schmichael

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
4,650
Submissions
737
Member since
Jan 6

  Live:    Portland, OR
  Work:    ▲ | ex-HashiCorp Nomad Eng Lead
schmichael most places on the internet, hmu
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
Comparing land area to IP address assignments is one of the sillier visualizations I've ever seen. I can't imagine what this is intending to convey. Should Siberia have more IP addresses than all of Europe?
Comment · 8 days ago
lxc never had a daemon but Canonical added one (lxd in 2015) and lxc forked it to incus to be community managed.

rkt (2013) was CoreOS's alternative to Docker and was daemon-less and failed.

Podman came along relatively late (2018) and benefited from a lot of Linux kernel and systemd improvements since Docker was designed.

So while arguably the client/server model is outdated for container management tools, I'm not sure it's weird. This is my workstation for example:

  schmichael@fedora:~$ ps -e -o comm= | rg 'd$' | wc -l
  67
Daemons are maybe the least weird paradigm you can choose for a Unix program.
Comment · 8 days ago
> Go is kind of a terrible language for a container runtime

I love Go and use it for everything I can but will absolutely concede this point. It's clearly possible to write the most successful container runtimes on earth in Go, but you absolutely have to fight the language/runtime sometimes. Since containers are based on processes, handing off a container spec to a minimal rust runtime seems like what we should all be doing by now. crun has just proven good enough that AFAIK no one has RIIR.

Comment · 18 days ago
Fair but I also know plenty of people who give their elderly folks their old iPads. If you fit all the important apps on the home screen and tweak a couple things, I can't imagine the UX could be any more complex than for this device. Mobility and screen size is even more important for the elderly. They don't want to stand in their kitchen staring down at a little computer to talk to their grandchild on a tiny screen.

And finally, when they do have issues and ask you questions: now it's questions about an unfamiliar device you may not own yourself!

Old iPad still seems optimal for this demographic.

Comment · 18 days ago
The weird thing about this product is that its biggest competitor is "an old ipad." I feel like most of their target customer base already has an old ipad that's better suited for what this does in every way. Old ipads:

1. Have a battery so you're not tied to a cord. Even old poor batteries are better than no battery.

2. Have apps! How does this not support apps?!

3. Have a huge range of 3rd party products and hacks and 3D models to wall mount it or stands for it

4. Are kitchen-safe (splatter proof, far fewer holes than this product, movable out of the way)

5. Also support siri and facetime and everything this device does AFAICT

I'm guessing they realized this and made sure it's priced lower than the cheapest new iPad, but it will be interesting to see if the price difference can compete with the old iPads most of their customers have in drawers or already on walls.

Maybe the purpose-built nature will be a reasonable enough differentiator, but I'm not sure it's focused enough for that. It's both a passive information station and for calls? It's for recipes which implies you put it in the kitchen, but it looks like a nightmare to clean with all those holes? It's also a very small screen when you have to read the recipe from a distance because it has no battery. I can't move my stove to it, and I definitely don't want it too near a stove or sink!

The multiple users feature is a really neat trick, but I would kill to have this for all Apple devices. Let me hand my kid my phone and it automatically switches to kid mode!

Please Apple don't lock multiple users to stationary devices like HomeView!

Comment · 21 days ago
I know plenty of my fellow millenials addicted to this slop too.
Comment · 21 days ago
The person in the TikTok put on their Scientist Halloween costume though so at least we’re getting good production value. Wouldn’t want to pour dangerous chemicals like corn syrup without gloves on!
Comment · 1 month ago
Same timeline for me, but this was my 3rd or 4th attempt at switching. Not sure if something materially improved or maybe LLMs finally just got good enough at helping me convert.
Comment · 1 month ago
The reason why this feature is particularly useful in vi-likes is because they are not IDEs. I hop in and out of vi all day long. Depending on the task I might create a new tab, run a command in vi, or exit vi to run it. Vi’s appeal is that it is “just” an editor and your terminal and workstation form your un-integrated development environment.
Comment · 1 month ago
We do love Scratch but account management is almost worse than something to install. If there’s no accounts, where does he save his work? The easiest option he’s discovered is copying and pasting it into a Google Doc because if he uses his school account he can access it from school or home.

What a terrible experience compared to a floppy disk! Sure disk failure was common and crushing, but the UX was simple and ubiquitous. I guess I could get him a thumb drive, but I don’t know if his school allows them.

Comment · 1 month ago
Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!

Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.

Comment · 1 month ago
And we do that and it is great but the restrictions are jarring and absolute, and docs written for “real” web dev always assume a dev server instead. AI can at least adapt.
Comment · 1 month ago
Same! I think our position just isn’t very interesting, so mostly we only hear from boomers or doomers. Gen Alpha seems largely outside that spectrum: ai where it supports creativity, no ai where it destroys creativity. The kids are alright.
Comment · 1 month ago
My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:

Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.

Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.

He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.

I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.

If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.

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