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Knowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.
by hardwaresofton 1y ago
Knowing which projects/languages/frameworks to invest time into and which to skip (even if they produce useful subprojects) is a superpower these days.
- iwontberude 1y agoAs soon as I saw it was a project by Intel I rolled my eyes and ignored it.
- toshinoriyagi 1y agoI mean, Clear Linux was the leader in the vast majority of Linux benchmarks, to my knowledge. So much so that even AMD used it in their advertised benchmarks for CPU releases because of the performance advantage. I think it was quite successful, and I doubt they are shuttering it because they don't see the value in it, but because of overall lackluster company performance and the new CEO cutting costs/the workforce aggressively.
- nine_k 1y agoIt being a Linux distro, I wonder how soon a viable fork will appear.
- bjconlan 1y agoFingers crossed. I probably just did my last fresh install of this a couple of days ago and my last swupd update now. You will be missed...
- Sunspark 1y agoI don't think there will be one, a company would need to commit to salaried devs. What would the value-added proposition be for them that they can't get by using any other distro out there?
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoThe problem is that Clear Linux did a lot of tweaking in their packaging to get good performance, up to and including actual code patching IIRC, so it would be a nontrivial ongoing effort to continue that work.
- yakz 1y agoAs a user I found it to be pretty buggy; driver issues on Intel NUCs causing instability.
- StableAlkyne 1y agoWhat's going on over at Intel anyway? This happened recently with Scitkit-Learn Intelex, which was a drop-in replacement for some parts of sklearn that was a bit faster. One day, the Intel channel on Conda just stopped working (and I learned that Anaconda loses the will to live when a random channel you installed one package from is unavailable) and another organization took over Sklearn Intelex. No communication could be found on Google connecting them to Intel (whose only news around the package was announcing the initial release a few years ago), you had to read the Git issue history to find people talking about the transfer. I still have no idea what even happened to their Conda channel after the sudden disappearance. The complete lack of communication just left a bad taste in my mouth...
- esseph 1y agoMultiple, multiple, multiple rounds of mass firings. Check the news past couple of months. Also completely outsourced all marketing.
- squarefoot 1y agoIs OpenCV still owned by Intel, or dependent by them (funding, engineers, etc)? There are many good distros out there, but to my knowledge OpenCV has no other FOSS alternative on par with it.
- mikepurvis 1y agoPretty sure Intel abandoned it like fifteen years ago, and then Willow Garage employed some of the people, now there’s an independent OpenCV Foundation. But I have no idea who’s actually paying the bills, behind the scenes.
- gchamonlive 1y agoAlso knowing when to give up and not get dragged into the sunk ship cost
- imiric 1y agoIt's not that difficult. Choose boring over trendy. Simple over complex. Stability and quality over speed and quantity. There is a lot of software that fits and optimizes for the former. Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising.
- hardwaresofton 1y agoIt's not that simple actually -- this kind of thinking might leave you working on mainframes in 2000 (or even now) which is obviously a mistake. It requires a certain taste. There's a skill involved. > Just be smart and selective about your choices, and avoid compromising. This is a very "draw the rest of the owl" kind of statement
- imiric 1y agoWell, sure, but those weren't instructions. Just general guidelines to counter the claim that choosing safe technology requires superpowers. It is much simpler than that.
- kev009 1y agoDebian, FreeBSD.. the longstanding community software is immune from these kinds of rug pulls.
- mikepurvis 1y agoYes, but you pay a real cost for those choices too. A management plane that is non deterministic, imperative, and full of highly mutable state, not to mention basic stuff like the package manager metadata and cache not being shareable, and package installs all having to be serialized because they all call shell scripts as root. These limitations constrain even tools like dagger from providing a first class interface to apt like there is for apk because any deb could have rm -rf / as the postinstall script. A lot of normal users don’t feel these pain points or tolerate them by sidestepping the whole affair with containers or VM images. But if you’re in a position where these things have an impact it can be extremely motivating to seek out others who are willing to experiment with different ways of doing things.
- zymhan 1y agoI'll bet $20 your solution to the problems you posed is "Nix"
- hardwaresofton 1y agoI’m assuming a friendly tone here, and in a similar tone its funny because I also think Nix is not adopted because its benefits just aren't worth the cost to users (devs)
- mikepurvis 1y agoI did indeed deploy Nix to moderate success in a prior gig, but have held back pushing it at my current one; we're simply not at the scale where the problems that Nix solves are worth the cost (yet, maybe ever). For a less controversial take, consider alpine's apk package manager. For a single-use container that runs one utility in an early dockerfile stage, apk can probably produce that image in 2-3 seconds, whereas for an apt-based container it's more like 30 seconds. That may not matter in the grand scheme of things or with layer caching or whatever, but sometimes it really does.
- lispisok 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age."
- hardwaresofton 1y agoSure, but the counter is that you're going to be very late to some new foundational tech (ex. Kubernetes) that are legitimately useful. There are benefits to being early to a trend that has legs
- binary132 1y agoThere’s nothing wrong with getting involved in things that seem like they might be interesting without counting on their long-term survival. Hype-chasing on the other hand tends to be a bad plan.
- rdl 1y agoAlways bet against Intel whenever it's something software?
- avazhi 1y agoIntel will probably be somebody’s subsidiary for less than $150B sometime within the next 3 years, pending DOJ approval. Company is absolutely cooked.
- Sunspark 1y ago$150B is pretty cheap if it comes with ready-to-go chip fabs.
- mbreese 1y agoI’d expect the fabs to get spun off at some point a la AMD/GlobalFoundries.
- mepian 1y agoAMD/GF spin-off was backed by Saudi money, who is going to pay this time?
- Fade_Dance 1y agoUAE money
- RantyDave 1y agoYou have to remember it comes with a phenomenal debt load.
- dehrmann 1y agoThere's enough value still there... If you spit up chip design and fab, who would be interested in each? And is there enough x86 demand to keep the design side open? Windows on ARM is a thing, and data centers have been buying more from AMD than they used to.
- justinclift 1y agoSome are easy to see to avoid (ie Google, https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com), whereas others like this one are a bit more unexpected though make sense (to me) in hindsight.
- happycube 1y agoIntel's graveyard, even before this year, is just about as big as Google's.
- justinclift 1y agoInteresting, I didn't know that. Is there a list, like there is for Google?
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoRule #1: Exclude those with corporate ownership or dependence.
- hardwaresofton 1y agoHard disagree here, corporations almost always have the biggest pockets to fund continued R&D. There’s a tension there, but this is why it’s a skill — theres no simple rule. Fully open source community governed projects can be some of the most obviously good to ignore.
- binary132 1y agoUnmaintained free software is nearly as useless as corporate-sponsored OSS whose funding and support has disappeared
- TrevorFSmith 1y agoA good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
- hardwaresofton 1y agosure but this approach is limited, ChatGPT would have failed this test.
- binary132 1y agoyes