nice. this is a detail that i needed to know that would otherwise be a dealbreaker.
i am intrigued by the promises of better histories, since i’ve been reviewing and contributing to a bunch of repos at work.
a lot easier to use
see this is the issue. i don’t find git hard to use. and i’m not going to be one of those assholes that’s like “i never thought it was hard”; i’ve just genuinely been at this for over a decade now. and i run nushell so i’m not opposed to new niche things as long as it improves my workflow.
i really want to get into jj cuz i like the pitch, but the real struggle isn’t new syntax or learning curve but the fact that my workflows at home and especially at work are built around git and GitOps. i tried briefly to integrate it into my dotfiles, but migrating such a large repository got a little hairy.
is there a doc about why a seasoned pro (at least don’t tell my manager otherwise) would switch to jj? are people using this in production effectively? is there a world where i can integrate jj into existing git based workflows that interact seemlessly with other contributors using plain ole git?
“patience is the absence of expectation”
— Shinichi Suzuki
you’re doing everything right. you’re probably worrying too much and prescribing too much. listen to the science and the literature, but also listen to your body. everyone is different. i’ve been lifting for 5 years and bailed out of a 60kg bench press yesterday (tbh higher reps but still; i was embarrassed).
also, comparison is the thief of joy. don’t compare yourself to the guy next to you or the influencers on Instagram or “what’s normal”. the only person you need to try to be better than is you from last week or last month or last year.
trying is the point. trying is progress. discipline is greater than motivation. we all have bad days. but it’s a journey. have a bad day, and go to the gym the next day and celebrate that you made it.
i started when i was 30, and i have been consistent for over 4 years. it pays off eventually, i promise.
but LLMs do represent a significant technological leap forward. i also share the skepticism that we haven’t “cracked AGI” and that a lot of these products are dumb. i think another comment made a better analogy to the dotcom bubble.
ETA: i’ve been working in ML engineering since 2019, so i can sometimes forget most people didn’t even hear about this hype train until ChatGPT, but i assure you inference hardware and dumb products were picking up steam even then (Tesla FSD being a classic example).
i know it’s popular to be very dismissive, but a lot of “AI” has already been integrated into normal workflows. AI autocomplete in development text editors, software keyboards, and question asking bots isn’t going away. speech-to-text, “smart eraser”, subject classification, signal processing kernels like DLSS and frame generation, and so many more will be with us and improving for a long time. Transformers, machine learning optimized chips, and other ML fields are going to be with us for a long time. the comparison to NFTs is either angst or misunderstanding.
the thing that finally got me using a terminal multiplexer was zellij. you can think of it as tmux with training wheels, but i don’t see a reason to go back.
i don’t know the full nature of the exploit, but zlib has an exploitable integer overflow via the MiniZip project. even though our images don’t use that project.
the issue with this take is that they have been transitioning their enterprise services to web services. i and others on my team effectually use Microsoft enterprise tooling on Mac and Linux machines.
i don’t think AD has anything to do with desktop Linux adoption?
i have a Linux Dell at home as well (from work), but it’s just a thin Ubuntu clone with some Dell bloatware. they really could go wild with it with just a few resources. Chromebook is also a good example of what i’m talking about.
OEM integration. i feel like there is a lot to like about Linux that most people who can will. but i think the thing that’s grown Linux a lot (other than geopolitical shifts) in recent time is SteamOS. not just because of Proton, but they’re literally selling a computer as an OEM with a 1st class linux OS. imagine if Dell and HP and Razer started doing the same
it wasn’t tough to get started. it generally reads like a normal Unix shell with some exceptions. i don’t think many Linux power users would have a hard time doing basic file system tasks or launching programs, etc. there are going to be some issues, like you can’t just paste bash commands in because && isn’t supported, multiline strings don’t require the \ character, and string escaping is totally different. those are intentional deviations that i personally agree with, but they take some getting used to. and then obviously stuff that is specific to nushell like working with tables.
definitely the killer feature out of the box is manipulating, parsing, and reading structured data. the “aha” moment for me was when i needed to change a value over a thousand or so JSON objects and did it with a one liner. then i use it with some extra overlays to do stuff like connect to a k8s cluster like k8s connect (helm stage dev.0) which reads my YAML config and connects to the cluster specified in that file. or making a call to our internal package store to get the latest version by parsing the returned JSON.
it works out of the box with your existing PATH (or Path if you’re nasty). you can just drop into it and it will have all the path stuff inherited just like if you launched zsh or bash. you’ll have to set that up if you want to use it as a system shell—like i do—, but otherwise it’s pretty seemless.
ETA: if you do have compatibility problems or need your old muscle memory to do something quick, it’s easy enough to use bash -c old_script.sh or just drop into a different shell
i was once sitting where you are. when PowerShell was released on Linux i thought about switching and read the manual. i really liked some of the philosophy:
descriptive names for commands. cat and ls have canonical short names to save disk space on the systems they were created for. this is no longer a constraint and aliasing a longer command name is better than “git gud n00b” when it comes to discoverability.
structured data. “everything is a string” is great when programs play nice. it breaks apart when programs prefer human readable output or worse don’t provide structured output, like —format=json or whatever.
modern control flow semantics. yes, pipes are great, let’s keep those, but why do i have to rtfm every time i want to bang out a simple script with an if-else control flow?
i looked around at a few solutions. xonsh uses Python. eshell is integrated into emacs and uses Elisp. i briefly tried to hack something together using Kotlin Script. and yeah, i tried PowerShell.
i settled on nushell not just because it fulfilled the above requirements, but also:
simple data types. string, number, list, record, and table are about the only types you deal with.
wide support for structured data. JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV, etc have parsers built in. jq and other such tools are made irrelevant because you just load it into nushell query with a unified DSL using common syntax like select and where.
honestly, these are the killer features. there are so many more. context aware autocomplete, modules and overlays, super easy custom completions, extension functions (one of my favorites is git remote open), cross platform (if you’re forced to use Windows), plugins, and i can contribute since i do Rust development for work.
give PowerShell a shot, but i think nushell is the happy medium
nice. this is a detail that i needed to know that would otherwise be a dealbreaker.
i am intrigued by the promises of better histories, since i’ve been reviewing and contributing to a bunch of repos at work.
see this is the issue. i don’t find git hard to use. and i’m not going to be one of those assholes that’s like “i never thought it was hard”; i’ve just genuinely been at this for over a decade now. and i run
nushellso i’m not opposed to new niche things as long as it improves my workflow.i’ll have to check it out again.