I don’t mean to argue with you. I’m just trying to answer your implied question - “Why are so many programmers angry at this new tool?”

Like artists, this new tool steals our work without giving due credit. And then it tries to replace us with a low quality mass regurgitation of our past work.

I’m not angry that you have this new tool, I’m still happy if it helps you.

I’m angry at how this tool was created and how it is being sold and monetized by scam artists.

Edit: I guess I am arguing one point: People keep unjustly crediting AI for making an on-ramp for new developers. AI didn’t do shit. People like myself built that on-ramp. I am happy that AI made the on-ramps I have helped build more discoverable. But I wish folks would not lose site of the fact that AI is just regurgitating guides that I, and my peers, wrote.

It is insulting to constantly hear about how helpful AIs answers are. I wrote many of those answers. AI copied and pasted them.

If you have a network share available, it can be a git remote.

cd NETWORKSHARE
mkdir dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles.git
git init --bare

cd $HOME/dotfiles
git remote add origin NETWORKSHARE/dotfiles.git

Then do git push and git pull operations as usual. The files at NETWORKSHARE/dotfiles.git will not be readable, but will have the full history of changes.

300 years ago you had to at least take on an apprenticeship to ever get to do that. Sewing with a sewing machine is so much faster, there is not much time to invest before you can make your own clothes.

And four years ago a person needed a $100.00 Raspberry Pi 400 and a $25 Python or Java book, or an Internet connection and the URL for https://scratch.mit.edu/.

I am also a fan of how AI is making coding more accessible. But it was hardly out of reach before AI hit the scene.

Many of us in the community pirated our first proprietary code editors and books; and we worked hard for our whole careers to make sure the next generation of developers didn’t have to steal their entry to the profession.

Then AI slurped up and regurgitated our years of hard work, and newbies are thanking AI tech bro assholes for welcoming them to the coding community; instead of thanking the folks who tirelessly wrote and published the materials that the AI is regurgitating.

It’s fine to agree that AI made a difference. But AI only did the final easy part.

Hell, this service might still have zero “AI” in it but count as an “agent” for marketing purposes.

True. I do think that’s where we might find something useful after the bubble pops.

But it’s some shit marketing though.

“Microservices, but sometimes it hallucinates.” is a sales pitch targeted for gullible suckers.

I’ve wiped better ideas off of the used shoes of an old bash profile than the average agentic AI solution.

Yes. One could imagine the privacy invasion will be completely “coincidental”, and fairly complete, for many users.

Everyday that passes my satisfaction has grown since jumping over to Linux Mint.

Yes! Our recent Linux Mint software update drama was some nice new quality of life improvements coming to the next version of KDE Plasma.

Watching Windows 11 unfold from this side has been like sipping a cup of hot tea on the porch, wearing a good jacket, during a rain storm, while holding the storm door open for folks coming in out of the bad weather.

Yes!

I may get a shit sound experience at home, but at least I have an opportunity for an even worse sound experience at my local theater, first.

Please hold. The invisible hand of the market is on its way. Please hold. Nothing is wrong with your economy. The invisible hand of the market is on its way. Please hold. Do not attempt to adjust your economy. Trust the invisible hand. Please hold…

You’ve just never seen him because he hasen’t accepted a meeting invite is 14 years.

And counting!

I’m with you on that but the price still seems steep to me.

Agreed. While it seems like we’re all still speculating at this point, $1000.00 would be a pill to swallow for couch co-op gaming.

Hopefully if RAM prices drive the price this high, arresting and jailing another batch of RAM producer CEOs can bring prices and the Steam Machine down in price to something reasonable.

I can dream, anyway.

In the meantime, I may still pay the premium just to signal my interest in having a less closed gaming option hooked up to my TV.

But why buy the Steam Machine over a PlayStation at that point?

I don’t buy locked-down hardware, with a locked-down game ecosystem, when open hardware is available, so the Playstation isn’t in the running, for me.

If itch.io and the like run on Playstation, that’s good to hear. I have assumed that they do not, from what I know of Sony in the past.

Anyway, I’m still pissed about the time that Sony shipped a self-installing Windows virus on their music CDs. I had to wipe and rebuild before my PC felt usable again.

If your monitor is currently connected via HDMI, and supports any other type of cable, I would try any other type of cable.

I have had similar issues when the Digital Rights Management (DRM) layer of HDMI was having timing issues, causing a blank screen.

In my case, it would sometimes work, if the power up / wake up / boot up cycles of the monitor and CPU happened to align, but on certain of my PC builds the timing tended to not match up during most boots, and I usually got a blank screen.

Edit: Oh, and classic advice for the ages - when I have the monitor hooked up to a graphics card, I switch it over for one boot and see if that fixes things long enough to pull some log files and get more info.

“With a certain audience, this life extending solution tested very well.”

“Great. How soon can we perfect the life extending bit and start selling it?”

“About that…”

Edit: We correlated the data, and this is going to sell well with Linux users.

was working for 30 mins until I realised that Firefox was “stuck” and unclickable.

I had an issue like that come and go on Gnome (Ubuntu’s default desktop environment) with Firefox and Chrome. I never tracked down a root cause.

I switched to KDE Plasma, instead.

I feel like Gnome is going through a finding itself phase, right now.

Edit: That’s the beauty of open source. I can help fix the problem, or…if I can’t…I can nope out of the way onto another solution until it is solved.

There will probably be a hefty convenience tax in the price of the SteamDeck, in exchange for my not having to learn a bunch of facts about graphics cards (which can play what, what drivers they need, how to tune them, which one to buy now that the one I researched is sold out to AI crypto bros, rinse and repeat research steps, AI cryto bro-ed again, etc.)

I know I could get a better price, I just haven’t found the time. If the Steam Machine comes anywhere close, I’m probably going to (foolishly / lazily) buy one.

Valve bought my trust with my SteamDeck. Let’s see if they spend it well when I eventually buy a Steam Machine.

Yeah. I’ve paid $1,000.00 for a solid gaming PC before, and got much worse results than I expect from “A SteamDeck that knows it is plugged in.”

Kind of a non-news item, to me.

I’m not buying a new model every year at that price, but if I expect it to last 5-10 years, I’ll probably end up buying one.

A bunch of this is going to come down to Valve’s build quality, warranty support, and whether these Steam Machine are repairable or not.

I’m kind of sad this thread has so much thoughtful discussion and so few memes.

Wouldn’t it be better to have more serious threads and less memes that hint at political/news arguments?

No. It would not. There’s plenty of thoughtful discussion to find here, but the memes are the joyful cascade that carries us between thoughtful discussions.

My team does this, but we collaborate in Markdown, and then one of us converts it into a PDF when we finish.

Ansible has extensive tools for applying partial configs to specific configuration files, leaving the rest unchanged.

It’s meant for remote hosts, but it works fine pointed at localhost.

Ansible might be overkill - might be enough to make a quick bash script that finds the most recently active Firefox profile and just drops the files you care about there.

This does sound like more than most dotfile managers as are able to handle.