The vast majority of users don't need "more meat" in their OS. They need stability. Linux Mint works great on that front, I don't see the need to loose focus with multiple new distros. Not everyone needs to jump distro every month.

Disclaimer: i've been using Linux Mint for over 10 years without ever hopping to something else. And I'm a software engineer, not a casual user.

How I wish CUDA was an open standard. We use it at work, and the tooling is a constant pain. Being almost entirely controlled by NVIDIA, there's no alternative toolset, and that means little pressure to make it better. Clang being able to compile CUDA code is an encouraging first step, meaning we could possibly do without nvcc. Sadly the CMake support for it on Windows has not yet landed. And that still leaves the SDK and runtime entirely in NVIDIA's hands.

What irritates me the most about this SDK is the versioning and compatibility madness. Especially on Windows, where the SDK is very picky about the compiler/STL version, and hence won't allow us to turn on C++20 for CUDA code. I also could never get my head around the backward/forward compatibility between SDK and hardware (let alone drivers).

And the bloat. So many GBs of pre-compiled GPU code for seemingly all possible architectures in the runtime (including cudnn, cublas, etc). I'd be curious about the actual number, but we probably use 1% of this code, yet we have to ship the whole thing, all the time.

If CPU vendors were able to come up with standard architectures, why can't GPU vendors? So much wasted time, effort, energy, bandwidth, because of this.

How do you people manage this?

That's crazy. Google/DDG bloat from SEO websites had already driven me out a while ago, so I hadn't noticed. I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and I find I can trust my search results again. Being able to permanently downgrade or even block a given website is an awesome feature, I would recommend it just for that.

Indeed, looking at the content of the script before running it is what I do if there is no alternative. But some of these scripts are awfully complex, and manually parsing the odd bash stuff is a pain, when all I want to know is : 1) what URL are you downloading stuff from? 2) where are you going to install the stuff?

As for running the program, I would trust it more than a random deployment script. People usually place more emphasis on testing the former, not so much the latter.

Have not used it for programming.

At work, this is to some extent because we haven't decided yet whether to trust sending away our codebase to be potentially trained on.

In general, this is because I find the agressive FOMO-inducing marketting revolting, and because it would be increasing our dependence on big tech companies where I believe we should do just the opposite.

I did use it once or twice to get pointers on topics I wasn't familiar with (e.g., new standards or protocols, ...), mostly just to get a helicopter view and some sources to follow it up when i was in a rush at work. Would not do that on my personal time.

I wouldn't object to using an open-source/open-training, ethically trained, self hosted model.

To me it's less about the aesthetics and more about ergonomics. I still feel at times that the UI, specifically the toolbar, is jumbled together without much cohesion. Or that the interface has been designed to allow entering inputs to someone else's tool, rather than built for me to do what I need.

I'm sure some of it can probably be customized; I don't actually use it that much that I feel the need to tinker.

I don't know what shady shit you're referring to. They do AI, but I don't use any of that. IMO their core strength is the search engine and how it works for you rather than against.

I hadn't bought a bundle in a long time, maybe I just don't remember it being that bad, but really? Even with the "extra to charity" preset, the charity gets less than Humble themselves? That's kind of gross.

Then it's a problem of the platform, if there's no way to either tag content on a particular topic, which people can filter if they wish, or a place for meta discussions, which people can choose not to visit. I still agree with the OP that simply deleting/forbidding this content isn't a good option.

Why would their experience be relevant? They're asking a question, so obviously they have things to learn. You could be nicer about it.

There is actually a fair bit of drama around this relationship with Collabora, it would seem: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-revoke-votes-related-to-libreoffice-online-atticiziation-and-freezing-of-repository/13495

You end up with a nice spec that you wouldn't have had otherwise? That has value even if you discard all the LLM-generated code.

I think experienced engineers are able to go straight from a vague requirement to an implementation without that intermediate step, and that power is easy to abuse. We build an implicit spec on our head, which gets translated to code on the fly, and then gets forgotten.

Not defending the LLM technology, but i do think this is one of the upside.

There's no specific AI detection at the moment, as far as I can tell. But it has "listicle" detection. If you ask "best lawn mower", all these "the 5 best lawn mowers of 2023" websites with affiliated Amazon links get pooled into a compact Listicle section, that you can just scroll past and ignore.

Very relevant read: https://staffeng.com/

That's a bit like saying "I'm not interested in compiler warnings, my program works for me." The issues this article discusses are like compiler warnings, but for the community. You should be free to ignore them, just by scrolling past. But forbidding compiler warnings would not fly in any respectable project.

I guess you mean std::expected, not std::exception?

Sounds great! Sadly it doesn't support Deezer, which is what I use to listen to music. I wonder what it would take to enable this.

Thank you for the nuanced answer!

You ask why I feel this is less secure: it seems the lowest possible bar when it comes to controlling what gets installed on your system. The script may or may not give you a choice as to where things get installed. It could refuse to install or silently overwrite stuff if something already exists. If install fails, it may or may not leave data behind, in directories I may or may not know about. It may or may not run a checksum on the downloaded data before installing. Because it's a competely free-form script, there is no standard I can expect. For an application, I would read the documentation to learn more, but these scripts are not normally documented (other than "use this to install"). That uncertainty, to me, is insecure/unsafe.

Ironically, it is rustup that triggered me with this most recently... https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

I second this. I lead a team of engineers, and to us the main dividing line between senior and not senior is if you're able to take on a project and lead it autonomously. I.e., you've gone past the stage where all you do is take on the next ticket in your task tracker; you have an awareness and understanding of the bigger picture, which allows you to create tickets on your own and select the most appropriate thing to work on next. The lead (me) is still there to help prioritize, fetch requirements, unblock things, etc, but it's fairly light touch management.

(Edit: my job title is Principal Software Engineer)