl;dr answer is, it’s too much effort only to solve the problem of making life easier for new users, and it can be a disservice to users in the long run.

As others have pointed out, there are limited GUI tools for common administration roles.

Power users are much, much faster at doing things via CLI. Most administrative tasks involve text file management and the UNIX userland is exceptional at processing text files.

A graphical tool would have to deal with evolving system software and APIs, meaning the GUI tool would be on constant outpatient care; this is counter to the UNIX philosophy which is to make software simple and well-defined such that it can be considered “done” and remain versatile and flexible enough to live for decades virtually unchanged.

It wouldn’t be that much easier for things like network rules unless a truly incredible UI was designed, and that would be a risk since the way that’s implemented at the system level is subject to change at any point. It’s hard enough keeping CLI userland tools in sync with the kernel as it is.

It would need to be adaptable to the ways different distributions do things. Administration on CentOS is not always the same as it is on Debian.

And ultimately, the longer a user spends depending on GUI tools, the longer it will take them to learn and become proficient with the CLI, which will always be a far more useful skill to have. You’ll never learn the innards of containers or VPS’ if you only know how to do things from the GUI.

I’m a JetBrains person. I like vim, but I also heavily use IDE features and VSCode just never scratched the right itches. I’ve worked with many people who use VC but when I pair with them and watch their workflows, they simply aren’t as efficient, as if they’re unaware of what a proper IDE can actually do. They also complain when VC extensions get mature and become paid extensions, which hasn’t been a problem with JB.

I use Copilot with JetBrains, but it’s only “cool”, not “awesome”. When I really need help with some code Copilot rarely does the right thing, and JB’s code completion already works really well. I know Copilot for VC is better than for JB and they claim they’re going to bring parity to JB at some point, but this article makes me suspect they’re lying. If they don’t I’m going to start shopping for competitors.

Digg didn’t survive though. Right now it looks like a corporate blog with a barely visible comment section.

That’s what I was getting at.

I agree that reddit won’t run out of users. I think the big question is whether they can figure out how to turn a profit.

Hah, that’ll be fun on my desktop… I don’t even have a microphone.

It’s Beej! Long (!) time student of your guides, hope to see more of you here.

We’ll make some plugin that downloads the ad and tells Google it was “totally watched and stuff”.

🤣 I didn’t think you were trying to tell me something, I figured the Lemmy code goofed somewhere.

I’m undefined? 😟

Otherwise known as managing success. Once you have a successful cash flow you need to diversify it and build your business to have multiple cash flows.

Semantics I guess. Di-worse-ification isn’t always the answer. They had a large product lineup, which was probably more expensive for them than it needed to be. They went under because they failed to fortify their balance sheet… rates went up and their debt crushed them.

Capitalism works fine just turning a profit while plenty of companies die chasing growth. It’s just part of it.

Twitter isn’t like reddit in that hashtags don’t have moderators. They outsourced moderating to the users, and now Musk has decided to remove it entirely.

I don’t get it.

I wouldn’t be so sure. I believe great managers could take it over and rescue it today, but they don’t have great managers, the place is run by idiots. It might survive in the manner Digg survived.

They just made it a lot harder to moderate by sparking an angry powder keg like they did, let alone killing all the mod tooling. That was better than what they’ve managed to produce in almost 20 years. They’ve also lost many of the moderators who weren’t doing it for the money (at least not reddit’s money). They can always hire new moderators, but that’s yet another expense on the earnings statement.

If they can get all the spam and hate posts under control it’s going to be a repost farm and OP will not surely deliver anymore.

From where I’m standing it appears they’ve been given an ultimatum by VC investors who are hellbent on selling whether they lose their asses at the bottom or not.

It’s not how they managed success, it’s that they ran out of it. Making a successful niche kitchen appliance is not a business, it’s one of many things that a successful niche kitchen appliance business does.

Successful businesses also allocate capital optimally, build formidable brand and product moats, hire amazing managers and build fortified balance sheets. They forgot to do all that stuff. (See also: reddit)

Several companies have called for this, and they all have an ulterior agenda. OpenAI just wants street cred and to have their competitors regulated. The rest simply don’t have a product and want everyone to slow down while they catch up.

Regardless, they all know on some level the government can’t stop AI just like they can’t stop piracy or cryptocurrency.

A dozen or two of the largest subs would be plenty.

Those subs required a huge effort to moderate before, but it’s going to be 10x worse now that every submission is going to be AI generated pictures of spez doing things to goats or something.

Same. Angry VC money is a demon that’s not worth summoning.

This is a good thermometer reading. I’m pretty sure many communities are prepared to extend this indefinitely if current plans aren’t reverted. I do believe him when he says

We absolutely must ship what we said we would.

I don’t know who the angry VCs are who get to pull his strings but if this gets their attention - it may or it may not - reddit might budge on things a bit.

At the end of the day the company is hopeless to make a profit with him at the helm. This memo sounds slightly nervous and lacks confidence. He has no clue what he’s doing.