> Useful if you need to compile Rust on a shared hosting server from 2008 where the only installed runtime is PHP.

Not sure if it was meant as a joke or not, but this cracked me up

Yeah, that's something that was unambiguously better back in the "Classic MacOS" days (probably starting with the Mac II). Windows could overlap multiple screens and they were always drawn correctly.

At some point in OS X in the switch to hardware acceleration, they started rendering windows on one screen only.

I get that you hardly ever really want a window spanning two screens, but when you accidentally misplace a window it would be handy to be able to see it on each overlapping screen so you can track it down. Right now you can put a few pixels of the title bar on the wrong screen, and the rest of the window just vanishes.

These regressions are weird given that modern hardware is vastly more powerful than a Mac II.

How does `just` compare to Task (https://taskfile.dev/)?

Those are buckling spring. Beam springs are older and different.

> (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro)

Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago, and that's why people liked it.

The modern install process is paired down to something like 10 steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install media, and boot into your bare bones system.

The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.

Microsoft is progressively making everything an instance of Chrome. They've seemingly altogether given up the notion of native platform rendering. The win32 api for native ui elements hasn't been touched in two decades. There have been a few failed attempts to move on from it like Siverlight, WinForms, UWP, LightSwitch, etc, but they never bothered to revisit their native UI library. So now everything is a Chrome instance.

The hidden assumption here is that "learning programming" means replicating the author’s path: deep curiosity, lots of time, comfort asking humans, decent reading stamina. For people who already have those traits, yeah, you absolutely don’t need LLMs. But that’s a bit like a strong reader in 1995 saying "you don’t need Google to learn anything, the library is enough" - technically true, but it misses what changes when friction drops.

What LLMs do is collapse the activation energy. They don’t replace the hard work, they make it more likely you’ll start and keep going long enough for the hard work to kick in. The first 20 confusing hours are where most people bounce: you can’t even formulate a useful question for a human, you don’t know the right terms, and you feel dumb. A tool that will patiently respond to "uhh, why is this red squiggly under my thing" at 1am, 200 times in a row, is not a shortcut to mastery, it’s scaffolding to reach the point where genuine learning is even possible.

The "you won’t retain it if an LLM explains it" argument is about how people use the tool, not what the tool is. You also don’t retain it if you copy-paste Stack Overflow, or skim blog posts until something compiles. People have been doing that long before GPT. The deep understanding still comes from struggle, debugging, building mental models. An LLM can either be a summarization crutch or a Socratic tutor that keeps pushing you one step past where you are, depending on how you interact with it.

And "just talk to people" is good advice if you’re already inside the social graph of programmers, speak the language, and aren’t terrified of looking stupid. But the "nothing is sacred, everyone is eager to help" culture is unevenly distributed. For someone in the wrong geography, wrong time zone, wrong background, with no colleagues or meetups, LLMs are often the first non-judgmental contact with the field. Maybe after a few months of that, they’ll finally feel confident enough to show up in a Discord, or ask a maintainer a question.

There’s no royal road, agreed. But historically we’ve underestimated how much of the "road" was actually just gate friction: social anxiety, jargon, bad docs, hostile forums. LLMs don’t magically install kung-fu in your brain, but they do quietly remove a lot of that friction. For some people, that’s the difference between "never starts" and "actually learns the hard way."

Everything in moderation!

It's like asking whether you need a pencil or pen to write. Just do a bit of everything, see what u like and go vertical on the things that stuck with you