Yes, I agree, we seem to need to feel "special".

Language is really powerful, I think it's a huge part of our intelligence.

The interesting part of the article to me is the focus on fluency. I have not seen anything that LLMs do well that isn't related to powerful utilization of fluency.

Python packaging is the least zen of python thing about python.

The real world moves. If your code didn't change it must be generating value against something that is very standard but I'd be very surprised that you're not modifying, adding, etc based on usage to derive even more value somehow.

> Code that doesn't need to change is a really good sign that you've got something good.

Not really, but you're thinking in terms of "my code nailed it because I'm not touching it" and that has NOTHING to do with it being easy to change.

Quoted: "Likewise, you can repeat yourself but classes only have a single (duplicated, but subtly different) responsibility."

I'm proud of my little joke on dogmas: "The only dogma I believe is that all dogmas are wrong".

I like to phrase this kind of thought as: "The only dogma I believe, is that all dogmas are wrong".

vim is late 1991, vi was 1976, sublime text was 2008. Just seems like garbage writing (very easily could be LLM).

In the article the author mentions wanting to benchmark a GPU and using ChatGPT to write CUDA. Benchmarks are easy to mess up and to interpret incorrectly without understanding. I see this as an example where a subtly-wrong idea could cause cascading problems.

With a dependency on a font. Wow, it's been a while since I've seen that.

Fairly commonplace for TUIs that use icon. Tons of vim plugins rely on NerdFonts (A regular monospace font that also includes tons of icons)

Is there any technical reason the font can't be shipped in the binary and installed automatically?

Which font? What license? Which one does the user want?

Where does it get installed? Will the user consent?

I did not use a Nerd Font until I tried superfile out today. It was not hard to build my own nerd font version of Berkeley Mono with font forge.

I very well might be in the minority of Linux users, but I don't particularly care about the answers to most of these questions. I just want it to work. Give me solid defaults[0]. I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to override those defaults. That's an important feature of Linux.

My first experience running a cool-looking TUI file manager yesterday (I actually ended up trying yazi first) was that I got a lot of blank squares in place of missing icons and emojis due to missing fonts. I had to spend 20 minutes figuring that out before I got a good experience.

Interestingly, I also tried wezterm[1] in the process. It actually ships with the required fonts as fallback, but the version from my distro's package manager didn't work (the AppImage did). I'm guessing my distro removed them, maybe for some of the reasons you cited. I started installing the nerd-fonts group for my distro. 6.5GB... no thanks. After manually poking through them and some googling I finally installed a couple and it's working now.

My overall point is that it's possible for app developers to provide good defaults like wezterm does. It's also possible for distro's to break those defaults. Also, if size is a concern then at least detect that I don't have a working font and offer to download one for me.

[0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-power-of-defaults/

[1]: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

Regardless of wanting sane defaults, this is not something superfile can do on itself: it runs in a terminal, and normally terminal programs do not get to choose what font is used.

So the "best" it could do is bundle the font file, but then you would still have to configure your terminal to use it. At that point, it's easier to just tell you you need a nerd font and link to their repo.

That being said, I kind of agree that, since NerdFonts are pretty good and by now quite widespread, it wouldn't be a bad idea for major distros to patch their default monospace fonts so that you get NerdFonts out of the box in the default terminal.

But, in general, if you go out of your way to install a different terminal emulator, it's unlikely you'd have much trouble changing its font anyway; still, getting everything to look nice and pretty is sometimes harder, so I suppose wezterm is commendable for including fonts and colorschemes.

(The above really mostly applies to fonts as they are an additional dependency and also highly dependent on user preference. For pretty much everything else I agree that good defaults are under-emphasized in CLI/TUI utilities. Probably because options usually get added incrementally and breaking historical defaults is not a good idea.)

Would it be possible for the program to detect that the current font doesn't support all the features you need and tell you?

Besides, you still have to set your terminal to use that font. Not as if typing `spf` on the command line can reconfigure whichever terminal you are on.

I think they are talking kilometers

I have a '97 Jeep XJ at ~214,000 miles. They do exist :)

Hasn't rusted through?

Nope. That's mostly (I guess?) an issue in places with a lot of winter months that use salt on the roads instead of sand. It's had a bit of rust, but nothing a buzzbox welder and some steel sheets couldn't patch.