A lot of what appeals to people about the past isn’t so much about returning to a golden age but recapturing authenticity. We rarely get the real thing nowadays.
We can't afford it, or at least don't want to pay for it. And quite often, attempting to give a significant fraction of the 9 billionish people on earth something authentic of the past would be an ecological disaster.
I mean, it's not like everyone having a personal automobile and AC set to 68 isn't an ecological disaster... I don't want to return us all to subsistence farming, but unless we do something, we won't really get to make that choice ourselves anyway.
I don't disagree, but at the same time, building the same cars we did in 1960 now would ensure the atmosphere would be incandescent in the next few years.
If you look at things like US energy consumption per capita it leveled off in the 1970s and has decreased since, so it is possible, but we're not getting those thing we had during the days of insane energy usage.
AC is fine, with sufficient PV and insulation - most of the time, hot days are sunny days and thus easily renewable.
Most people shouldn't own personal automobiles, because most people live in cities and cities shouldn't be built around the personal automobile in the first place.
Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs.
Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
I would argue that most people who had a blog were 15-25 in that time. Yes it was very common in that demo, but outside of it, it was definitely not. I don't know if that classifies as "mainstream".
The very active ecosystem of blogs I followed in the first decade of the new millennium, on arts themes (literature, cinema, non-popular music) and religious-denomination news, were mainly people above 30 blogging, sometimes much older. Wordpress had made it easy for any computer user, not just tech nerds, to set something up.
The previous poster might also consider all the high profile, independent, and influential publications across various subjects that grew out of blogging – e.g. HuffPo, Pitchfork, Jezebel, so many video gaming and entertainment sites... many of which were sadly bought up by rich idiots and/or existing media conglomerates.
> Everyone and their mother wasn’t online back then.
Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!
It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad when that turned into social media.
The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
> Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream.
Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.
Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.
Heh, when you started talking about venturing outside I thought you were going to talk about in real life meat space.phones and tablets really freed us up but we still don’t leave our house to go on the internet for discussions. Funny with all that freedom the untethered life gets us.
I recently looked into the BSDs for a desktop project before going back to Debian. I love the philosophy but they’re for the initiated.
The onboarding rails just aren’t there these days. Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.
One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience.
> Everyone says the BSD documentation is superb, but the man pages are more of a reference than an onboarding guide.
If you try it again, the FreeBSD Handbook is the onboarding guide. [1] It's been a long while since I've set something up going from the Handbook, so I can't personally attest to its quality, but it's supposed to be good.
> One major challenge is LLMs have a hard time with BSD-related prompts. They’re trained on so much more Linux content, and there’s just enough overlap between both systems that hallucination rates are extremely high in my experience
I can't imagine they work well on Linux either, because different distributions have a different selection of tools, especially when you consider older documentation that's still out there and no longer works on mainstream distributions as tools have been replaced. The same is almost certainly true for MacOS and probably Windows as well. All of the OSes I can think of where most of the online documentation should be consistent probably don't have much online documentation. I'm not a LLM user (which is probably obvious), but I can't imagine how you'd get good information from it... at best, maybe you could get pointers to documentation you should read and understand yourself, or you could find the documentation and paste it to be summarized? People that use LLMs that I've tried to help with problems will tell me that the LLM told them X when it doesn't make sense and it actively contributes to their problem, so that doesn't give me confidence; of course, people who use LLMs and it solves their problem don't need my help, do they? :)
I "tested" the handbook recently (I think on FreeBSD 14 when it came out) and I can attest that the experience was flawless. It is even surprising that the right way to use it, is to follow a documentation and apply what it says, versus the Linux way which looks a lot more like "google your way through multiple different ways of doing the thing until you find the one that works".
They do, and they work better on Ubuntu/Debian than on e.g. Alpine, which in turn works better than some wonky Yocto build (ask me how I know). The mere existence of different distributions and tool selections is not the important factor here, but the amount of discourse there is in the training data. Debian and Debian-likes run the table here.
I've found Claude 4.5 Sonnet to be great with FreeBSD stuff. Very occasionally it'll hallucinate a sysctl argument, but that's been about the extent of my issues.
One way to look it is to approach it as a creative practice. A good part of any practice is devoted to developing technique.
Some are just fine with a standardized but unoptimized tool while others are fascinated by building their own high-flying TUI. The journey is the destination. If all you create is a config file, it still counts.
I’m exploring a similar implementation and am honestly torn between NixOS and a more monolithic experience like Debian or OpenBSD.
As much as I love the idea of declarative builds, I’m struggling to justify the investment of learning and maintaining Nix for an individual setup. I’ve dabbled with it and mostly encountered footguns.
Whatever makes a nice, clean slab is what I’m after.
I've greatly benefited from investing just a few hours then utilizing LLMs. I was very unfamiliar to a lot of the syntax from the nix language, so I spent most of my time getting an overview. It was less than 8 hours total.
Another thing that helps a lot is to browse other people's codes on Github.
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