Ignoring prices, Mac is definitely the second best option after Linux for Linux-y development flows. None of my issues were huge, but still enough to ask for a Linux laptop for a replacement.
Sure, if you just use Linux for dev, with a Windows hypervisor, you won’t notice the difference.
We devs also have a serious issue of performance blindness, because generally work and test on pretty beefy machines. Windows 11 is undeniably heavier on the system than Linux, and Mac hardware flies anyway. If your dev machine is beefy enough, you won’t really notice though.
It obviously depends on the environment, but if I am supposed to develop tools that, in theory, can fuck up everything, then I also need access to everything (on my machine). There’s no point in testing, if the elevated access rights on the server suddenly surface a fuckton of extra bugs.
Heck, I need admin just for the basics of installing developer tools and opening web ports.
They tried to lock our stuff down once. After a couple of days of absolutely zero work being done because all our tooling was missing, and the poor IT guy had to somehow learn how to install every tool we needed and taking forever, we just got sudo rights.
Cool, and then there’s NEVER any problems with different paths? With back and forward slashes? With the limit on path length? With missing permissions on the file system requiring weird workarounds?
Most importantly, your server is likely not Windows, yet you test on Windows, and that’s never ever been a serious source of issues?
And don’t say WSL. That’s like saying the fix to using Windows is to use Linux, but fiddlier. Not to mention you still get issues with the mounted file system.
Can you point to the justifying? If your argument is “AI bad because water usage”, then you have to actually demonstrate it’s a problem, and that you’ve always cared about water usage.
In the post they very EXPLICITLY state that there are many real issues with AI, just that water is the worst of them.
Do you know how psy-op for a movement works? Simple, you start focussing the movement on obviously false or irrelevant topics. That way, nothing useful gets accomplished, and the movement looks like a joke to anyone with a brain.
Are you a secret pro AI agent?
All of that just seems like special pleading, and has no moral basis at all. “It’s my culture” is morally equivalent to “I’ve always done it this way”, tradition is just “My parents have always done it this way”. I hope I don’t have to bring any examples to demonstrate how often “culture” was horrendously immoral.
In the end, going vegan does require some amount of effort, at least initially. Guess what? If someone has gotten used to using LLMs for many parts of their live, it would ALSO require some amount of effort to replace it. You might say that veganism requires more effort atm, which I could agree with. But that begs the question: If AI lives long enough, will it suddenly become totally fine, simply because it’s just as integrated into daily life as meat eating is?
Finally, “they need to eat food” is to veganism as “I need to learn” is to LLMs. In both cases there’s better alternatives.
It’s crazy how fast the online left has changed it’s mind about “no ethical consumption under capitalism”, and “individual actions are useless”.
Whenever vegans bring up the impact a persons choice has, like a water footprint roughly a gallion times bigger than AI use, noone feels responsible. It’s all just the companies or the politicians or the systems fault. No individual is ever complicit for purchasing their products.
Sadly, the true reason is obvious: Individual responsibility is only fun when it’s about shaming others for something I don’t like doing anyway
For reference, I’m not saying AI is awesome. I’m not a fan, at least of it’s current hype infested version. Maybe the bubble bursting will produce a bearable version of AI.
Hey, Claude isn’t actually used there anymore. Anthropic had some insanely basic red lines, and the Department of War wasn’t a fan. All the murdering efforts are now done by OpenAI.
What exactly are we talking about? Doing Windows related development on Windows is roughly as decent as doing Linux related development is on Linux (or Mac).
It’s just that because like 90% of servers are Linux, 90% of development benefits far more from being developed on a Linux-y system.
For example, the Windows filesystem is very different. Over and over I’ve had issues with permissions being different, with paths being inconsistent (this happens esp. with WSL) and with limits on path length.
You can develop on Windows, but having the test env closer to the real env takes care of so many little headaches.