His whole rant on Linux and "highly configurable software" vs good defaults is just plainly nonsense to me.

> “Highly configurable” is often just an excuse for shipping no opinion at all and calling the resulting work your problem."

I couldn't disagree more. You can argue that Linux or other open-source software don't have "good defaults" is mostly because there's way less investment in 1) user experience; 2) quality assurance; mostly because there's no product logic involved in it.

Especially if you think that Linux, for example, is the mostly used in servers, and it works usually fantastically well in most server VMs. Maybe it needs a lot of fiddling to make it work on your old dell laptop because it's not where the work is put at. Windows will run well on it because Microsoft puts people actively working on making it run on most commercial user-end hardware. Apple machines will work perfectly on their hardware because that's what they're made for.

Arch Linux is not just better than any other Linux distro. It's better at one thing, just like Ubuntu is better at something else.

> I don’t want my tools to be “fun”. I want my tools to be invisible. > A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.

Bit of a wrong take, on my opinion. Every tool has its quirkiness, and you should embrace it. No tool is invisible. It feels less "visible" as you build more "muscle memory", but it's still there. We have to embrace the tools as part of the craft, not pretend they don't exist.

> Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack.

John Carmack was one of the _first_ graphics programmer to ever exist. The next John Carmack can't be in the same field. The same way we can't expect the next Beatles to be playing rock music. :)

I really don't understand what the point of it is, then. It's not anymore "I put a lot of effort into something because I have the knowledge, experience and time to do so, hope you enjoy", it's like "I paid AI tokens to to that. Everyone could've done, but I paid with my own pocket. And it's untested.". That's it?

> "Yes, I used Google Anti-Gravity to convert the programs from GW-BASIC to 'C', but what a better learning tool than to debug a program?"

Debugging a program is an excellent learning tool. It's just not better than another learning tool: coding the program yourself. :)

that's just objectively not true. code is not just the thing that "builds" the final program, it's also the blueprint of that program.

it's both the most detailed _description_ of what the program does and also the instructions on how to build that program. and it's deterministic, which means that the same compiler will *always* generate the same program based on that code (search for bootstrapping, and you'll understand better why that is). you can think that a very detailed prompt is like a "code" in the sense that you'll always be able to build the same thing, but that's simply not the case because LLMs are not deterministic.

the other thing I like to comment is that you mention _"product"_ a few times, but you never mentioned a _"program"_, which is what it becomes after it's built (or executed, for that matter). I think those are in different levels of abstractions. if you're looking for a way to come up with a product faster than your competitors, good for you. code is waaaay more than that.

Whoever owned your domain 10 years prior is not important to this matter, I was just pointing it out that it was very likely not you.

> One aside, in genuine astonishment rather than complaint: it is striking how multifaceted a picture of a stranger can be drawn from a WHOIS record, an Amazon sample and a GitHub page. I have read it with more curiosity than dismay, and learned things about myself in the process.

Well, in my opinion that's your fault entirely. All your descriptions are rather vague on all your networks, which makes this whole thing more suspicious.

> Slop in the AI-slop sense it is not. Heavily edited and translated, yes. Authored, structured, fact-checked and re-read line by line by a man in Germany having rather more fun with this than he had expected, also yes.

Thanks for being transparent with this. I didn't find any mention of that before in your site, so that's good to know.

> Now it is up to you to dig further and keep me on my toes. Ask away. One small request: stay fair.

Once again, I want to be fair and this is nothing personal. I'm not digging any further either. I did change my original comment from "This is 100% AI Slop" to "This seems AI Slop" minutes after I posted it, because I want to acknowledge that I might be wrong.

However, I want you to take my comment more like the one from a possible costumer (after all, I have huge interest in the subject and that was what drove me to do it) who wanted to do some research on an author before spending $90 on their book. This is a platform for discussions, I also raised that concern so other could chime in.

- Domain was registered in February this year: https://www.whois.com/whois/vivianvoss.net

- Web archive has only a couple snapshots before this year, and it seemed to belong to an "Elite Escort": https://web.archive.org/web/20160515000000*/https://vivianvo...

- All his other domains are recently registered too, the oldest one `byvoss.tech` is from May 2025.

- GitHub has way too little projects and contributions for someone with such experience. The first project dates on the same day as the domain registration: https://github.com/VivianVossNet?tab=repositories

- As other people mentioned, too many blog posts lately (almost one a day), and a very weird writing style. Which doesn't seem at all that's because it's English as a second language. It's just plainly vague and disconnected sentences.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920820

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47594304

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The fact that some people will straight up lie after submitting you a PR with lots of _that type_ of comment in the middle of the code is baffling!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45383960

Points: 83

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249176

Points: 1

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I'd like to show this project I've been working for a few months. It's yet another TUI feed reader, but a bit different from the other alternatives available. First, I wanted to have all my feed entries downloaded locally, in a way that I could decide how to store and sync those files. Second important aspect would be have it look and feel good, still running on a terminal, so I could SSH into my VPS from anywhere and run it.

So I created bulletty. It's a TUI RSS/ATOM reader written in Rust and ratatui, that is looking good and feels just right to use. Of course, all I've done so far was to fulfill my needs, but I think it's already in a good state that it can be used and appreciated by others as well.

For the feeds, I implemented something similar to an Obisidian vault. The feed categories are directories in your system and the entries are just markdown files. All your library is within `~/.local/share/bulletty`, so that you can sync and backup that the way you want.

There are so many other interesting features I want to implement in this project, such as support themes, ability to highlight and write notes on articles, display images (using kitty image protocol or sixel), a webview for the articles, etc. I'm working on it on my free time, so I'm really interested in other people's contribution. I also set it up for `hacktoberfest`, and I added some issues that I think would be good to have. If you feel you want to contribute, please do by sending Pull Requests, or creating new Issues for bugs or creating a new Discussion thread to talk about possible features or other ideas.

If you wanna try it, `cargo install bulletty`! Or just check the GitHub page for more detailed instructions.

Thanks and have a good day everybody!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248467

Points: 2

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