35 pointsby Pseudomanifold5 hours ago7 comments
  • datakan2 hours ago
    > In that sense, LLMs are embodying the Unix philosophy. Of course, this analogy has holes so big you can easily ride a horse through. LLMs are neither small nor do they do one thing—you could even argue that some of the things they do, they certainly do not do well.

    So the title is just clickbait

    • rambojohnson2 hours ago
      yep. so exhausting.
    • jt21902 hours ago
      OT: Please refrain from commenting and just flag the article. This might seem harsh but it’s a strong signal to the submitter to find better content.
      • meatmanekan hour ago
        Flagging is for content that breaks the guidelines, not for content you disagree with.
  • Chinjut2 hours ago
    People love to say the Unix philosophy is "Write programs that do one thing and do it well". But this does not really seem to me to really match Unix practice. And it doesn't match LLMs either, as the article notes.

    (So what is this article talking about? I guess it's talking mainly about "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface".)

  • pjmlp3 hours ago
    My Java, .NET, Go, JavaScript/Typescript code running on serverless deployments, or low code/no code agentic tools, don't care what OS is powering the underlying type 1 hypervisor running their containers.
    • RAM-bunctiousan hour ago
      He's talking about philosophies in the article, one of which is that "text is the universal interface". LLMs are embracing this, as Unix did decades before.
      • pjmlp39 minutes ago
        That famous phylosophy only exists on a book that gets idolatred by some.

        Go check the man pages of any commercial UNIX to see how many of the commands actually abid by such famous phylosophy that gets passed around, of each command doing a single thing well.

        It is a endless list of options, and multiple capabilities for each of them.

  • zahrevskyan hour ago
    > Presenting at first nothing but an input box to the user, they constituted a deliberate break in habits for many

    No, users were used to it because that's how Google works.

  • drak0n1c2 hours ago
    Not only are LLMs perfectly equipped for command-line interfaces, Linux is also the most performant OS for hosting the models locally.
    • dionian2 hours ago
      How so? Compared to say Mac OS? (Just curious)
  • vessenes2 hours ago
    s/Unix/The CLI/

    But yes. That’s true.

  • justsomehnguy2 hours ago
    > Many of the command-line tools I use have been around for quite some time now1 but they still work admirably and allow me to do things like this:2

    > [...]

    > If this reads like gibberish to you, my younger hothead self, full of (neo)vim and vigor, would have hit you with the old “Linux is very user-friendly; it’s just also super picky about its friends.” Yes, younger me was adept at making enemies like a craftsman

    No, it reads like you are an entitled fanboi and need to touch gra^W^W talk with a real human beings outside your small citrcle of nerds. Even better - to work a couple of weeks with your own hands and your own back. That helps.