Happy to learn about the concept today. It resonates with me.
I sometimes think of something Kant wrote, about how friction (hardship, etc.) elevates us.
In Kant's own words:
"Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy."
See the section titled "FOURTH THESIS" at the following link if interested.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903): "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
"""Master Foo turned to the end-user. “Tell me”, he inquired, “why do you seek the Way?”
“I am discontent with the software I see around me”, the end user replied. “It neither performs reliably nor pleases the eye and hand. Having heard that the Unix way, though difficult, is superior, I seek to cast aside all snares and delusions”."""
Interestingly each of those sentences also tripped me up but I let it go as it read good enough.
This comment is pushing me to think critically about those weird sentences rather than just accepting it. Thanks for this comment.
This is like that short story with the various llm troubleshooting jobs in some solarpunky future. I loved it but the fact it was AI gives me a form of sadness. This is likely the same now.
I love this, ordered one now. I've been looking for something lightweight to use to ssh into various machines. Though tbh it might go into my junk drawer anyway. Maybe I like the idea of on the go ssh more than actually doing it.
I'm in the exact same boat. Look up the BeepBerry. It has the same blackberry like design but uses a Raspberry Pi Zero instead so it actually runs linux. Too bad they're no longer made but you could probably find one second hand with enough digging. For now I just use Termius on my phone but a dedicated device sounds awesome.
Looking at the comments for that product I suspect it'll find a home in your junk drawer rather quickly.
I've ordered gizmos from Lilygo in the past and found their support/documentation/updates to be very poor. Once a product is out the door they seem to do little further with it.
Churning out new products seems to be their forte.
I've done a little bit of this and Claude is pretty great. Take the app and let Claude run wild with it. It does require you to be relatively familiar with the app as you may need to guide it in the right direction.
I was able to get it to rebuild and hack together a .NET application that we don't have source for. This was done in a Linux VM and it gave me a version that I could build and run on Windows.
We're past the point of legacy blackbox apps being a mystery. Happy to talk more, my e-mail is available on my profile.
I work on a bunch of Pick systems :) Love it all and we're still doing active development. (Feel free to send me an e-mail, we pick up orphaned systems)
If anyone wants to take a look, here are some links:
