This new one seems even pushier to shove me on the shortest-path solution

It's really not that hard. I lived in NL for a year and assimilated Dutch just about as well as my flatmate (a German who was taking a taking a Dutch language class)

Go out and pay attention to your surroundings. Read everything. Make dutch friends. Spend some time outside the large cities.

Dutch is already like half English just spelled and pronounced way differently.

Worse, they exploit our curiosity and open-mindedness to build their empires for them. Which we willingly do because cool shiny shit.

Nerd-sniping as a weapon of oppression

A lot of it is simply that they are far more open to the idea of curiousity as having value than most people.

> cool shiny shit

You mean absurdly high compensation for very comfortable, low-stress office work? People work to feed their families, not just because working is 'cool'.

Who replies to you with fucking emoji brainrot

You are absolutely right!

You can tell it to be no nonsense

For that wealth to mean anything he has to withdraw from it, and wouldn't that produce a paper trail?

Apologies if its mentioned in TFA, I only got halfway through it... the author's self-indulgence was getting to be a bit much

I know right? 8-year-old me dreamed of being able to articulate software to a computer without having to write code. It (along with the original Stable Diffusion) are Definitely one of the coolest inventions to ever come along in my lifetime

Well, the cloud is someone else's computer.

It is, but that's not a useful or insightful thing to say

It's not an insightful statement right now, but it was at the peak of cloud hype ca. 2010, when "the cloud" often used in a metaphorical sense. You'd hear things like "it's scalable because it's in the cloud" or "our clients want a cloud based solution." Replacing "the cloud" in those sorts of claims with "another person's computer" showed just how inane those claims were.

No, it doesn't at all. "it's scalable because it's in the cloud" may be reductive nonsense or it could be true. It's scalable because it's on someone elses computer and in a matter of minutes it can be on one of their computers with twice the ram and vCPUs. That is a meaningful thing to say when the alternative is CAPEX heavy investment in your own infrastructure. Same with "our clients want a cloud based solution" in contrast with on-prem installs. They don't want your shitty pizza box in their closet, they want someone else to be doing the hosting.

Are you sure about that?

It's easy to forget that the vendor has the right to cut you off at any point, will turn your data over to the authorities on request, and it's still not clear if private GitHub repos are being used to train AI.

Two of these are basic contractual problems, your company should have a lawyer who can sort them out easily. The third (data being turned over to authorities) is something that the vast majority of companies do not care about in the slightest.

People pass around stickers (or at least used to) in hacker events saying that so there has to be something to it, right?

Protesting the term is, I'd wager, motivated by something like: it sounds innocuous to nontechnical people and obscures what's really going on.

Only if owning the means of your production isn't important to you

LLMs cost money, regular expressions are free. It really isn't so strange.

I have never really understood the systemd hate. It sure as hell beat the sorcery that was managing init.d scripts for everything.

I managed the distro upgrade on hundreds of remotely-managed nodes, porting our kiosk appliance from a pre-systemd debian to a post-systemd debian, and out of all the headaches we suffered systemd was not one of them, short of a few quirks we caught in our development process. It pretty much just worked and the services it provided made that upgrade so much easier.

Curious how you got burned, I hear a lot of complaining but haven't seen a lot of evidence

I don't understand the init.d script hate ;)