Yeah, I realized that as soon as I posted it.

You know what this is launching just in time for?

Tax season.

Cue* 10 million people getting audited because they let their browser file their taxes for them.

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It’s glorified autocorrect (/predictive text).

People fight me on this every time I say it but it’s literally doing the same thing just with much further lookbehind.

In fact, there’s probably a paper to be written about how LLMs are just lossily compressed Markov chains.

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I’ve long maintained that actually writing code is only a small part of the job. Understanding the code that exists and knowing what code to write is 90% of it.

I don’t personally feel that gen AI has a place in my work, because I think about the code as I’m writing it. By the time I have a complete enough understanding of what I want the code to do in order to write it into a prompt, the work is already mostly done, and banging out the code that remains and seeing it come to life is just pure catharsis.

The idea of having to hand-hold an LLM through figuring out the solution itself just doesn’t sound fun to me. If I had to do that, I’d rather be teaching an actual human to do it.

But at a certain point, it seems like you spend more time babysitting and spoon-feeding the LLM than you do writing productive code.

There’s a lot of busywork that I could see it being good for, like if you’re asked to generate 100 test cases for an API with a bunch of tiny variations, but that kind of work is inherently low value. And in most cases you’re probably better off using a tool designed for the job, like a fuzzer.

I’ve maintained for a while that LLMs don’t make you a more productive programmer, they just let you write bad code faster.

90% of the job isn’t writing code anyway. Once I know what code I wanna write, banging it out is just pure catharsis.

Glad to see there’s other programmers out there who actually take pride in their work.

Why would you bring up C# in a thread about kernel programming?

You go ahead and write an OS kernel in C# then.

Because Rust lets you choose when something is unsafe vs writing all unsafe in code all the time:

Note the other 159 kernel CVEs issued today for fixes in the C portion of the codebase

I’m not saying there’s no people trying it, or that the actual number is negligible. I’m just saying I highly fucking doubt that 780,000 people have actually installed Zorin OS in the last month.

That “780,000 Windows users” number is just made up for the title as clickbait.

That number is never mentioned in the original blog post.

All they said is they have a million downloads and “over 78% of these downloads came from Windows”. At no fucking point did they imply that means 780k unique users. There’s no reason to assume that everyone who downloaded the ISO actually went on to install it.

They also want $48 for their Pro version which comes with a “professional-grade creative suite” consisting of… GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, Kdenlive, and… Audacity (?), going off the screenshots they show:

They’re shamelessly reselling free software as some sort of comprehensive package, and it’s not even their own distro. They’re just piggybacking on Ubuntu.

And their premium support only covers… installation?

But hey, they support this edition with updates until 2029!

Of course, pay no attention to the coincidence that the Ubuntu LTS version it’s based on also hits end-of-life around then:

So I’m not really sure what you’re actually getting out of this purchase besides some extra themes and some really formulaic desktop wallpapers, and a couple proprietary apps. They say they “contribute to upstream Open Source projects” but offer zero evidence; their site doesn’t even have any Github/Gitlab links.

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I know, after I posted that I was looking at their outages and worrying that my 1/month estimate too much of an exaggeration cause they hadn’t had a big one in a bit.

I wasn’t the original person that replied.

Could start with the fact that they go down about once a month now and take half the Internet with them.

If someone’s self-hosting, I’d be willing to bet they don’t have the same hardened config or isolation that a cloud provider would.

No VPN.

I’ve started noticing websites just to refuse to work on Linux:

• Xfinity
• Microsoft
• United Airlines
• American Airlines

It’s not like some weird script error either. It’s straight up a 403 Forbidden on certain routes. Works perfectly fine if I switch to my Windows laptop. It’s like it took one look at my user agent string and decided I was a bot.