AI Hesitation Turning Around
Jan 28, 2025
I’m a Bit of a Rebel
I feel like some of what I do in life isn’t because it’s the “best”. I certainly love optimizing workflows, switching keyboard layouts because QWERTY is clearly not the best, learning and customizing window managers instead of using broad defaults from full desktop environments. But, I also do lots of things that are decidedly not in pursuit of efficiency or optimization:
- Firefox is not faster than Chrome, and AFAICT it still isn’t really much better than Chromium privacy-wise
- Linux causes me pain, MacOS supposedly “Just Works™”
- NixOS causes me more pain, but I also love it
- I daily drove a OnePlus 6 with PostMarketOS for a few months last year. So cool to carry a terminal with you. But Termux exists, and my wife could not reach me reliably.
I don’t value ease of use as much as other values like privacy, openness, and tinker-ability. As most things in life, it’s always a trade-off. I get teased by many of my coworkers and friends for being the “linux guy” or similar, for choosing to swim upstream despite the more “obvious” easy choice of using the proprietary, super affordable electric boat (with better battery life BTW). So how could I come around to these over-hyped, shark-backed, environment burning GPU crunchers??