by sho_hn 18 hours ago
> so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN
The average developer stopped being a "tech nerd" around 2010 or so. I think older developers sometimes don't understand how the ranks have swollen and how many, many more people are in software now that don't have the "I was a nerdy kid in the 90s, loved computers and chose the career" upbringing.
The average developer now has a MacBook, went to a bunch of bootcamps and writes TypeScript. Or enterprise Java if they got unlucky.
I used to be a custom rom guy in high school, and I also used to develop apps for my nexus 5. Now I have an iPhone and I save the tech nerding for work hours. I definitely would not have gotten this far without my custom rom days, but now my phone just needs to do phone things so I can work on robots instead.
This. I was heavily involved with the Maemo community back in the day and even made an Ubuntu 9.04 port to the Nokia N800/N810. These days I'm juggling multiple responsibilities and I need to conserve my mental energy for work. I certainly credit my career on that tinkering, but these days I just want something that works so I can put my energy elsewhere.
>I need to conserve my mental energy for work.
Is perhaps the saddest sentence. Whats the point of working when you don't have enough energy left to do the fun stuff?
You might be reading into that too much. It's more likely that this person's definition of what is "fun" has changed since they were younger. Spending time with family/friends or engaging with new hobbies might be how they have fun now, and that's perfectly fine.
Yea, messing with my computer isn't as fun for me as it once was. There's something screwy with my CPU cooler, and I've been putting off dealing with it for well over a year.
I still wouldn't be caught dead with a Macbook - I do have some self respect.
Dealing with broken Linux installs might be your definition of fun, but it's very possible to be a nerd and not find that particular thing fun, and prefering Macbooks
Android phones do phone things. They work perfectly fine - in many ways better than iPhones, and in others not as well.
I switched to an iPhone more in an act to protest Google and I regret my decision. Things didn't get easier, they got harder.
I mean for christ's sake, there's no universal gesture for "back". Do I swipe from the side? Press the x button at the top left? The top right? Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app? When I swipe to text with autocorrect turned off why does it change the word I swiped AND the word before it that was already correct? Why can't I swipe the word "racist"? Why can't I swipe the phrase "killed himself" and instead it "corrects" to "Lillies himself" or "milled himself"? (Made for a very awkward conversation about Turing...). Why can I swipe the word "suicide" but not "suicidal"? (These are phrases I've found to be easy to reproduce but it also happens with mundane everyday shit) Holy fucking shit how the fuck is this thing even a phone, it doesn't even do phone things well? I mean as far as I can tell there is no setting which will ever capitalize a singular "i", making it trivial to recognize an iphone user since well... iphones came out...
Not only that, with things like Termux they just work better. Want to sync files to your computer? Easy, rsync. With a few lines in a bash script my phone does daily backups locally. With a few lines I have a script that means my phone is a keyboard for my computer. With a few lines I have I can turn my old phone into something useful instead of garbage. Maybe these things are tech nerdy to the average person and "too much work" but for us? Come on, this shit is trivial.
I switched from iPhone to Android and I was fully expecting a world of pain but I was (am?) pleasantly surprised.
The back button thing is real. When I have to use someone else's iPhone I immediately feel the lack of consistency.
And KDE Connect is fantastic to use. So many things on iPhones are just annoying for no reason. I don't want to buy a 1000 dollar computer to look at my photos, come on now.
I'm not too big of a fan of KDE content but totally get why people use it.
I do want to suggest you install termux, and do it from fdroid rather than the play store.
I'm guessing you're on Wayland, so check out ydotool. (If still on x s/x/y) there's a lot of cool things to do with tools like that. Basic one is use your phone as a keyboard (like KDE connect can do, but I found it more reliable and KDEC doesn't play well with VPNs)
I wrote a similar script in Apple Shortcuts and... wtf is this bullshit. My files backup Shortcut is even uglier. I'm incredibly impressed at the hacky shit I was forced to do just to backup photos... I almost would rather pay for an app that does it. I almost would rather learn how to write an iOS app. Just to... replace a 10 line bash script -__-
Since I'm still not a big fan of Google my next phone is going to be a Pixel and I'll install Graphene on day 1. That is, unless something better comes out :)
I'll check out ydotool. I did a bunch of bullshit with shortcuts, too. I had one that would change my screen from grayscale to color when I opened the photos app. Of course it only worked, like, 80% of the time so that was great.
I have a pixel 9a with Graphene right now and I'm very happy with it. Great hardware, great price, great software. The one blindspot is messaging, which is a big problem in the US. RCS doesn't work on Graphene, and SMS is basically the worst thing ever, so I use Signal as much as I can. I'm hoping one of these days RCS becomes an actual open standard with competing implementations but... I won't hold my breath.
That's good to hear about graphene. I've been able to get most of my friends to move to signal but yeah the walled gardens are annoying. Does graphene not support the same RCS that Google does?
As for Android, I think the real magic happens when you just realize your phone is another computer and you can do normal computer things with it. It just starts unlocking so many doors. One thing I like to do is have my desktop sit behind my TV. Big screen for movies and games. For everything else, there's ssh. Your phone is just another terminal in that environment. But the modern version of a terminal means your local machine can actually do meaningful things too. Tbh, it's really what the big tech companies are doing too, they just pretend they aren't.
Also, since you're new to Android check out revanced. I'm not sure if you need this on graphene but you can recompile apps. Mostly used for removing ads but there's more to it than that.
I'm hoping one of these days we can just treat computers like computers. Stop creating these walled gardens. It really slows down innovation and honestly, I believe the big companies would make more money doing it. After all, their whole business sits on top of open source work. The computer is nothing without the program. The smart phone is nothing without the app. Why can't we recognize that the success of these machines is that they're environments. You can't create a product for everybody, but building environments doesn't have the same limitations
PhotoSync and LocalSend.
Swipe up from the bottom (which goes to the app switcher), and then swipe up any app you want to force-quit.
Sorry, I definitely was unclear when angry writing this
> Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app?
I see, you can't find the way back so you quit the app in frustration. I get that
[flagged]
Nobody needs to, it is a online forum.
I like iPhone and won't go back to android because I am comfortably using a 6 year old iPhone on the latest operating system with no real issues. Planning to keep using it until it stops getting security updates, or the hardware fails.
I think the assertion here is there are no Android phones that don't have long term support. Apple compared to Google Pixel phones are basically the same longevity today[0][1].
With a lot of Android devices they'll have a lifespan even beyond that. Although there are choices to make at that point. You just don't have the option with Apple.
[0] https://endoflife.date/iphone [1] https://endoflife.date/pixel
It's less surprising to me that a developer would choose a Macbook than an iPhone. You can have root on a Macbook and install software without permission from Apple (though I hear of late it may require using the command line).
The hardware performance is outstanding, and while opinions are split about the OS, a lot of people who display good taste in other technical matters like it. I've chosen to spend my own money on a different laptop, but if someone offered me a high-spec Macbook Pro on the condition that I use it for a year, I'd accept.
I choose a Macbook because it's my terminal. I'm given the choice "Macbook" or "Windows laptop". I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux. My laptop is really just a glorified ssh machine, with a web browser, and corporate shovelware. Life is so much better in the terminal. Home is 192.168.1.0/24 and 100.64.0.0/10, it doesn't matter what screen I'm using. Home is where the ssh connection is.
>I'm forced to use Microsoft products and they're actively hostile to Linux
How so? Powershell has openSSH built in now, and WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats. I have a Windows 11 laptop and I use it like you are saying as an ssh machine and web browser without much issue.
> WSL2 basically works minus some annoying behavior and caveats.
And on top of that, as frustrating as OSX is (even as terrible as OSX26 is) Winblows is worse. OSX feels disconnected, but Winblows feels hostile.
What setup do you use for seeing image previews (or the images themselves?) on a terminal in Linux?
I use yazi a fair amount but I've also configured fzf to do it. There's a lot of tools to view the images, chafa is a good one.
This definitely should be improved but I honestly don't use fzf that much. I can fix it if you really need something but I'm sure you could find it in the docs or even an LLM could handle this. Requires you to define a few variables, lsd, bat, and chafa
$ echo $FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS
--ansi --preview "if file --mime-type {} | grep -qF image; then chafa --passthrough none -f sixels --size ${FZF_PREVIEW_COLUMNS}x${FZF_PREVIEW_LINES} {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e directory; then lsd --color always --icon always --almost-all --oneline --classify --long {}; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e binary; then strings {} | bat --color always --theme=Dracula --language c; elif file --mime-type {} | grep -aF -e text -e json -e empty; then bat --color always --theme=Dracula --style=numbers,grid --line-range :500 {}; fi"Not the original poster but possibly lsix[1], which looking at the readme should work in certain terminals on Windows as well but I haven't tried it.
Ok, I still don't see how that's "hostile to linux" and not just windows being crappy, which it is.
Because I didn't really speak about Microsoft's hostility to Linux.
I think the moment it turned from annoyance to hate was when they bought Skype and then removed features from the Linux version. Features like... conference calling... but there's a million things like that. Go talk to Linux nerds and I'm sure you'll get a unique story each time. We've all felt the pressure
I think they mean that Office products and the like aren't available on a Linux OS
At _least_ you're not forced to use Microslop. But that's been a pretty common refrain from a lot of devs - the Macbook is the lesser of two evils.
I've been given a Winblows machine in the past. My boss thought he was doing me a favor because it was a powerful machine... Sorry... all I need is ssh...
> My boss thought he was doing me a favor because it was a powerful machine
From folding@home to mining@work
Why not just install Debian (or whatever) on it, instead of suffering Windows?
Because it was a work machine?
Yes...? Didn't stop me before. Unless it's some locked down, domain-joined e-waste like I have now. Public sector IT policy literally prevents me from doing certain tasks at my job, and makes others take four times as long. Not even my email works properly.
Last job was a lot of SSH and webshit like Jira, Confluence, Odoo and Google apps. They didn't care if you used Amiga OS as long as your work got done.
It's very evident when you work with the young juniors. I've seen people with CS degrees that don't know their keyboard shortcuts.
I’ve got great news for you.
> writes TypeScript. Or enterprise Java if they got unlucky.
I would argue writing TypeScript is also equally being unlucky (I write Elixir for a living, but sometimes have to deal with TypeScript too)
Back in the 90s, Macs were mostly used by the "tech nerds". Normal people ran windows 95/98. It's still kind of weird to me that Macs became sufficiently mainstream as to lose their tech nerd cred :)
My memories are different. Macs were run by media guys for graphics, video and audio. Tech nerds used, sure Windows, DOS, but also Linux already, many types of Unixes, Netware, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST or Falcon. But Macs? No!
Exactly, Macs were more of a yuppie toy for people that didn't need real computers.
Maybe "tech nerd" is being interpreted in a specific way that I don't quite follow. Are the multimedia guys with the expensive tech setups not nerdy enough?
They were nerds but not computer nerds. “tech nerd” would be someone building computers, learning how to program a bit, war driving, etc
Huh. For me "tech nerd" has always been more general, and encompassed the folks pushing the envelope in multimedia/games/home-automation, and so on
I was young but I do remember during the 90's my really nerdy computer/programmer friends being into Apple stuff until around the time Steve Jobs left, then getting into Unixes and eventually messing around with Linux or going back to Apple when they adopted a Unix base for OSX.
My own experience was learning on an old IBM PC at school, then Apple 2s later. Also my dad was a programmer (but maybe less nerdy/more professional) so I got second hand x86 hardware and learned to program on Windows with Visual Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ (since he already had licenses). Eventually I got into Linux in the late 90's.
Yeah, that is correct, the early Apple computers were used by tech nerds too! I mainly referred to the 90s like the OP and to Macintosh computers.
I'd say Macs have a far greater association with developers and tech nerds now, most code was being written for Windows and Unix back then. I was in a Computer Science University program in the 90's, and our labs were full of Unix workstations, things like SGI and Sun. When the iMac dropped, they put them in the non-CS labs. On a personal level, I've always felt the relatively current Mac==developer trend is driven in large part by fashion, but I've never been a fan of the Apple/Mac ecosystem even though I can respect what the Mac is on an engineering level. So maybe I'm biased.
This is such an uncharitable take of your peers.
The issue is not pedigree - it’s that many folks have an incurious mind.
I certainly know many folks with a CS degree that are incurious and frankly terrible engineers. I also know bootcampers that are extremely curious, have a lifelong-learner attitude, and are subsequently great engineers.
There’s nothing special taught in the vaunted halls of a CS undergrad that can’t be trivially learned off YouTube.
I agree with your first couple of sentences. But the YouTube bit is dangerous misinformation. You cannot match any credible university education by watching YouTube.
There are many wonderful educational channels on YouTube. Just as in a classroom - you cannot passively absorb material and expect to understand it with any depth. You can absolutely get the same education off YouTube. The only advantage a proper course provides is pre-made structure. But even that is accessible to the motivated learner.
I know plenty of tech nerds who have been Apple fans since the 80s.
on the Apple //e