that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
> As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about.
Automation and technology in general have made it possible to do more farming with fewer people: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso... . In the US job market, agriculture accounted for 51% of workers in 1880 and less than 3% in 1980. It now appears to be closer to 1% depending on which source you reference.
Hard to imagine many occupations that have undergone more radical change in the recent past than farming. The profession is now utterly technology-dependent, and a few companies like John Deere have hastened to take unfair advantage of that. Hence the growing advocacy of right-to-repair laws.
Mass Transit isn't the solution on its own. It needs to be Mass Transit PLUS people living around mass transit stops.
Mass Transit will never, ever, ever work in rural areas where houses are 2-5 miles apart from each other. It would barely work in suburbs, and only certain kinds like bus transit. You're never going to get a subway to work in the suburbs. Mass Transit is great for cities though, we should be building more of it.
Trolleys and Regional Rail work great in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the state actually gives SEPTA funding so they can keep their vehicles up to date and pay their workers fairly
> $116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
Some interns make more than that.
I highly doubt the median intern does, even a SWE intern. Please think beyond SF/NYC.
Yeah this is a crazy comment to me. I know multiple people who had entry level Wall Street and NYC/SF SWE offers back in 2022-2023 and I feel like $120k was really good for even an entry level position, let alone an intern. I guess maybe inflation in the past few years might have changed this.
I don't find Notepad++ to be a good replacement for (the old) notepad, personally. It's too feature-filled. The big win of notepad was that it was genuinely minimalist.
True, I can ignore them, but they're still a distraction and impact performance. For the use cases that I want the old Notepad for, Notepad++ isn't a great alternative for me.
I live on the north side of Chicago and, to be honest, one of my favorite modes of public transit is the express buses that go from Edgewater/Uptown to downtown.
It's MUCH faster than the train, because once it hits the highway, it doesn't stop till it gets downtown.
Dont get me wrong I love the train, but the red line suffers from the same too-many-stops problem.
Express buses thread the needle imo precisely because they hook into existing infrastructure (highways) and still move masses of people
Good point but the solution you are describing is having a tiny minority of busses that move quickly between centers of activity faster rather than decreasing the stops on the vast majority of the line.
This is really neat - i especially like the heatmap, makes it very easy to immediately figure out what is actively being worked on, even in the regular file explorer view
that said, I'm not sure i plan on using it long term - as someone else pointed out, the lack of extension sandboxing does make me feel a bit uncomfortable for extensions like this that aren't backed by large entities.
I hate to be that guy, but HR is one of the things I always point to as a perfect example of "A system's purpose is what it does"
- HR's task is NOT with maximizing results/IC output
- HR's task is minimizing corporate risk
HR is, in most corporate environments, doing exactly what it is intended to do (minimize risk)!
Hiring anybody, from an org's perspective, is insanely risky for a million different reasons. Therefore, there are a million different (valid and invalid) reasons to reject a candidate - which is what overwhelmingly happens, unless HR is sidestepped via referrals and networking.
But does it minimize corporate risk? Those who get ghosted or face an unfair interview can overwhelmingly report a negative experience online, which then slowly drags the company down because it hurts the candidate pool. I assert it does not minimize this dimension of corporate risk.
And you're massively discounting the power of a sequence of three substantial negative reviews. (Fake positive reviews don't count and only make it worse.)
One thing i keep saying over and over, and few believe me, unless they know from experience - is that winters in Chicago are actually significantly more miserable than Minneapolis, where I went to college.
Minneapolis winters are so cold that everything is dry as a bone, so the cold doesn't 'stick' the same way - Chicago winters sit mostly in the 20-40 range where it's both wet and cold (often raining at a balmy 34-38F), and it's much much more immiserating to be outside.
I am in a similar area IE; usual coldest is low 20s, often sits around 32-38f. But have oft worked outside in consistent cold snaps from negatives to 10f or so, also on boats/the docks.
working in dry extreme cold is infinitely worse than balmy 35f. One because in both scenarios moving snow/moisute out is required regardless of temps for working safety, and two because dexterity is gone at the lower temps/layering becomes inhibitive to work.
Ie; I'd rather work in a rain/snowcoat and be able to use my hands to get back inside quicker, than to work 8 hours outside in the "Clear/dry" extreme cold.
If we take the post as truth (it's not clear to me whether we can), then Bazzite will get iffy kernel updates that will particularly break handhelds. But desktop will be more stable and you could even turn off automatic updates for 6months and see how things look after.
I think Bazzite has a very smooth experience for Windows gaming and even if you decide that you don't like it or that the distro really is falling apart, you'll have gotten the best Linux-gaming experience and can evaluate other distros more clearly.
Just install another distribution—Bazzite has some conveniences in setup, but doesn’t fundamentally provide anything that you can’t get elsewhere, and a lot of those customizations you probably won’t need.
I decided to try Fedora Kinoite for my gaming machine (to have something with less “maybe not maintained one day stuff” out of the box and a long term community of maintenance), and have been happy.
I've had issues with Wayland, even in 2025, but never with X11. X11 may be old, but it's stable. Mint is for normal people, not us. I do have it on my travel laptop though, because well, it never has any issues.
I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
MacPorts vs Homebrew is actually my biggest gripe with Mac dev, but at least it doesn't get in the way of installing basic software. Regular stuff is always intuitive and ends up with a .app. Even lots of dev stuff is just a .pkg you download, macports/homebrew is for niches.
You said it yourself, "fuck snap." But Snap is the default for a bunch of things. There's probably someone else saying "fuck flatpak." The user doesn't win this way, it's not a feature.
If you want to base it on popularity then you should use Debian. Debian and its child distros (of which Ubuntu is one) make up the majority of Linux distros and the child distros are still 99% Debian.
Professionally I've only ran into a handful of Ubuntu installs.
Dozens of SUSE
Hundreds of thousands of RHEL.
So if I wanted to help someone new, I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu because it would be somewhat of a dead end.
Fedora gives you familiarity with the largest deployed commercial Linux, while still getting the newest packages out there through either fedora yum or flatpak. Best of both worlds.
Look I have no love for snap in particular, but it exists as a default in serious places. If you can bury it then great, the less confusion the better. I'm not going to install some alt distro just to avoid it though.
Send Xorg to a nice farm too. Or Wayland. Whichever the bad one is. Competing window servers is a way bigger problem.
(Even if they're all true) Do any of those things matter to a user? If the goal is to ditch Windows and have something else that can run Steam and a web browser and maybe some other applications, being "ancient" sounds just as likely to mean "stable and actually works"
One immediately noticeable thing is the lack of gestures on X11. Touchpad and touchscreen gestures just work in Wayland, most DEs implement them OOTB, even Hyprland has them.
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
Mint won't even boot for me because it doesn't support my year old GPU (9070 XT). That's a huge miss when someone is looking at an OS primarily for gaming.
he received his work permit a month before getting picked up?
it sounds like he was here legally. Maybe not the whole time, i dont know that for sure! but certainly at least at the time he was picked up by ICE goons.
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
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