One of the reasons I switched to arch from debian based distros was precisely how much faster pacman was compared to APT -- system updates shouldn't take over half an hour when I have a (multi)gigabit connection and an SSD.
It was mostly precipitated by when containers came in and I was honestly shocked at how fast apk installs packages on alpine compared to my Ubuntu boxes (using apt)
pacman is faster simply because it does less things and it supports less use cases.
For example pacman does not need to validate the system for partial upgrades because those are unsupported on Arch and if the system is borked then it’s yours to fix.
Less charitably, pacman is fast because it's wrong. The dependency resolver is wrong; it fails to find correct answers to dependency resolution problems even when correct answers are available.
With the right context both are pretty good actually.
I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.
The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.
Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.
When I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.
I'm running the MXFP4 [0] quants at like 10-13 toks/sec. It is actually really good, I'm starting to think its a problem with Cline since I just tried it with Qwen3 and the same thing happened. Turns out Cline _hates_ empty files in my projects, although they aren't required for this to happen.
I authored a patch (I still use it to this day, and I think others do too) that allows this, and sent it to the LKML as an RFC, and was rejected, for some background.
"I've got to warn you that I have an allergic reaction to arguments
that start with "the right solution is really hard, so let's pick the
easier, worse solution." ;)"
Proceeds to continue enforcing objectively worse solution (evidenced by the existence of this entire thread).
Don't y'all have a #emacs slack channel or equivalent at your company? I work for a medium-sized tech company and we have a single digit amount of emacs users I feel like. The channel is mostly dead except for a few tips and tricks and the odd time people asking how we each install it on our macbooks.
Anecdotally a lot of managers use Emacs, though that may be an age thing.
(I use emacs for Real Work, unless that Real Work involves a JVM. Still do all the git stuff in emacs/magit, though)
Could media player actually just play midi dumps like this back in the day?
I've been on Linux for so long now, that being able to just play a MIDI file without making a bunch of decisions about soundfonts and synthesizers [1] just seems mind-blowing to me now.
Part of me wishes that just by default, mpv or something would just pick a softsynth and just play it (like WMP here) rather than have me install a separate program, pick a sound font, invoke it in some weird way to let it know what soundfont I want, and not even be able to seek back and forth.
Windows and macOS have both bundled similar low-quality licensed versions of a Roland GS sample set and low-quality software synthesisers since the late 1990's. Neither of them are as good as even the lowest-end dedicated hardware General MIDI synth from Roland was, but they're still better than nothing. You're unlucky because you happen to be using Linux. unfortunately the best in that field was and remains proprietary so this will probably never be solved on that platform.
This is how I use my Framework laptop around 80% of the time. So much so that I wish I could just detach the screen (and re-attach it easily).
I have the xreal air 1, and have the xreal one's on order, they seem to be the leader in this space with their on-glasses processing for "anchor" mode.
I got these primarily to start gaming, but really, I just use the one hour of downtime before bed to do side projects (usually coding) while laying down, and it's been great. And the spouse does not complain about the bright screen.
Another advantage is that the muscles around my elbows are a lot less sore, as a laptop really isn't ergonomic to stare down into, unless you build one with a much taller screen [1].
It was mostly precipitated by when containers came in and I was honestly shocked at how fast apk installs packages on alpine compared to my Ubuntu boxes (using apt)
reply