It’s one of the best resources out there which helped me learn linux
I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
131–140 of 177 posts
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
LLM companies already do this. Both Reddit and Stack Overflow turned to shit (but much more profitable shit) when they sold their archives to the AI companies for lots of money.
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#133Very useful because the information is almost distribution agnostic as Arch will stick to upstream as much as possible; or at least that's my impression as Debian user reading their wiki. Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
I get the sense the Arch wiki pages has more detail than the man pages themselves. The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.
Man pages were always intended to be concise reference material, not tutorials or full docs. More akin to commented header files or a program's --help output, before the latter became common.
(GNU info tried to be a more comprehensive CLI documentation system but never fully caught on.)
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#134I 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.
You don't become a mechanic without fixing broken down cars. So in that sense, the shittier the car, the better.
My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#135The quality of Arch wiki is the reason I could get into Linux. And that pretty much defined my career. So I, probably like many of us, owe a lot to the Arch Linux maintainers.
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#136Very useful because the information is almost distribution agnostic as Arch will stick to upstream as much as possible; or at least that's my impression as Debian user reading their wiki. Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
> Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
Exactly my thought! 20 years ago, I used Gentoo, and their wiki was the best. Somewhen the Arch wiki appeared and became better and better. At some point, I was tired of compiling for hours and switched one machine at a time to Arch, and today, the Arch wiki is the number one.
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#137Very useful because the information is almost distribution agnostic as Arch will stick to upstream as much as possible; or at least that's my impression as Debian user reading their wiki. Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
The Gentoo wiki was (is in many ways) phenomenal, and I recommend anyone interested in the inner workings of Linux at least walk through a full install from scratch - you learn a lot even just copying the instructions into the terminal.
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the sense the Arch wiki pages has more detail than the man pages themselves. The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.
Man pages were always intended to be concise reference material, not tutorials or full docs. More akin to commented header files or a program's --help output, before the latter became common. (GNU info tried to be a more comprehensive CLI documentation system but never fully caught on.)
man pages got replaced by --help in many, many cases.
GNU info was an interesting experiment but it got replaced by online wikis.
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>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.
You don't become a mechanic without fixing broken down cars. So in that sense, the shittier the car, the better. My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.
Gentoo foot guns were (are) the best!
That you could always just boot from the CD and start again was nice. I think I reinstalled 4-5 times the "first time" before I got it where I wanted to be.
Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
NixOS. Having a config-defined system is a bit too different at first, but really nice when it comes to system reproducibility, and being able to roll back. It made maintaining my laptop + workstations the "same" a breeze, although it took a bit to learn and settle into something that works for me. It seems today things are easier for newcomers, but Nix Flakes are still "experimental", and thus the documentation on t…
Nix Flakes are around for years and still experimental?
The word experimental has no meaning here anymore. I forgot the last time that someone brought that up.