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I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

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Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#101

Post by badgersnake »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #96
ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

>>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.

If your goal is to learn how it works this was great, a new challenge every day.

Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro.

Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#102

Post by redox99 »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #87

I just hope they have robust backups and disaster-recovery plans, as Gentoo Wiki once had a terrible data loss, and it was like the burning of the Alexandria Library, I feel that put the distro to a decline. I don't use Arch (I used Gentoo in those times), but these collaborative knowledge bases are too precious to be lost. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900319

Wouldn't everything be on the internet archive? And common crawl?

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#103

Post by kelvinjps10 »

overfeed wrote: post #39
resonious wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, I suspect resources like the Arch Wiki are largely responsible for how good AI is at fixing this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).

> So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general). AI walled-gardens break the feedback loop: authors seeing view-counts and seeing "[Solved] thank you!" messages helps morale.

Also if it's not correct someone else will edit it. But with the LLM it's just the LLM and you, and if you correct it is not like it will automatically be updated for all the users.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#104

Post by jampekka »

shevy-java wrote: post #60
ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

I learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that…

> The xserver (x11 or what as its old name)

It was XFree86 until around mid 00s after which the X.org fork took over.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#106

Post by miki123211 »

pjerem wrote: post #62
integralid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, being unpaid LLM trainer for big corporations while nobody actually reads your work is not very encouraging. I wonder what the future will bring.

I do think we will, at some point, face a knowledge crisis because nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet. Then the LLM companies will notice, and they’ll start to create their own updated private training data. But that may be a new centralization of knowledge which was already the case before the internet. I wonder if we are going to some sort of equilibrium between LLMs and the web or i…

I wouldn't be surprised if LLM companies end up sponsoring certain platforms / news sites, in exchange for being able to use their content of course.

THe problem with LLMs is that a single token (or even a single book) isn't really worth that much. It's not like human writing, where we'll pay far more for "Harry Potter" and "The Art of Computer Programming" than some romance trash with three reads on Kindle.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#107

Post by duesabati »

201984 wrote: post #8

Their wiki is what sold me on Arch. I ended up there solving most of my problems on other distros, and if they can make such a fine wiki, I figured they could make a great OS (which they did).

Me too, I started with Debian but after a few weeks, I found myself being more on the Arch wiki than the Debian's one so I did the switch and never used any other distro.

I'm sorry to say this but Debian's documentation sucked a lot some years ago.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#108

Post by duesabati »

agumonkey wrote: post #86

I'm still somehow surprised at the implicit culture quality (concise, precise, extensive) of that wiki, because it seems there was no strictly enforced rules on how to create it. Similar-minded people recognized the quality and flocked to make it grow.

I can see that too, this might be a reason for its success, all the articles are very straightforward and full of paths you may encounter

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#110

Post by fc417fc802 »

pjerem wrote: post #62
integralid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, being unpaid LLM trainer for big corporations while nobody actually reads your work is not very encouraging. I wonder what the future will bring.

I do think we will, at some point, face a knowledge crisis because nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet. Then the LLM companies will notice, and they’ll start to create their own updated private training data. But that may be a new centralization of knowledge which was already the case before the internet. I wonder if we are going to some sort of equilibrium between LLMs and the web or i…

> nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet

I think there will be differences based on how centralized the repository of knowledge is. Even if textbooks and wikis largely die out, I imagine individuals such as myself will continue to keep brief topic specific "cookbook" style collections for purely personal benefit. There's no reason to be averse to publishing such things to github or the like and LLMs are fantastic at indexing and integrating disparate data sources.

Historically sorting through 10k different personal diaries for relevant entries would have been prohibitive but it seems to me that is no longer the case.

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