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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • It’s hard to be a contrarian in these kinds of positions (I’ve been there, and it didn’t end well), so I wouldn’t be too outspoken, but at the same time, try to innocently point out the issues with approaches like this. I would just try to point out the flaws in this approach, the same that we would for any other kind of programming fad - without making it seem like it’s an agenda, of course.

    For example, any time teams are looking for feedback - code review, retrospectives, etc. - just point out the flaws on why vibe coding is a bad idea and bring it up casually when the time comes. It doesn’t hurt to be honest as long as you don’t come off as being an ass about it.









  • I’m so tired of reading this stupid argument. “People only dislike systemd because they’re afraid of change.” No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here’s the real issue:

    Do you really think it’s a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?

    Let’s consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users’ default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn’t conform to its “standards” in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome’s engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.

    That’s exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.

    Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do…

    But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering’s new startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572