Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.
Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro.
Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.
However, my IPMI motherboard and FreeBSD's integrated ZFS boot environments might be considered cheating...
My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.
That you could always just boot from the CD and start again was nice. I think I reinstalled 4-5 times the "first time" before I got it where I wanted to be.
Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...
AI walled-gardens break the feedback loop: authors seeing view-counts and seeing "[Solved] thank you!" messages helps morale.
Then the LLM companies will notice, and they’ll start to create their own updated private training data.
But that may be a new centralization of knowledge which was already the case before the internet. I wonder if we are going to some sort of equilibrium between LLMs and the web or if we are going towards some sort of centralization / decentralization cycles.
I also have some hope that LLMs will annihilate the commercial web of "generic" content and that may bring back the old web where the point was the human behind the content (be it a web page or a discussion). But that what I’d like, not a forecast.
THe problem with LLMs is that a single token (or even a single book) isn't really worth that much. It's not like human writing, where we'll pay far more for "Harry Potter" and "The Art of Computer Programming" than some romance trash with three reads on Kindle.
I wonder about this a lot when I ask LLMs niche technical questions. Often there is only one canonical source of truth. Surely it's somehow internally prioritising the official documentation? Or is it querying the documentation in the background and inserting it into the context window?
But longer form tutorials or even books with background might suffer more. I wonder how big the market of nice books on IT topics will be in the future. A wiki is probably in the worst place. It will not be changed with the MR like man pages could be and you do not get the same reward compared to publishing a book.
I think there will be differences based on how centralized the repository of knowledge is. Even if textbooks and wikis largely die out, I imagine individuals such as myself will continue to keep brief topic specific "cookbook" style collections for purely personal benefit. There's no reason to be averse to publishing such things to github or the like and LLMs are fantastic at indexing and integrating disparate data sources.
Historically sorting through 10k different personal diaries for relevant entries would have been prohibitive but it seems to me that is no longer the case.
You see it referenced everywhere as a fantastic documentation source. I’d love seeing that if I were a contributor
I had a bit of a heated debate with ChatGPT about the best way to restore a broken strange mdadm setup. It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point until I posted terminal output.
Sometimes I feel it’s learnt from the more belligerent side of OSS maintenance!
- As the context window grows the LLM will become less intelligent [1] - Once your conversation takes a bad turn, you have effectively “poisoned” the context window, and are asking an algorithm to predict the likely continuation of text that is itself incorrect [2]. (It emulating the “belligerent side of OSS maintenance” is probably quite true!)
If you detect or suspect misunderstanding from an LLM, it is almost always best to remove the inaccuracies and try again. (You could, for example, ask your question again in a new chat, but include your terminal output + clarifications to get ahead of the misunderstanding, similar to how you might ask a fresh Stack Overflow question).
(It’s also a lot less fun to argue with an LLM, because there’s no audience like there is in the comments section with which to validate your rhetorical superiority!)
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991256
The "good" news is a lot of newer LLMs are grovelling, obsequious yes-men.
Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.
For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.
As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).
Seen too many batshit answers from chatgpt when I know the answer but don't remember the exact command.
It was XFree86 until around mid 00s after which the X.org fork took over.
I believe this to be the entire ecosystem, not just Arch. It's been a long while since something like moving to 64bit happened. Or swapping out init systems.
I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto.
(I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)
A few years before the Xorg thing there was also the 2.4 to 2.6 kernel switchover. I think I maybe was using Slackware at that point, and I remember building my own kernel to try out the new shiny thing. You also had to update some userspace packages if I remember correctly: things like modprobe/insmod at the very least.
It's to the point where if I see 'archlinix-keyring' in my system update, I immediately abort and run through the manual process of updating keys. That's prevented any arch nuclear disasters for the last couple years
This was still the case when I switched to arch in like 2016 lol
I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.
Crux is a great distro for anyone ok with a source distro and I think it might be the best source distro, unlike the more common source distros, it does not do most of the work for you. Also love its influence from BSD, which came in very handy when I started to explore the BSDs and FreeBSD which is my fallback for when Patrick dies or steps back, Crux deserves more attention.
The best successor I've found is Alpine. It's minimal and secure by design, has an excellent package manager (I much prefer apk to pacman or xbps, or apt and rpm for that matter), has stable and LTS releases while letting people who want to be rolling release do so by running edge. People think it's only for containers but it has every desktop package anyone would need, all up to date and well maintained. Their wiki isn't at Arch's level, but it's pretty damn good in its own right.
Back then I used Arch because I thought it would be cool and it's what Linux wizards use. Now Arch has gotten older, I've gotten older, and now I'm using Arch again because I've become (more of a) Linux wizard.
The python (is python2) transition was even more silly though. Breaking changes to the API and they wanted (and did!) force re-pointing the command to python3? That's still actively breaking stuff today in places that are forsaken enough to have to support python2 legacy systems.
That does sound significantly longer ago then 2016 ;)
I do miss Arch but there is no way I am going to keep up with updates, I will do them when I discover I can't install anything new and then things will break because it has been so long since my last update. Slackware is far more suited to my nature but it will never be Arch.
Why do I miss the stupid unconscious bravery of those days :)
...a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor