For me, it was easier to just continue to use Ansible for machine reproducibility. I really like the thought behind Nix but I felt like I needed to elbows deep in it 24/7 to really grok it. And if I stopped looking at Nix for 6 months, then that knowledge just disappeared. I migrated away from NixOS for my homelab because I would come back to flakes I had written and not understand how anything worked and couldn't be bothered to relearn. I know that Ansible and Nix can sometimes be apple and oranges but I know that I can come back to a playbook and understand what it does even if I haven't touched Ansible for years.
...I was not at all confused about what it was when I looked at it.
When I saw "safe home for your photos" I assumed it was a platform for uploading photos via an app or on the web. "Cross platform" is even a sub-heading. Do you use iCloud or Google Photos?
Sometimes I see this complaint for products here and I am just... confounded. Are people unable to use context clues to infer meaning? I really don't mean to be rude here. It feels like there is some grander disconnect like if someone younger looked at a floppy disk and didn't know that it was a save icon.
Well, the monetization would be that you would have to have a subscription to use it over a long term - similar to AllTrails. Checklisting/packing/gear tracking was one dimension. The other dimensions would be curated backpacking routes and AI analysis of whether or not you were prepared for your trip.
The idea would be that you would scan all of your gear in and then create a map (or select one) and then Gemini would tell you whether or not you were prepared for that trip - does your sleeping bag insulate well enough, do you have the right shoes, etc. You could even do neat tricks like calculate expected route completing time based on assumed weight. I was also planning a "ask a human" feature that would snapshot all that data and post it to an internal forum.
Ultimately though, outdoor people hate AI (understandably). Selling it as "AI powered" is a no-go.
And I genuinely do not understand how to distribute software. Getting people to use your software is extremely hard unless it is very polished and has no bugs. The feature set was too similar to AllTrails so people will expect AllTrails quality. And something that I'm struggling with for all software that I make is I don't know how to get beta testers to get a better feedback loop. Going "hey my software isn't perfect but can you try it out and let me know what you think" is genuinely met with disdain for bothering the person, apathy, blank stares, or whatever. Doesn't really matter if it's offered for free or not - or even if the person expressed a desire for a solution. A person can say "wow that is a great idea I would love to try that" and I would follow up with them with practically no success.
At the end of the day I think I just want to give up and go back to big tech and optimize ad distribution pipelines to deliver weight loss ads to children or whatever tech is up to these days.
This is such a problem for any federated platform; there really isn't an obvious front door. And I'm sure there is some principled theology behind why this shouldn't be the case but ultimately I think there should be a front door somewhere - even if the front door leads you to the most blandest instance around.
I vibe coded a battery monitor for my wireless mouse. It doesn't have Linux support and I wanted to know when to charge it.
I built an AllTrails equivalent (iOS app and all). It allows me to scan my backpacking gear to load it into a library (with metadata attached), build a weight profile for my trip, has offline maps, and more. I wanted to make something that was more suited to long backpacking trips and will eventually add itinerary planning. I was originally planning on trying to monetize it but I don't know how to sell software and honestly the QA process is so time consuming (hike, fix bugs, hike more, fix those bugs) that I just gave up. I plan on redeploying it to my homelab since I previously ran it on Hetzner.
All of that is intentional. There isn't enough money to be made connecting people. Revenue streams are driven by ads attached to media interaction. Connecting people is low engagement. We, as consumers, have rewarded this revenue model by proving that it works. If you don't want to contribute to it then don't use these large platforms.
I use Linux and MacOS. I did just remove Windows because I didn't want to migrate to W11.
Honestly, MacOS is great. I don't really understand the hate for it... and Apple hardware is genuinely a cut above the rest. I actually think it's really a pity that Apple is so big that it's able to vertically integrate so many areas of laptop development that OEMs struggle to compete.
It's a really cool project and clearly you put a lot of effort behind it. I like that it's self-hosted and may try it out on my homelab. Thanks for making it!
Something that I was hoping was that LLMs would make software development easy enough so that I could upskill in areas that determine entrepreneurial success. But I find that the quality of code from LLMs is low enough that I have to spend a lot of time doing QA (or manual coding).
But also you could write the god damn best software out there but if you can't convince people to open the web page or download the app then it goes nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
It actually really hurt when I pulled up the page. It's why I'm trying to bootstrap my own software company off of my savings.
I'm aiming for 85k (or there abouts) after a few years of earning nothing. But I can't help but feel like a failure because distribution and convincing people to use my software is extremely difficult. I don't want to go back to the tech industry but at the same time I don't know if I have it in me to go "yeah, I'm still working on my <insert dream here> but I have 0 - 10 users" for the next few years.
It's hard to maintain open source software that needs infrastructure. Everyone is a volunteer and it's not like the Mandriva project has the resources to fully vet people as well as have a high quality RBAC and access control system. This guy sounds like maintained a large project, offered to help, and Mandriva saw the Trojan horse as a way to alleviate a lot of their problems.
And it didn't sound like he was able to "nuke everything" - it sounds like he had access to their repository infrastructure (which is reasonable given he was volunteering to host it) and then lashed out.
If anything, I think it's a bigger organizational red flag that they agreed to privately host their source code on some random git forge and not a larger, more communal one. I mean, even if they didn't want to use GitHub (did this even cost money for them) then there are other providers to choose from.
It just sounds like the Mandriva maintainers are trusting and good folk who may be overworked running an open source project and that led to a bad apple entering the bunch. It's hard for me to be mad in that kind of situation.
It's not huge showstoppers. It's just a lot of little annoying things and last mile configurations. For example, I have to launch KCD2 with a Steam Deck related launch option for it to pick up my controller. It took a bunch of googling to figure that out.
I have an Audeze Maxwell headset whose dongle was left in Xbox mode (which Windows was happy with) and so I spent 30 minutes debugging why it wasn't working in Linux until I flipped it to PC mode - which crashed PulseAudio so I had to restart it.
Dota2 has a native Linux client... but it suffers from microstuttering and that's just killing me. FPS is high as I have a 4080 but, man, the stutters are killing me.
Battlebit initially launched in a resolution so low that I had to guess through game menus to get it to my monitors native resolutions. It's just... small and annoying things.
I don't really mind, personally. I grew up using Linux. I don't mind doing these configurations and it's worth it to have a dev environment on my desktop computer. It's just that Linux isn't really "Microsoft competitor" ready when it comes to gaming. Valve has put in a bunch of hard work though. Huge kudos to Valve for getting Linux as far as its come. I hope the Steam Machine takes off and we see more hardware and game developer support.
This is super cool. More options is always good. Something that is confusing about the docs though... is there a desktop application? The screenshot implies there is but I couldn't find the docs to download THAT.
Yeah, but you're also on Hacker News. You are an outlier. I recently wiped Windows off of my gaming PC and installed CachyOS and, honestly, Linux just isn't ready yet. I'm also an outlier because I'm an SRE whose first distro was Slackware and I'm returning to the fold because Linux gaming has gotten much, much better... but it is still pretty inferior to playing games on Windows.
> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music
Something I'm trying to do right now is to build something and avoid using LLMs to write any code. I still use it to consult. I'm writing a Dota2 tournament match aggregator in Elixir that takes tournament streams and chronologically orders them in a format that makes it easier to watch them sequentially since I find YouTube hard to use for ingesting series of videos.
I'm building it because... I like programming. I like making things. I find that LLMs are making me intellectually lazy and making things with them feels unfulfilling. I want to build. It's human to want to build.
Oh yeah, no shade against the language itself. I had fun learning it and using it for some toy development years ago - and the TEA still exists in multiple library implementations. Just wild to see the creator of the language emerge from the fog like that.