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.
We know they're just optimizing for time spent on the site/app, as a proxy for the number of ads they show you and then get paid for.
But the thing that was supprising to me, as someone that remembers the world before the internet, is that anger is the thing that makes people stay on a site.
Before the internet came along, one would have thought that Truth would be the thing. Or funniness, or gossip, or even titalation and smut. Anger would have been quite far down on the list of 'addicting' things. But the proof is obvious, anger drives dollars.
There's no putting this knowledge away now that we know it.
The lesson only question is what are we going to do about it?
> 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.
> 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).
We learned all that, but that knowledge is all but worthless and has been for some time. I wish I had learned programming instead. All these other computing and OS skills become unnecessary as time moves on. Except for VPS hosting with FTP.
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.
Yes! The next generation of computer scientists will be more passionate than we are because they have mastered their craft and got curious despite growing up with dumbed down boring computers.
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.
> My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash.
Agreed, but my impression was of a more complex one than you imply.
There were a whole bunch of competing commercial Unix-like OSes in the 1980s.
But there were other prejudices as well.
In Proper Grown-Up Unix terms, PCs were toys, poorly-made weird little things that were no more than office equipment. So nothing worth using ran on the 386.
There was no local bus yet, no IDE or EIDE, slow AT expansion bus, no processor cache, and so on -- meaning a forest of proprietary or semi-proprietary extensions and buses and special slots. This opened up a market for a vendor to port to Brand X PCs and Brand X's own weird storage and display.
Enter Interactive Corp, which tried to combat this, and worked on Unix ports for various vendors' hardware. Expensive OS for expensive machines.
And there was SCO which wasn't proud, wasn't fancy, ran on commodity kit, and didn't try to be a general purpose OS like that white lab-coat brigade expected. So SCO Xenix worked, and you could run apps on it, but in the box there was no C compiler, no networking, no X11, nothing. It was a runtime-only OS and it was still expensive.
Everyone sneered at it but it did the job. I put in a lot of it.
Then if you weren't paying, someone else was who would never see the word "Unix", there were all the vastly expensive RISC boxes with their vastly expensive expansions and vastly expensive -- well, everything. Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, loads of company would sell you rooms full of workstations, single-user minicomputers with big screens. They cost as much as a house.
Actual BSD ran on actual minicomputers that cost as much as a small street of houses and those dudes wouldn't even look at PCs.
Which left a market for enterprising vendors squeezing Unix-like things onto low end kit.
Various flavours of BSD, including BSD/OS; SCO Xenix in both 286 and 386 versions; Interactive 386ix; several vendors' own-brand licensed Unixes, including Dell, later, an official Intel one that mainly ran on Intel's own pizza-box workstations.
And all the proprietary computer vendors entered the game too. Commodore did Unix for high-end Amigas; Atari did Unix for high-end STs; Acorn did Unix for high-end Archimedes; Apple did Unix for high-end Macs, allegedly originally just to get a US military deal; etc. etc.
All these are still $1000 per instance OSes though.
Then, universally scorned, MWC Coherent, a real Unix-like OS for $99... and QNX, which was apparently good but mainly focused on real-time stuff, and cost more than the casual could afford.
(As a European I never saw this but it was in all the ads in all the US mags. There was a lot of "cheap" American stuff we didn't get over here, like paid-for shareware. We had metered phone calls so no BBS scene. Only rich Americans got that stuff.)
Coherent was so good that AT&T accused them of theft and sent Dennis Ritchie around to check. He came back and said, no, it's legit.
And Andy Tanenbaum's Minix, a toy for students, not for real work, but essentially free with a book.
These latter indirectly showed that you _could_ copy AT&T's holy grail and make it work, so while Richard Stallman was building all the tools but choosing the wrong kernel and sabotaging the whole thing, along came this Finnish kid with his learning exercise, and excited beardies on Usenet said that it actually worked and it was at least as good as Minix and was getting to Coherent levels.
So the point is, there was a spectrum, from legendary machines made from purest unobtainium, to ludicrously expensive x86 stuff for very specific (and ludicrously expensive models) of PC kit, to the still ludicrously expensive SCO that got no respect, to "cheap" stuff that nobody had in Europe because it had no business purpose. There was legendary free stuff in America but it only ran on room sized computers that cost as much as a lottery win, so I never saw it. "Free" as in "it's free if you're so rich it doesn't matter."
And "free" shareware that was "free" as in "the phone bill to get it will cost more than just buying a commercial version in a shiny box".
But there _was_ a spectrum, from vastly expensive to "a small business will pay for this", down to theoretical stuff in America that you could dream about... which paved the way until the point where an ordinary PC was a 32-bit machine with a memory management unit and hundreds of megs of disk and several megs of RAM, and suddenly, this Lin-Min-Gnu-ix thing was doable, if you had a beard and a checked shirt with black jeans and wore hiking boots every day.
> 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.
that comment is probably referring to VisualBasic 6.0 which was not a dialect of C# like VB.NET but then again your product from the 90s likely started off as that
FreeBSD is a complete OS, while debian is a distro, i.e the Linux kernel + a lot of programs including the utilities from GNU. So almost everything in debian comes from a package while in the BSD world, there's a split between the system utilities (called base) and the third-party projects (called ports). The port system itself is a collection of recipes to build those projects.
But the nicest thing about the software in the base is that they are developed in sync with the OS, so their code can be simpler.
FreeBSD ports are more up to date. Debian packages are famously out of date - their claim to fame is stability not staying up to date. Arch is a better comparison here if you care about this you would be asking about Arch not Debian: that you are asking about Debian implies you want this out of date.
The other major difference is FreeBSD ports lets you chose the build options - the defaults are normally good, but if you don't like how Debian (Arch...) choose to build your packages you are not stuck. Ports even mixes with binary packages so you can choose the defaults for some things and build others yourself and the system will track everything and when things need to be updated. This is something you rarely need, but when you do FreeBSD soundly beats everyone else just because the effort is so much less (again though, most people never need this in the first place - and Debian has pushed less need of this on applications which is a good thing)
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.
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.
reply