I'm going to dissent - The smaller/fewer screens you have and the more default your config, the more important, mysterious and highly paid you are. The guy with the tiny macbook that never bothered to remove any of the dock programs their machine shipped with (bro, why do still have Contacts in your dock?) and still has the terminal (terminal, not iTerm) background color set to the retina-searing default white will 9 times out of 10 be the smartest, humblest mf in the room. 100 percent chance they will show you the most devastatingly elegant solutions to problems that stumped your whole team for a week.
This is 100% true in my experience and I can only guess it's because they spend their time solving actual problems and considering ideas rather than going down the config and personalization rabbit hole.
A counter argument: the people who spend most of their time doing nothing or playing with configs are that way because they finish their work very quickly and have loads of extra spare time.
an early colleague of mine was a guy who ran ratpoison for a fullscreen firefox window and did the rest of his work in the frame buffer. he had no time for, or interest in, any kind of aesthetic distraction, but he was one of the most insanely skilled and knowledgeable people (especially at his age) i've ever met to this day.
I can't prove that neolithic hunters sorted themselves into cultures based on the pointy rock they preferred, but I wouldn't doubt it.
I'm old enough to remember the Mac vs. PC cultural divide, with the ubiquitous ads of the hip/cool "I'm a Mac" dude teasing the corporate "I'm a PC" guy.
And before that there was the stereotype of the young, fast-and-loose, self-taught PC programmer battling against the stodgy mainframe empire of IBM.
With a little bit of searching I found plenty of examples of cultural divides centered on tools:
1920s-1950s: Stanley vs. Craftsman
1900s-1940s: Yankee vs. Generic
1910s-1930s: Atlas vs. Independent
1800s-1900s: American vs. British Toolmaking
My point--if there is one--is that this is not a new phenomenon that emerged from notetaking software. This is likely a deep feature of human nature.
Haha I agree completely about the timeless nature of this dynamic. One of the monster Unix greybeards who took me under their wings when I was a sapling had a T-Shirt: "The sports team from my area is inherently superior to the sports team from your area", the point being (it was explained to me) that such statements are in fact true or false given context (given that this was San Diego in about 2003, generally false).
A critical feature of the (trivially superior) hacker culture from back then was that we did pass such judgements. Not always with complete consensus (vi/emacs), but pretty often (Windows sucks).
Passing judgement, and more importantly, sharing judgement with your in-group, is the root instinct at play here, IMHO.
The ability to organize into groups with a common purpose is, I think, the key evolutionary leap that allowed us to outcompete every other species on Earth. And having shared idols and taboos, whether religious or software-based, is the primary instinct for keeping the group together.
When someone says that Obsidian is better than Notion, they are merely following a million-year-old instinct embedded deep in our hardware.
It's been that way for a long time. I remember when some non-techie friends were opining at the bar on what having a @gmail.com vs a @aol.com email said about a person, circa 2006. At the time, I found it completely surprising that it implied anything about a person other than wanting 1GB storage and search for email.
I know a lot of people running Chromium engine browsers (and I have brave installed for the occasionally necessary IPMI widget or whatever), but I see a lot of Safari on MacOS, a lot of Edge (Chromium/Blink based IIRC) on Windows, and a lot of Firefox on Linux and Android (where I have Vanadium via Graphene).
This is a very technical/programmer sample, so leading indicator at best, but it seems like "best on platform" is making at least a minor comeback.
Five years ago that same kind of a sample was all Chrome and the Firefox weirdo. Now I'm the Firefox weirdo.
I vaguely felt like I was reading an ad for Arc, a browser I have never heard of before, with some content wrapped around it. Kind of like those gross Apple ads that showed Einstein and Madame Curie to sell iMacs.
Very fun citations. Provocative and in line with what I want to believe.
I hope computing gets to the point where taste matters. It still feels like the lowest common denominator rules, that hyper-massified same-tool-for-everyone computing is where we have been latched up for most of a decade now. That it takes scale to survive and only by making the most universal of products do we get to scale.
I really want to believe that taste & discernment & distinction may rise again. That there is some kind of demand-side desire, some reward, for having taste, for modelling good hip interesting.
It feels faded, worn but I still think it's mostly that we have failed to rebuild cool, lost our own cool, that has made Tim O'Reilly's "follow the alpha geeks" mantra lose its luster. Folks seem empowered in little narrow verticals & to be doing well with for example mentioned here Notion or Obsidian, but it's software lifecycle within a very small segment. It doesn't affect the rest of most of those user's computing life. That's just not sufficiently cool, not broadscale enough to fully be a believable follows le lifestyle.
Does the author find it aesthetic or artistic to write like this? No caps, incomplete sentences, banal and faux-poetic prose? He's writing an opinion piece about software, it doesn't need to read like Tumblr poetry written by teenagers.
Software didn't "change". It's mostly linkedin social signaling that dragged everyone to use the same tools as the "successful bros". Cargo culting technologists are everywhere today, from the newbie who can git but can't write 10 bug free lines of code, to the HR person uploading his daily breakfast to github because he s "a techie". Software is like fashion nowadays , built for mass appeal to twitter and teamblind.com users. The craftsmen, fewer-and-fewer every year don't even tell you what tools they use.
I'm sorry, I know it's tangential, but how was anyone able to read all that AI fluff?
It wasn't just frustrating, it was terribly repetitive. It's not ~~just~~ the content of the post, it's the way that it's written. And the AI authorship disclaimer? Missing. (Not that that would've made the contents much better, but it would've made it a bit more palatable and feel less sneaky.)
I actually didn't dislike the premise of the article at all, and agree with some/many of the points (I've even favourite'd it). It showed a perspective I hadn't explicitly thought of before.
The sentence structures I mentioned in my earlier comment are what are often associated with AI. Once you start noticing them, you'll find them a lot on online content. Lmk if you want to learn more, there's a YouTube video on identifying AI comments. I had independent found many of them myself, which would be very unlikely if these were genuinely not ai language traits.
Readit News
Slightly different, but the most wizardly dev I know runs arch on 10 year old thinkpad. Uses the little nub mouse and everything.
He says stuff like “you can save a ton of memory if you don’t need file indexing”
https://github.com/kcrawford/dockutil
I'm old enough to remember the Mac vs. PC cultural divide, with the ubiquitous ads of the hip/cool "I'm a Mac" dude teasing the corporate "I'm a PC" guy.
And before that there was the stereotype of the young, fast-and-loose, self-taught PC programmer battling against the stodgy mainframe empire of IBM.
With a little bit of searching I found plenty of examples of cultural divides centered on tools:
1920s-1950s: Stanley vs. Craftsman
1900s-1940s: Yankee vs. Generic
1910s-1930s: Atlas vs. Independent
1800s-1900s: American vs. British Toolmaking
My point--if there is one--is that this is not a new phenomenon that emerged from notetaking software. This is likely a deep feature of human nature.
A critical feature of the (trivially superior) hacker culture from back then was that we did pass such judgements. Not always with complete consensus (vi/emacs), but pretty often (Windows sucks).
The ability to organize into groups with a common purpose is, I think, the key evolutionary leap that allowed us to outcompete every other species on Earth. And having shared idols and taboos, whether religious or software-based, is the primary instinct for keeping the group together.
When someone says that Obsidian is better than Notion, they are merely following a million-year-old instinct embedded deep in our hardware.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I don't know what universe the author is living in, has anyone else realized "everyone around them stopped using Chrome"?
This is a very technical/programmer sample, so leading indicator at best, but it seems like "best on platform" is making at least a minor comeback.
Five years ago that same kind of a sample was all Chrome and the Firefox weirdo. Now I'm the Firefox weirdo.
Maybe it's the same universe in which capital letters were never invented.
I hope computing gets to the point where taste matters. It still feels like the lowest common denominator rules, that hyper-massified same-tool-for-everyone computing is where we have been latched up for most of a decade now. That it takes scale to survive and only by making the most universal of products do we get to scale.
I really want to believe that taste & discernment & distinction may rise again. That there is some kind of demand-side desire, some reward, for having taste, for modelling good hip interesting.
It feels faded, worn but I still think it's mostly that we have failed to rebuild cool, lost our own cool, that has made Tim O'Reilly's "follow the alpha geeks" mantra lose its luster. Folks seem empowered in little narrow verticals & to be doing well with for example mentioned here Notion or Obsidian, but it's software lifecycle within a very small segment. It doesn't affect the rest of most of those user's computing life. That's just not sufficiently cool, not broadscale enough to fully be a believable follows le lifestyle.
It wasn't just frustrating, it was terribly repetitive. It's not ~~just~~ the content of the post, it's the way that it's written. And the AI authorship disclaimer? Missing. (Not that that would've made the contents much better, but it would've made it a bit more palatable and feel less sneaky.)
The sentence structures I mentioned in my earlier comment are what are often associated with AI. Once you start noticing them, you'll find them a lot on online content. Lmk if you want to learn more, there's a YouTube video on identifying AI comments. I had independent found many of them myself, which would be very unlikely if these were genuinely not ai language traits.