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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t have any particular allegiance to rust, though once it’s set up, being able to install through cargo rather than being to figure out whatever package manager or build system is nice, especially on various HPC environments where I don’t have sudo.

    Btop does look cool though


  • What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don’t mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like alias ls="eza" is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I’m on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.

    Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I’m forced to use the basic ones, I’m actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn’t make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?

    I mean, for helix/vi it’s even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I’m going to be crippled anyway, so…


  • kevin@mander.xyztoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    they either don’t improve upon or add functionality that’s not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.

    The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don’t lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn’t have them, I’m a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.

    The principle exception to this is actually fd - I now find find (har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that’s because fd is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.


  • kevin@mander.xyztoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Yes. The only things I use regularly that aren’t aliased to or replaced by a rust-built tool are mkdir, ln, and rsync.

    • cd: zoxide
    • ls: eza
    • cat: bat
    • grep: ripgrep
    • find: fd
    • sed: sd
    • du: dust
    • top/htop: btm
    • vi: helix
    • tmux: zellij (or wezterm mux)
    • diff: delta
    • ps: procs

    Probably some others I’m forgetting





  • That’s fair. Another example of what you describe that I’m more familiar with is Epic (medical records software). My hypothesis is that the differences that matter are:

    1. Cost of switching is higher and/or
    2. The people making the decision (business manager, hospital admin) are farther from the actual users of the software.

    Could be lots of other reasons too, but these are the ones that jump out at me.


  • Really the only thing that I miss on Linux is creative cloud stuff. Yeah, gimp and inkscape cover 80% of the functionality of PS and Illustrator right out of the gate, and I bet I could get to 90% if I sank a bunch of hours into learning the differences. Which is amazing for open source software.

    But there’s a gap when you have a team of dedicated and highly paid developers and hordes of creatives testing everything out and demanding progress that’s going to be hard to overcome.





  • And if these smart academically inclined people can’t reason about the merits of the system beyond whether it has worked for them, then they are as I accused them … unintelligent or childish.

    Nah, it’s really hard to notice things that are against your incentives to notice. And if all of the people around you are prospering in the same system, extra hard. The myth of meritocracy is extremely compelling, possibly to an even greater extent in academia than elsewhere.

    success in academia is its own reward with prestige that should not be underestimated.

    No doubt. And listen, I’m on the tenure track job market at this very moment, having said that last year was definitely going to be my last attempt. There’s some kind of cultish nature, all the more inextricable in that I can see it, and it doesn’t stop me.

    I guess my point is that it’s obvious to most of us that that success is extremely rare, and getting rarer. The thing that keeps me in it is the sense that I can do more good pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake than work that is easier and more remunerative but less fulfilling. Call that stupid or childish? Maybe 🤷.


  • I do these things. I also refuse to review for-profit journals and paper mills, post all of my code in open source repositories, and advocate for these practices whenever I get the chance. When I had a popular science blog over 10 years ago, I was writing about this stuff a bunch.

    But as long as hiring committees are scanning CVs for the number of Nature/Science/Cell journals, and granting agencies aren’t insisting on different practices, this shit will continue.


  • I can understand why it seems the way. But the people doing academic research by and large could make a lot more money working less hard at some company, but choose instead to try to advance human knowledge.

    The incentives are just terrible. When I was a PhD student, I railed against this system, but when it came time to publish, I was overruled by my PI. And I know now that he was right - success is built off publication, and the best journals have this shitty model.

    I used to think that when I became boss, I wouldn’t participate in the bullshit, but if any of my trainees want a career in academia, that stance would be screwing them over. The rules need to come from the top, but the people at the top, almost by definition, are the ones that have prospered with the current system.