For the most part what kind of company you are is what kind of product you’re selling or making money off of.

So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.

Besides, if it’s what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.

I think it’s grossly undersold personally. What valve has managed is getting the single target platform open source could never agree on.

It’s a small miracle, and it bleeds over into stuff like device driver support in a way I don’t think most people who didn’t deal with Linux in the 2.x era immediately appreciate.

If Linux on the desktop has a surge, they did a lot of the legwork.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

Thank you, added to the list. Gonna tear up some disks spinning up all these VMs.

I’m less worried on an intro to Arch than I am being able to just standardize on the same repos I’m already staring at when I inevitably have to answer questions over the phone. I know a few people like my dad (lapsed unix) who could afford to remember what it’s like outside of the walled garden, but too much friction is going to drive them off, ui or otherwise.

I actually started looking around for this myself as a way to recommend some easier intro points.

I’ll have to take a look at popos from the comments, but anyone have any experience with how well maintained Manjaro is these days?

George can have it back when he finishes winds of winter.

(and I recind this if the postumous publishing conspiracy is real, ain’t wishing for no man’s death)

it’s kinda like looking at some weird bizarro version of yourself finding your old handle.

If it’s also a zombie I’m more creeped out.

There can be nothing between apple and the iron grip on it’s users.

Not always. Believe it or not it used to be kinda like it is now, here.

With the technical barriers to entry pre AOL the people online were outcasts, nerds, and science departments at universities. The ad driven model is the attempt to lower barriers of entry make profit of that and not the other way around. Lots of the Internet ran on generosity and donations.

It’s been shittier every day after there was an agreement on how to monetize though. The people at the start didn’t ever have the guarantee it would get adopted, so for all the idealism we deal with their compromises.