Yeah. Once you spend an afternoon debugging a failing cron job, the 5 minutes needed to write the boilerplate starts to feel pretty ok though.

I’ve never had to spend an afternoon debugging a failing systemd timer in the years since I made the switch.

It’s not. But the systemd timer has more robust logging and monitoring, and much more explicit and readable syntax.

Once you get used to systemd timers, it’s really hard to see why you wouldn’t use them if your system has systemd. Unless writing crontabs by hand makes you feel like a hacker I guess. I’m not even being totally sarcastic about that - there is a fun retro feel to cron.

GPL (and copyleft generally) gets way more attention than it should. In the wild, MIT and similar permissive licenses are by far the most common. Linux is on GPL, but that may be a historical artifact as much as anything. I don’t know if Linus himself would choose it if he were making the choice today.

The wider FOSS community, in my experience, leans permissive rather than copyleft. The copyleft people are just loud.

EDIT: To be clear, when I say I don’t know what choice Linus would make today, I don’t mean that I’m skeptical he’d choose GPL. I literally just mean that I don’t know. He’s been quite clear that he’s not a principled believer in copyleft, but it does have real advantages for a project like the Linux kernel.

I’d add that traditional search can’t reasonably hope to compete with AI in this environment. If you’re running a traditional search engine right now, there’s a real argument that the best business decision is to accelerate the enshitification to capture as much value as you can from your remaining audience while you still have it.

This is the usual cycle with these sorts of technologies - once a replacement arrives, the natural choice is to shift from growth to exploitation.

This is going to get worse before it gets better.