No no no no - plugins are “tightly coupled” which this blog post claims is not the “UnIx PhIlOsOpHy”. They have to be completely independent applications swappable at will by the end user with different implementations!

You’re allowed to have programs whose job is to coordinate other programs.

Sure - it’s just not always a good idea. Would you want to copy your buffer to a dozen different applications applying filters to an image?

90% of his argument is just “UnIx PhIlOsOpHy” though. Or arguments (term used loosely) that are based on that. He keeps chanting “But systemd Is MoNoLiThIc” over and over as if that ended the discussion while handwaving away the same argument against Linux or Wayland. But somehow systemd is different. Systemd needs to be crap for some reason.

It turns out that system boot benefits from tightly integrated steps. Filesystem mounting can depend on network availability for example. Logging depends on filesystems to be mounted. The sub-systems are naturally inter-dependent. And service management and execution needs to know about all those things. Some services need networking, some need file systems, etc.

You match the design to the problem. You don’t pretend like the Unix Philosophy is some gold standard that everything must adhere to.

The Unix principle is the most over-rated design principle ever. It’s sole purpose is to be dragged out when somebody doesn’t like your application. Notably the systemd haters don’t levy the same complaint about Wayland…

It’s based on the idea of programs as “functions” that can be strung together like you often do with things like “cat /etc/passwd | grep user | tr ‘s/:/,/’” (cat put in there to trigger the right people). That’s a great philosophy for cli utilities. But it’s not universally applicable.

The goal is not to make things tiny but to make them “the right size.” You wouldn’t want to run 30 different applications to do what GIMP does and you shouldn’t have to.

And the idea of having dozens of viable replacements for different functions is not a Unix thing but pretty restricted to the Linux ecosystem. And it’s not like it was planned, it just happened because 12 people went out and wrote their own ntp daemons. There wasn’t really much benefit to it. “Oh boy, I can run a different ntpd… And half of them are partially implemented. Hooray?”

This is by far the most nuanced critique of systemd I’ve ever seen.

It’s the same bullshit everyone has always bitched about.

But that’s the problem - there is no definition for slop. Some people call ALL ai code slop, some just call bad code slop. It’s a messy term that’s up to the user to define.

I think people are sensible enough these days to not deny that AIs sometimes produce acceptable code.

New to the forum?

There are plenty of people who call all ai generated code “slop”.

Well this study finds:

For both contributors and maintainers, GenAI boosts productivity by up to 50% across all types of OSS development tasks.

Jfc you could write this better to not sound like a dick.

They are misunderstanding distros - I’m just letting them know. No judgement.

there’s always a bunch of people in the comments roasting them for AI use.

That happens here too, it’s just easier when you make AI disclosure a scarlet letter.

No, you’re entirely misunderstanding distros.

In fact pop exists at least in part explicitly to make it easier to install nvidia drivers to support system 76 gaming laptops.

It’s a good option if you want up to date nvidia drivers.

Still not true. People often just lie or make things up.

It does not matter how much slop was before, we always try to minimize it.

There is no policy that will stop that. It’s happening whether you want it to or not.

What every project needs is a way to handle submissions that ensures a level of quality. The kernel has this. Also needing to police whether code was llm generated would be an increased burden.

There is truth to every bit of propaganda

This is not true.

Well yeah, duh.

Opening ports is also trivial. You don’t generally need a dedicated IP if you keep a connection running but YMMV. And you don’t need a domain - just remember the IP. This is only for a few weeks.

Setting up ssh is nearly trivial. And saying it’s “less secure” doesn’t mean it’s insecure.

It’s the primary access point for thousands of systems and for good reason. It’s “good enough” for your little homelab.

LLMs generate a voluminous amount of code, which is mostly impossible to audit for security anyway.

They can but they didn’t have to. If you tell claude to “minimize changes” or “keep it simple” then it does.

This is why people need to familiarize themselves with AI tools. Even those of you who feel they are “of the devil”. Because how one uses these tools matters.

Jesus… Just port forward 22 to your system and ssh in directly.

Just use ssh and be sure to disable remote root access and require key based authentication. If it’s good enough for aws, azure, etc. then it’s good enough for what you want.

You’ll want to read up on port forwarding and pick a remote gui tool. “No machine” works very well for x11, but rdp is supported by some wayland displays. Vnc is the old workhorse.