> Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist.
This is the zen of suckless. Unlike other projects that desperately reach for users anywhere they can get them and then suffer the resulting bloat, suckless knows exactly who they are building for.
It’s a tough thing to swallow but embracing the opposite of the suckless zen is probably a large part of why modern software is so bad. The more we try to pretend it should be possible for all people to program or use computers in general, the worse software becomes.
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI.
You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call.
It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI is all a big scam and such if it weren’t so obvious that this underlies your very motivated reasoning. It is a big mirage of angst that causes people on here to clamor with perfunctory praise around every blog post claiming that AI companies are unprofitable, AI is useless, etc.
Think about why you believe the things you believe. Are you motivated by reason, or resentment?
I'm not sure that AI has as much impact on resources like SO as one might imagine. There is one reason why I resort to using AI, and two reasons why I always double check its answers.
The reason why I resort to AI is to find out alternative solutions quickly. But quite honestly, it's more of a problem with SO moderation. People are willing to answer even stale, actual/mistaken duplicate or slightly/seemingly irrelevant questions with good quality solutions and alternatives. But I always felt that their moderation dissuaded the contributors from it.
Meanwhile, the first reason why I always double check the AI results is because they hallucinate way too much. They fake completely believable answers far too often. The second reason is that AI often neglects interesting/relevant extra information that humans always recognize as important. This is very evident if you read elaborate SO answers or official documentation like MDN, docs.rs or archwiki. One particular example for this is the XY-problem. People seem to make similar mistaken assumptions and SO answers are very good at catching those. Recipe-book/cookbook documentation also address these situations well. Human generated content (even static or archived ones) seem to anticipate/catch and address human misconceptions and confusions much better than AI.
They didn't cited papers directly even before the web. It's not a bounce or engagement issue.
Journalists don't make it easy for you to access primary sources because of a mentality and culture issue. They see themselves as gatekeepers of information and convince themselves that readers can't handle the raw material. From their perspective, making it easy to read primary sources is pure downside:
• Most readers don't care/have time.
• Of the tiny number who do, the chances of them finding a mistake in your reporting or in the primary source is high.
• It makes it easier to mis-represent the source to bolster the story.
Eliminating links to sources is pure win: people care a lot about mistakes but not about finding them, so raising the bar for the few who do is ideal.
> Being correct comes second to being agreeable in human-human interactions
Prioritizing agreeableness above correctness is the reason the space shuttle Challenger blew up.
The bcachefs fracas is interesting and important because it's like a stain making some damn germ's organelles visible: it highlights a psychological division in tech and humanity in general between people who prioritize
1) deferring to authority, reading the room, knowing your place
and people who prioritize
2) insisting on your concept of excellence, standing up against a crowd, and speaking truth to power.
I am disturbed to see the weight position #1 has accumulated over the past decade or two. These people argue that Linus could be arbitrarily wrong and Overstreet arbitrarily right and it still wouldn't matter because being nice is critical to the success of a large scale project or something.
They get angry because they feel comfort in understanding their place in a social hierarchy. Attempts to upend that hierarchy in the name of what's right creates cognitive dissonance. The rule-followers feel a tension they can relieve only by ganging up and asserting "rules are rules and you need to follow them!" --- whether or not, at the object level, a) there are rules, b) the rules are beneficial, and c) whether the rules are applied consistently. a, b, and c are exactly those object-level does-the-o-ring-actually-work-when-cold considerations that the rule-following, rule-enforcing kind of person rejects in favor a reality built out of words and feelings, not works and facts.
They know it, too. They need Overstreet and other upstarts to fail: the failure legitimizes their own timid acquiescence to rules that make no sense. If other people are able to challenge rules and win, the #1 kind of person would have to ask himself serious and uncomfortable questions about what he's doing with his life.
It's easier and psychologically safer to just tear down anyone trying to do something new or different.
The thing is all technological progress depends on the #2 people winning in the end. As Feynmann talked about when diagnosing this exact phenomenon as the root cause of the Challenger disaster, mother nature (who appears to have taken on corrupting filesystems as a personal hobby of hers) does not care one bit about these word games or how nice someone is. The only thing that matters when solving a problem of technology is whether something works.
I think a lot of people in tech have entirely lost sight of this reality. I can't emphasize enough how absurd it is to state "[b]eing correct comes second to being agreeable in human-human interactions" and how dangerously anti-technology, anti-science, and-civilization, and anti-human this poison mindset is.
To some extent Ukraine has also given people are very distorted impression of what a modern war in other contexts would look like, adding an unhelpful data point to the other outdated one which is WW2.
WW2 was probably the last time you could fight a war, and do things like convert your local industry to produce weapons and tanks that were relevant. And even then, it only really happened because the US mainland was not contested territory during the conflict - it had the luxury of choosing when to enter the war.
Ukraine is simply not a "normal" looking modern conventional war. Both sides have receiving significant external imports which are various reasons are mostly untouchable by kinetic strikes till they cross the relevant borders (in this way it is much more like Vietnam in logistical respects). So you see assumptions like "mass production of drones will be key to the future!" in a context where the bulk of the critical components - microprocessors, cameras etc. - are not produced in the countries in conflict, and are imported from factories which are in no danger of ever being directly targeted.
So cheap mass producable systems have held the line in areas, but they're obviously drop ins for something you'd prefer to use instead - i.e. artillery - but there's a shortage of that. But conversely they haven't moved the line in a lot of areas - some of the biggest strikes of the war have been from conventional exploitation of defensive failures - i.e. the Kharkiv breakthrough, or from espionage operations which might be notable for using a lot of drones but the real accomplishment was getting them in position and the real success was still very typical: Operation Spidersweb taking out a large number of Russian long range strategic bombers.
Now people will point to the latter and say "see! strategic bombers are useless!" ... and yet that can hardly be true if a substantial operation to destroy strategic bombers was worth doing. A system being vulnerable in a way it previously wasn't does not make it ineffective (i.e. if strategic bombers at airfields intact would endanger the Ukranian position, then they're still an obviously necessary system, but they now need better protection then they had - or Russian counter-espionage just sucks).
Take turmeric for example. It contains curcumin, a chemical that has quite good evidence for anti-inflammatory properties. However curcumin is not present in turmeric in clinically relevant quantities. People taking turmeric medicinally are not actually interested in the curcumin, if they were they would be taking a concentrated extract. They are interested in the ritual and cultural associations of turmeric.
In most cases when we do find evidence for something clinically relevant in traditional medicine we either discover that the effect is something other than it is traditionally associated with and/or that you need to take it at extreme doses for it to do anything at all.
I think I have an old comment about this, but there is an actual `adb sideload` command for installing an apk on your phone from your computer. Since it's from your computer and not the phone itself, it's sideloading and not frontloading, I guess. Weirdly, and wrongly, people have also started to use the term to refer to just installing apps from outside the official appstores, but that's not sideloading. It's just installing an app. It's a normal Android feature. You can just grab a .apk file with your browser and install it like you would a .exe file on Windows.
iOS on the other hand historically required a jailbreak for this. I think that's where the confusion started. Android doesn't need a jailbreak, it doesn't need root (privileges), it doesn't need a custom ROM. You can just install stuff, it's normal. I think iOS users don't realize how different Android is and they just start repeating words like sideload and root without knowing what they mean, assuming it's just Android-speak for a jailbreak. They don't realize there's no jail in the first place.
I am aware English is a living language, and if enough people are wrong for long enough, they stop being wrong, but it's certainly painful to witness.
There's a direct line from mandating seatbelts to mandating developer certificates. If you accept in one domain that it's legitimate for power to reduce freedom to protect people from themselves, you'll accept it in every domain.
Look: in order for a mandate to be justifiable, it needs to at least provide superlinear benefit to linear adoption. That is, it has to solve a coordination problem.
Do seat belts solve any coordination problem? Do they benefit anyone but those wearing them? No. Therefore, the state has no business mandating them no matter the harm prevented.
A certain kind of person thinks differently though. He sees "harm" and relishes the prospect of "protecting" people from that "harm". They don't recognize the legitimacy of individual bad decisions. The self is just another person trying to hurt you. This kind of person would turn the whole world into a rubberized playground if he could.
Your comment is a perfect example of the worldview I described. Your argument is essentially that without rules stupid people will do foolish things and get hurt.
Yes, they will. So what? That's the price of freedom. I've never been a fan of slave morality.
> Who should bear the burden of treating these people?
You're arguing that we're all the hook if we let people do dangerous things and clean up after them when they screw up. There are two ways out of this situation, not one.
They're already learning how to handle this in SF. (I don't live there anymore, so I can't give specific examples.)
Waymo markets itself as an automated driver - same reason they're using off-the-shelf cars and not the cartoony concepts they originally showed. Like real drivers, they take the law as guidelines more than rules.
De jure (what the law says) and de facto (what a cop enforces) rules have had a gap between them for decades. It's built into the system - police judgement is supposed to be an exhaust valve. As a civil libertarian, it's maddening in both directions:
- It's not just that we have a system where it's expected that everyone goes 15mph faster than posted, because it gives police an avenue to harass anyone simply for behaving as expected, and
- It's also dystopian to see police judgement be replaced with automated enforcement. There are whole classes of things that shouldn't be penalized that are technically illegal, and we've historically relied on police to be reasonable about what they enforce. Is it anybody's business if you're speeding where there's nobody to harm? Maybe encoding "judgment" into rules will be more fair in the long run, but it is also coaching new generations to expect there to be more rules and more enforcement. Feels like a ratchet where things that weren't meant to be penalized are becoming so over time, as more rules beget more automated, pedantic enforcement.
A slight digression, and clearly one I have a lot of thoughts on.
It's really interesting to see how automation is handling the other side of this - how you build machines to follow laws that aren't enforced at face value. They can't program them to behave like actual robots - going 24 mph, stopping exactly 12" before the stop line, waiting until there are no pedestrians anywhere before moving. Humans won't know how to interact with them (cause they're missing all the nonverbal communication that happens on the road), and those who understand their limits will take advantage of them in the ways you've stated.
So Waymo is programming a driver, trying to encode the behaviors and nonverbal communication that a human learns by participating in the road system. That means they have to program robots that go a bit over the speed limit, creep into the intersection before the turn is all the way clear, defend against being cut off, etc. In other words, they're building machines that follow the de facto rules of the road, which mean they may need to be ready to break the de jure laws like everyone else does.
On the contrary, the US-led coalition achieved military victory in Afghanistan in under 60 days. Which is an incredible feat. Though what that coalition failed to achieve, and where people try to adjust the definition of tactical victory, was the nation-building goal of creating a functional, independent Afghanistan government. The counterinsurgency aspect was the process of protecting that fledgling "nation".
The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Yes, BSD is a single coherent system but so are many Linux distros. It's just that we've come to accept bad documentation as the norm for Linux-based tools. In my experience there's several types of problems that are very common for Linux tools:
* Extremely short documentation. Everyone has seen these, a tool where the man page exists but provides almost no actual information.
* Unfriendly reference-type documentation. GNU programs are often guilty of this, coreutils certainly comes to mind. On the upside, it's usually comprehensive. But it's not good - it's a short description followed by a sequential list of every option, so the functionality is described in detail but there are no usage examples, no list of the most common options, or anything like that. Great reference, poor usage documentation.
* Too much info about ancient systems or historical details. Yes, it's great that many of these utilities are portable and can run on different systems or work with files from different systems. The man pages for zip/unzip mention MS-DOS, Minix and Atari systems, while defining the zip format as "commonly found on MS-DOS systems". The man page for less explains that it's a program "similar to more(1)" - completely useless info now - and mentions that it has some support for hardcopy terminals, again information that's not important enough for the first paragraph in 2025.
* Poor keywords in the description. There's the theoretically useful apropos command. My Xorg wouldn't start so I tried to remember how to start my wifi up. apropos 'wlan|wi-fi|wifi|wireless' doesn't mention nmcli, which I was thinking of, though it does at least provide the much more difficult iw command.
* Technical project-specific jargon that makes it easy to find the solution - if you already know it, that is. For example, Xorg documentation generally doesn't use the word "resolution". It's not in the xrandr or Xserver man page, and in the xorg.conf page it's only a reference to virtual screens. Because X uses the term screen size. That's fine, understandable and even accurate but most people would first search for 'resolution'.
I date a lot of public school teachers for some reason (hey, once you have a niche it's easy to relate and they like you), and I assure you you'd have a better more human conversation with an LLM than with most middle school teachers.
One of the biggest problems with a lot of the modern theory of democracy is that it sees democratic mechanisms as being not just necessary but sufficient to justify any action undertaken by the state.
Another major problem is the lack of clear bounding principles to distinguish public questions from private ones (or universal public questions from public questions particular to a localized context).
Together these problems result in political processes that (a) treats every question as global problem affecting society an undifferentiated mass, and (b) uses majoritarianism applied to arbitrary, large-scale aggregations of people as means of answering those questions.
This leads to concepts like "one man, one vote" implying that everyone should have an equal say on every question regardless of the stake any given individual might have in the outcome of that question.
And that, in turn, leads to the dominant influence on every question -- in either mode of democracy Rothbard refers to -- being not the people who face the greatest impact from the answer, nor the people who understand its details the best, but rather vast numbers of people who really have no basis for any meaningful opinions in the first place.
Every question comes down to opposing parties trying to win over uninformed, disinterested voters through spurious arguments and vague appeals to emotion. Public choice theory hits the nail on the head here, and this is why the policy equilibrium in every modern political state is a dysfunctional mess of special-interest causes advanced at everyone else's expense.
Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the particular genius of the American approach has been to embed democracy within a constitutional framework that attempts to define clear lines regarding what is a public question open to political answers and what is not. The more we erode that framework, the more the reliability of our institutions will fray.
> The group is also aging and isn't getting new blood.
This is very sad, because the GNU project pioneered a way of software design that's very different from anything we see on proprietary platforms, or even common Linux/BSD applications for that matter. This is best exemplified by Emacs - hackable to the core, with more than enough documentation and context help baked in to help you do just that. You can see the same philosophy at play in the Guix OS, the Shepherd (init), GNU Poke (semantics-aware binary editor) and many many other GNU software. It can be used easily by anyone, but it's absolute heaven for those who like to poke around (not a pun) the system. It nudges normal users towards becoming system hackers. The difference between GNU software and corporate-sponsored components (like systemd, avahi, gnome, policykit, PAM, Chrome, Firefox, etc) is stark. I have heard similar things about NetBSD and OpenBSD to a lesser extend, but I'm yet to give it a good try. The only other alternative I've seen is the suckless suite of software where the configuration is done in the source code itself, before it's compiled. But it can be slightly daunting even for power users. With the loss of that knowledge and philosophy, an entire generation will grow up without ever knowing a different way of computing that treats you as something more than just a consumer to be squeezed for every last penny, and the true power and potential of general purpose computing.
A tip for those who both use Claude Code and are worried about token use (which you should be if you're stuffing 400k tokens into context even if you're on 20x Max):
1. Build context for the work you're doing. Put lots of your codebase into the context window.
2. Do work, but at each logical stopping point hit double escape to rewind to the context-filled checkpoint. You do not spend those tokens to rewind to that point.
3. Tell Claude your developer finished XYZ, have it read it into context and give high level and low level feedback (Claude will find more problems with your developer's work than with yours).
If you want to have multiple chats running, use /resume and pull up the same thread. Hit double escape to the point where Claude has rich context, but has not started down a specific rabbit hole.
As a French person, let me tell you you are wrong.
French people mostly don't give a shit about religion and do not have any prudish views. We have many nudists beaches and women are regularly topless on the beach. Talking about sex if accepted in society and between friends and family.
So it's not about that at all.
What most French people are though is little children that need to be guided and protected by the state. Without the state they are lost. If you look at the news, the most recurring theme is: "why hasn't the government solved this problem for us poor souls? We are helpless, help us!"
Therefore French people accept the state and all that it encompasses. They have little protests here and there and sometime they succeed in making the state back down but in the end the state usually wins.
It's a form of learned helplessness and a very sad and toxic relationship between the French state and it's citizens.
> Energy independence and HSR are indeed poor metaphors for each other.
It's not a metaphor. You're reasoning very sloppily. The absence of high-speed rail in the US is caused by a societal breakdown in technological and economic development. That breakdown also causes other effects. One of those effects is that over the last 20 years the US not only failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers; it lost the world-leading native industry of solar panel manufacturers that it already had. There's no strong reason to believe that a blockade would reverse that breakdown rather than accelerating it.
> In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail.
Yes. That's because the US doesn't have high-speed rail, even 60 years after the Shinkansen went into service. If the US did have high-speed rail, one would be able to travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper by rail than they could in a car. And the difference is not small.
The fastest trains on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line average 290km/h, about 3–4 times faster than a car in the US and 50% faster than even the fastest Autobahn car speeds. The peak speed is 350km/h, but as in a car, some time is wasted speeding up and slowing down at stops at the beginning and end of the trip, and along the way.
Maybe in China cars are cheaper, in which case driving would only cost 10 times as much, I don't know. But it clearly isn't going to be as cheap as taking the high-speed train.
A consequence of the US's deficits in transportation is that a large fraction of the mental energy of its professional and intellectual classes is devoted to operating cars in traffic rather than to developing vaccines, improving Wikipedia, creating video games, or even selling ads.
60 years is a long time in terms of technological development. 60 years after the Wright Brothers achieve controlled powered flight in 01903 was 01963, when both the US and USSR had orbited cosmonauts, and the Apollo Program was well underway. 60 years after the first stored-program computer was delivered in 01949 (either the EDSAC or the secret Manchester Baby) was 02009, when Intel and AMD were shipping billion-transistor six-core processors. A wealthy country not being able to deploy the already existing technology in that time frame shows that it's experiencing not slow technological and economic development but slow collapse.
More expensive in what way? "Cost" is what everyone quotes about why nuclear isn't great, but isn't the whole idea behind shelving fossil fuels and switching to alternatives due to downsides that are secondary to cost?
To me, renewables (solar and wind namely) have many more downsides than nuclear. So if we are doing things not because of cost anyway, why not nuclear? What do you fundamentally care about?
The power density of wind and solar is abysmal. You need to cover huge amounts of land with your preferred solution (which doesn't work everywhere) to produce relatively meager amounts of power. You need to have grid-scale storage solutions which are currently not priced in to the costs being quoted. Even if you have that storage solution you need to be significantly over-capacity in terms of production so that storage can actually be filled during peak hours.
Meanwhile, nuclear: requires a fraction of land use (good for ecology), runs continuously (so doesn't need huge storage outlays), can run basically anywhere (reducing transmission costs).
The most important note is that "nuclear" is not entirely encapsulated by existing Gen III reactors. There are many more designs and ideas that are being developed as we speak, whether more interesting (read: safe/efficient) fuel mixes, modular/micro designs, and various other improvements.
"Cost" is a merely a reflection of how much human capital is required to make something happen. I'd much rather spend our human capital on technologies that have the potential to massively increase the energy available to humanity, rather than focusing on tech which we know has strict upper bounds on power output / scalability. Solar and wind is useful in certain areas, but the idea that they can provide the baseload for a decarbonized future is ridiculous to me, unless your starting point is "I don't think humanity needs to consume much more power".
Lets make a new license: If you wont hire me, use my library and make over $100m in revenue a year, you must pay a commercial license to use my software equivalent to the total cost (equity grants included) of an average principal engineer or director who manages 50+ people at your company in your highest COL metro, whichever is higher. For OSS work that isn't mostly one author, make it go to the foundation for the OSS project instead and apply the rule to principal maintainers. You could even scale it in multiples of revenue in principle engineer units of $1b per principle engineer of global revenue.
IMO I think foundational projects that every single bigtech uses like ffmpeg should get on this licence yesterday. They would start getting millions because it still would be way cheaper than making it themselves in their bloated cost structures.
I'm sure you feel the same way about cutting down on cell phones right? How about we just let people keep their cars (preferably EVs), but feel free to go live in a dense cell block and eat bug juice if that is what floats your boat.
>Apartheid, genocide and war crimes are not "culture war" issues.
"Culture war" doesn't literally mean culture stuff like religion. It basically covers any controversial issue over ideology.
From wikipedia:
>A culture war is a form of cultural conflict (metaphorical "war") between different social groups who struggle to politically impose their own ideology (moral beliefs, humane virtues, and religious practices) upon mainstream society,[1][2] or upon the other. In political usage, culture war is a metaphor for "hot-button" politics about values and ideologies, realized with intentionally adversarial social narratives meant to provoke political polarization among the mainstream of society over economic matters,[3][4] such as those of public policy,[5] as well as of consumption.[1] As practical politics, a culture war is about social policy wedge issues that are based on abstract arguments about values, morality, and lifestyle meant to provoke political cleavage in a multicultural society.[2]
Of course, everyone thinks their issue is a Super Serious Issue that isn't culture war, and their side is so obviously correct that the idea controversy exists at all is absurd, so you really can't take someone's word that it's not a culture war issue. The Wikipedia article agrees with this. It lists such serious issues as trans rights, education policy, and obamacare. I'm sure if you asked strong supporters/opponents for those issues, they'd scoff at the characterization of "culture war".
If you are accusing me of being absurdist or reductionist, know this: floor mats were the official cause of "sudden acceleration", where they would slip off their pegs that were holding them to the floor (usually due to human error), and would jam the pedal to the floor. Or sometimes between the brake pedal and the floor preventing correct operation of the brake. In fact, Toyota and NHTSA issued an urgent recall in 2009 to remove all floor mats from vehicles due to this very issue: https://www.safetyresearch.net/toyota-and-nhtsa-issue-urgent...
So yes, the line was very obvious because these are events that happen in real life, risk that you say you wanted to eliminate by absolutely playing it safe: "_anything_, there is no such thing as excessive 'playing it safe'"
I can only assume that your original comment was reactionary and hyperbolic, but then got upset over where that kind of hyperbole lead in the past.
I think there is one big difference that will differentiate between principal/lead devs and euqally experienced senior devs working with AI.. AIs are not people. Lead/principal developers are good at delegating work to, and managing, people. People and AIs have very little in common and I don't think the skills will really translate that well. I think the people who will really shine with AI are those at the principal level of skill but who are better with computers than people. They will be able to learn the AI system interaction skills without first having to unlearn all the people interaction skills and I'm not sure if the "leadership skills" that are prized in principal devs can even be unlearned they seem to be more a natural affinity than a skill.
The libertarian bent typically suggests that the government must be funded to the extent that it can protect private property. This means it must be able to recognize private property and litigate against its theft, including bodily harm. Therefore I shout from my safe stable, but my prerequisite is that the government exists to provide that safe stable.
It also exists to provide public goods, which are defined as nonrivalous and nonexcludable, such as national defense (where I would only suggest it be provided insofar as the workforce be entirely voluntary).
Redistributibe policies such as PFML or universal healthcare, are indeed theft. You take from Person A to give to Person B when Person A would otherwise not do so. Please help me understand how that is not theft?
2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff
2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law
2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
2031: Australian ISPs must enforce the login restrictions because some sites are refusing to and there are loopholes
2033: Australian ISPs must provide the government with a list of people who visited this list of specific sites, with dates and times of those visits
2035: you must be logged in to visit these other specific sites, regardless of your age
2036: you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
2037: all visits to all sites must be logged in
2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded
2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age
2040: all visits to all sites will be reported to the government
2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Australian politicians, police, and a good chunk of the population would love this.
Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It's all "beer and barbies on the beach" but that's all actually illegal.
Doesn’t turning off SSID broadcast result in devices that have the wifi network saved repeatedly broadcast a request for the AP to identify itself in an effort to establish a connection?
This is the zen of suckless. Unlike other projects that desperately reach for users anywhere they can get them and then suffer the resulting bloat, suckless knows exactly who they are building for.
It’s a tough thing to swallow but embracing the opposite of the suckless zen is probably a large part of why modern software is so bad. The more we try to pretend it should be possible for all people to program or use computers in general, the worse software becomes.