“ I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Carl Sagan - 1995

It’s also another example of someone who believes their success in one narrow area makes them an authority in everything else

There are few people alive who are less fit to lecture us on matters of theology and morality than Peter Thiel.

I run a ton of apps like this.

Look at it the other way. Why muck up my OS with a bunch of tiny apps? Who knows what version I’ll pull in my repo today. Chances are good it’s outdated with weird patches.

The docker image is built by the devs. All the proper dependencies are baked into the image. It’s going to run exactly as intended every time, no surprises.

And I can pick up the docker file and my configs and run it exactly the same on any OS.

I love watching this in tech, the pendulum swings, this is static linking in another dress,

Soon everyone adopts this, and then someone complains “why is there 500 libc libraries on my machine” or “there was critical bug and I had to update 388 containers - and some maintainers didn’t update and it’s a giant mess!”

Then someone will invent dynamic underlying container sharing (tm) and the pendulum will swing the other way for a bit, and in 2032, one dev will paste your comment in a slightly different form - why muck up my mindvisor with a bunch of tiny apps? Isolated runtimes are built by the devs,

And so on, back and forward forever

> And so on, back and forward forever

My god, we've discovered a genuine perpetual motion machine.

> this is static linking in another dress

Although static linking usually seems to result in small binaries that just run on the target machine while this needs all the Docket machinary (and the image sizes can get horrendous)

It's worse, it's reverse perpetual motion. It takes an infinite amount of energy to achieve something you could achieve with a tiny finite amount!

Noooo!!! Packaging all your dependencies by static linking is bad! Packaging all your dependencies as shared libraries into one tar file, separately for each app, is the way to go and needing another runtime just to be able to run your program (not for it to actually function.... just to run it). The final artefact is still only one file, but without the benefits of link-time-optimization!

We need a static linux distro, because i prefer to have a portable app that works on all linux distros.

Sounds like you need an APE

    The docker image is built by the devs.

Not in this case, it isn't.

All of the things you describe are just "package manager, but outside distro control," which is fine I guess but not really a meaningful answer.

I think the real answer is that distro packaging sucks; it tends to involve arcane distro-specific tools and introduce as many or more bugs than it fixes (with the added problem of playing hot potato with the bug reports), on top of delaying updates. Really, what do you gain by using distro packages? (I know the answer is supposedly that you get a set of well-tested versions of your applications that play nice with each other, but that's rarely been delivered in practice)

I don't disagree with that assessment, but I'm not sure docker's any different. It's just a different arcane set of tools that introduces as many failure points as it fixes (with the added problem of supply chain attacks) on top of having to use all the distro stuff anyway. So, while I use the hell out of docker, I don't really regard it as an improvement on (or really an alternative to) distro packages. I think it's a better tool for solving complex deployments, but e.g. irssi isn't really in that camp.

I think that like it or not, Docker has managed to win mindshare in a way that no single distro's package management ever did. Application developers could never get away with publishing only RPMs or only debs (and whether the same deb would work on Debian and Ubuntu was always a risky question), but everyone runs Docker; even the alternatives like Podman or Moby feel the need to be compatible with existing Docker packages.

Yeah, that's probably true among developers. Among other classes of users, providing a deb or an rpm (or some combination of package manager formats) has been pretty normal. Enterprise software like Slack has been doing this for ages, Microsoft distributed Teams that way for years, the CUDA stack is rpm/deb, etc. Outside of the dev world, docker is basically a signal that your devops people should be on the project. The most common question used to be "why no installer" but nowadays users just use the "app store" (Gnome's Software or KDE's Discover) to Get Stuff, and wouldn't be able to tell you if asked whether what they just installed was a native package or a Flatpak.

I do agree that Docker is ubiquitous in the development world, but I think the fraction of people even aware enough of packaging to have an opinion is vanishingly small.

Exactly, because owning a gun and being trained are very different things.

I own guns but I am not capable of performing a Charlie Kirk style assassination. Nor could I actually carry out a school shooting with high rate of fire across many weapons.

Both of these crimes require that the shooter have training and practice in this style of shooting. You need specialized equipment beyond what a casual gun owner will spend. Buying a 9mm and going to the range every couple of months isn’t cutting it.

Gun culture creates the environment where folk are prepping for combat situations. Go watch any guntuber and you’ll see them train for military situations that your hunter, farmer, or even family defense gun owner is not concerned with.

In fact, I learned that there’s a pejorative term “Fudds” for gun owners who aren’t militarized like this. As in, Elmer Fudd; an actual hunter that uses guns for game. Somehow this is not a respectable person for a gun nut.

When gun ownership becomes a hobby and personality trait you see a lot more people optimizing their habits toward maximum lethality

I have the opposite expectation actually

In the late 90s you weee considered a prodigy if you understood how to use a search engine. I had so many opportunities simply because I could find and retain information.

So LLMs have solved this. Knowing a framework or being able to create apps is not a marketable skill any longer. What are we supposed to do now?

It’s the soft skills that matter now. Being well liked has always been more important in a job than being the best at it. We all know that engineer who knows they are hot shit but everyone avoids because they are insufferable.

Those marketing people don’t need to spend a week on their deck any longer. They can work the customer relationship now.

Knowing how to iterate with an LLM to give the customer exactly what they need is the valuable skill now.

The palantir bubble will not pop as long as Thiel and his folk are embedded in USG. The stock took off when Trump/Vance came in and Vance is thiels pick

Their primary technology predates any AI hype by a decade at least, and their strength has always been in deploying great engineers.

Compare all data companies profit performance before AI came along: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741151

I don’t need to load up any social media app to hear the latest word from popular conservatives. Their voices are mainstream.

Does that mean I need to avoid Bluesky? Or Twitter? Is bluesky bad somehow because of that?

I’ve been using RSS feed for nearly 20 years now. Why we ever strayed to some endless algorithm is beyond me.

I have a list of chronologically sorted articles from sources I trust. That’s it and that’s all.

I read them until they are read. Then I close the app and do other stuff until tomorrow.

Is it any wonder Google killed off Reader around the same time it tried to launch Google+? Managing our own feeds was never going to peak capitalism.

But socialism is bad

Yes, it is indeed possible for two things to be bad at the same time.

Interesting that one of the items that they iPhone can’t replace is the “fuzz buster”, a radar detector

Arguably that’s also covered by Waze or any other speed trap app

But the dystopian take is that the iPhone gave away far more to the surveillance state than we ever had with scanners and radar detectors of old. I don’t think we’ll ever go back.

Yeah, but then the cops had radar detector-detectors. And of course the war of escalation continued, with radar-detector, detector, detectors. and even radar detector-detector-detector-detectors.

Fun times.

As I recall, the goal was for the detector detectors to shut off once detecting that they were being detected, to avoid a ticket in places where detectors were illegal.

And in Ontario, Canada? One single company sold to the cops and people, in a war of escalation that left their pockets quite padded. Wikipedia says BEL-Tronics, Inc. of Ontario, Canada

Kind of the same game-plan (suspected) of antivirus companies.

Is that because the wireless hardware on the phone can't pick it up, or because nobody has attempted to program it?

Then again, it needs to be a laser detector today.