8 ms·

Uh, I live in Australia, it's always a problem ;) More seriously, unless you're doing stuff locally (in which case, go ham doing cool things on your system), t

Uh, I live in Australia, it's always a problem ;) More seriously, unless you're doing stuff locally (in which case, go ham doing cool things on your system), the tools you use need to work for others, with their requirements and restrictions (some of which can be changed, but others which are inherent).

maccard 2y ago
The problem is that we cater for the absolute lowest common denominator and completely eschew the vast vast majority of people who don’t require that feature. Of course there’s an xkcd for it [0]. I haven’t owned a device in the last decade with a screen resolution less than 1920x1080, and most devices are significantly higher these days. My primary work monitor is 27 inches with a 144hz adaptive refresh rate - these are available at the bottom end of the scale, and are widely available at the mid level of the market. And yet, I’m forced to use tools that adhere to standards from when latency to disk was higher than my latency to a remote server these days, that can’t handle resizing, that can’t reliably handle Unicode input. Imagine if I gave you a car designed in 2024 that had a hand crank to start, but you could configure it to use a battery if you wanted to. That’s how I feel about the restrictions of terminals, shells and TUIs these days. [0] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- camgunz 2y ago
  The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I don't need to worry about `ls` not fitting in an 80 character terminal because its devs "haven't owned a device in the last decade with a screen resolution less than 1920x1080". I don't need to worry about `find` not working because it can't resolve DNS. I know when I SSH into my router, my raspberry pi running pi hole or emulation, my laptop, and my server that my `#!/bin/sh` script works exactly the same. It was so, so hard to get here. Imagine chaos so maddening that autotools was somehow an improvement. > The problem is that we cater for the absolute lowest common denominator and completely eschew the vast vast majority of people who don’t require that feature. Not for nothing, but for most people in the world computers and internet access are an unaffordable luxury. I'm typing this on a machine that cost me $3,700, and in some ways I'm sympathetic to what you're saying. But average world GDP per capita is something like $12,500. Electricity isn't free. Internet access isn't free. Before we start making arguments about catering to the 1% of people fortunate enough to use the fastest machines and networks, we should consider who our actions may close the door on.
  - SilverRubicon 2y ago
    > But average world GDP per capita is something like $12,500. Electricity isn't free. Internet access isn't free. These people are big users of the command line?
    - camgunz 2y ago
      If you read on, you'll find that my point is that if even the most basic apps (CLIs and TUIs) have hefty system requirements, we stand little chance expanding the use of computers to the average person. I'm not sure what your point is though.
  - maccard 2y ago
    > The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. > Not for nothing, but for most people in the world computers and internet access are an unaffordable luxury. I Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? There's a vast, vast middleground between a western developer with a stack of multi-thousand dollar devices with low latency ssh access, and someone in a rural village in kenya using a 2g sim card on a 25 year old OS. The line shouldn't be "you need an ARM Macbook to run a terminal", but maybe, just maybe we could realise that pretty much any device it possible to buy and run a shell on in the last 20 years is not restricted to being driven by control codes, and that I'd wager pretty much every device that is actually using a terminal emulator sold in the last 18 years (I'm going to draw the line at 2006 when Core2Duo appeared) has had an amount of hardware that was just not considered 35 years ago when they were designed.
    - camgunz 2y ago
      > I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. Which standards do you have a problem with? Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great. Are you saying it should be easier to build a TUI? It's already very easy: just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these). I'm not saying every TUI app performs great, but maybe you remember an article that made it to the HN front page about how centering in web apps is impossible? Or how web apps can't both confine text to a reasonable center column of text and take full advantage of all the screen space when a browser window is fully maximized on a wide monitor? TUIs don't have a monopoly on layout weirdness is all I'm saying here. > Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have, because thinking about it, I'm not coming up with too many that wouldn't really irritate me. Maybe tab completion could query external services because we have pretty fast networks and CDNs now, but I don't always have internet, and I'm not thrilled by the idea of my ISP knowing whenever I try to tab complete a Docker image or whatever. Maybe we could cache it, but I'm not wild about every tool I use keeping its own cache or history database. Maybe we could have big beautiful TUIs, in fact we already do, but I prefer to have a lot of splits in my terminal and therefore like it when things work fine at 80 columns. So I can't think of significant improvements, but on the other hand I can easily envision this being a bigger barrier to expanding computer/internet use to more humans. Or to be maybe too frank about it, I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux.

maccard 2y ago

The problem is that we cater for the absolute lowest common denominator and completely eschew the vast vast majority of people who don’t require that feature. Of course there’s an xkcd for it [0]. I haven’t owned a device in the last decade with a screen resolution less than 1920x1080, and most devices are significantly higher these days. My primary work monitor is 27 inches with a 144hz adaptive refresh rate - these are available at the bottom end of the scale, and are widely available at the mid level of the market. And yet, I’m forced to use tools that adhere to standards from when latency to disk was higher than my latency to a remote server these days, that can’t handle resizing, that can’t reliably handle Unicode input. Imagine if I gave you a car designed in 2024 that had a hand crank to start, but you could configure it to use a battery if you wanted to. That’s how I feel about the restrictions of terminals, shells and TUIs these days. [0] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

camgunz 2y ago
The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I don't need to worry about `ls` not fitting in an 80 character terminal because its devs "haven't owned a device in the last decade with a screen resolution less than 1920x1080". I don't need to worry about `find` not working because it can't resolve DNS. I know when I SSH into my router, my raspberry pi running pi hole or emulation, my laptop, and my server that my `#!/bin/sh` script works exactly the same. It was so, so hard to get here. Imagine chaos so maddening that autotools was somehow an improvement. > The problem is that we cater for the absolute lowest common denominator and completely eschew the vast vast majority of people who don’t require that feature. Not for nothing, but for most people in the world computers and internet access are an unaffordable luxury. I'm typing this on a machine that cost me $3,700, and in some ways I'm sympathetic to what you're saying. But average world GDP per capita is something like $12,500. Electricity isn't free. Internet access isn't free. Before we start making arguments about catering to the 1% of people fortunate enough to use the fastest machines and networks, we should consider who our actions may close the door on.
- SilverRubicon 2y ago
  > But average world GDP per capita is something like $12,500. Electricity isn't free. Internet access isn't free. These people are big users of the command line?
  - camgunz 2y ago
    If you read on, you'll find that my point is that if even the most basic apps (CLIs and TUIs) have hefty system requirements, we stand little chance expanding the use of computers to the average person. I'm not sure what your point is though.
- maccard 2y ago
  > The strength of these tools is that they are the lowest common denominator. I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. > Not for nothing, but for most people in the world computers and internet access are an unaffordable luxury. I Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? There's a vast, vast middleground between a western developer with a stack of multi-thousand dollar devices with low latency ssh access, and someone in a rural village in kenya using a 2g sim card on a 25 year old OS. The line shouldn't be "you need an ARM Macbook to run a terminal", but maybe, just maybe we could realise that pretty much any device it possible to buy and run a shell on in the last 20 years is not restricted to being driven by control codes, and that I'd wager pretty much every device that is actually using a terminal emulator sold in the last 18 years (I'm going to draw the line at 2006 when Core2Duo appeared) has had an amount of hardware that was just not considered 35 years ago when they were designed.
  - camgunz 2y ago
    > I disagree - the strength is that they're standardised. The weakness is that those standards are ancient. Which standards do you have a problem with? Handling terminal escape codes is pretty easy; dozens of terminal emulators do it great. Are you saying it should be easier to build a TUI? It's already very easy: just use a library like Textualize or Bubbletea or rview (there are also dozens of these). I'm not saying every TUI app performs great, but maybe you remember an article that made it to the HN front page about how centering in web apps is impossible? Or how web apps can't both confine text to a reasonable center column of text and take full advantage of all the screen space when a browser window is fully maximized on a wide monitor? TUIs don't have a monopoly on layout weirdness is all I'm saying here. > Are we really doing "there's starving children in africa"? Feel free to correct me here, but it sounds like your point is that we should move the baseline from what was prevalent in the 70s to what was prevalent ~2006. I'd love to hear some examples of what you think that would enable beyond what we currently have, because thinking about it, I'm not coming up with too many that wouldn't really irritate me. Maybe tab completion could query external services because we have pretty fast networks and CDNs now, but I don't always have internet, and I'm not thrilled by the idea of my ISP knowing whenever I try to tab complete a Docker image or whatever. Maybe we could cache it, but I'm not wild about every tool I use keeping its own cache or history database. Maybe we could have big beautiful TUIs, in fact we already do, but I prefer to have a lot of splits in my terminal and therefore like it when things work fine at 80 columns. So I can't think of significant improvements, but on the other hand I can easily envision this being a bigger barrier to expanding computer/internet use to more humans. Or to be maybe too frank about it, I'm completely fine with you being annoyed by yet another Unicode or layout bug if 1,000 more people--let's just say in rural Washington--get the chance to be charmed by Linux.