I made my own Git

Are people repeatedly handling merge conflicts on multiple machines?

If there was a better way to handle "I needed to merge in the middle of my PR work" without introducing reverse merged permanently in the history I wouldn't mind merge commits.

But tools will sometimes skip over others work if you `git pull` a change into your local repo due to getting confused which leg of the merge to follow.

Cherry-picks being "fundamentally wrong" is certainly an interesting git take.

In some ways, the legacy of mercurial lives through jujutsu/jj and offers some sanity and familiarity on top of git's UI. But with that said, mercurial is far from dead, major "under-the-hood" works are going strong (including a rewrite in rust), the hosting situation is getting good with heptapod (a branch of gitlab with native mercurial support).

I really don't see any downside to recommending mercurial in 2026. Git isn't just inferior as a VCS in the subjective sense of "oh… I don't like this or that inconsistent aspect of its UI", but in very practical and meaningful ways (on technical merit) that are increasingly forgotten about the more it solidifies as a monopoly:

- still no support for branches (in the traditional sense, as a commit-level marker, to delineate series of related commits) means that a branchy-DAG is border-line useless, and tools like bisect can't use the info to take you at the series boundaries

- still no support for phasing (to mark which commits have been exchanged or are local-only and safe to edit)

- still no support for evolve (to record history rewrites in a side-storage, making concurrent/distributed history rewrites safe and mostly automatic)

Git storage is just a merkle tree. It's a technology that's been around forever and was simultaneously chosen by more than one vcs technology around the same time. It's incredibly effective so it makes sense that it would get used.

The bottleneck with git is actually the on-the-fly packfile generation. The server has to burn CPU calculating deltas for every clone. For a distributed system it seems much better to use a simple content-addressable store where you just serve static blobs.

It is my understanding that under the hood, the repository has quite a bit of state that can get mangled. That is why naively syncing a git repo with say Dropbox is not a surefire operation.

Lack of current-SCM incumbent compatibility can be an advantage. Like Linus decided to explicitly do the reverse of every SVN decision when designing git. He even reversed CLI usability!

The name "null" is confusing; you have to pick something. However, I think what is desired here is the "theirs" strategy, i.e. to replace the current branch's tree entirely with the incoming branch's tree. The end result would be similar to a hard reset onto the incoming branch, except that it would also create a merge commit. Unfortunately, the "theirs" strategy does not exist, even though the "ours" strategy does exist, apparently to avoid confusion with the "theirs" option [1], but it is possible to emulate it with a sequence of commands [2].

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/merge-strategies#Documentation/merg...

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4969679/814422

What do you mean, "What does it mean?" It means what I wrote.

> There already is reset hard.

That's not... remotely relevant? What does that have to do with merging? We're talking about merging.

For reference, this is how I do it in my Caddyfile:

   (block_ai) {
       @ai_bots {
           header_regexp User-Agent (?i)(anthropic-ai|ClaudeBot|Claude-Web|Claude-SearchBot|GPTBot|ChatGPT-User|Google-Extended|CCBot|PerplexityBot|ImagesiftBot)
       }

       abort @ai_bots
   }

   import block_ai

i run a cgit server on an r720 in my apartment with my code on it and that puppy screams whenever sam wants his code

blocking openai ips did wonders for the ambient noise levels in my apartment. they're not the only ones obviously, but they're they only ones i had to block to stay sane

And what purpose would this serve, exactly?

They used to do this with maps - eg. fake islands - to pick up when they were copied.

while I think this is a fun idea -- we are in such a dystopian timeline that I fear you will end up being prosecuted under a digital equivalent of various laws like "why did you attack the intruder instead of fleeing" or "you can't simply remove a squatter because its your house, therefore you get an assault charge."

A kind of "they found this code, therefore you have a duty not to poison their model as they take it." Meanwhile if I scrape a website and discover data I'm not supposed to see (e.g. bank details being publicly visible) then I will go to jail for pointing it out. :(

Cloning gets you the raw text objects directly. If you scrape the web UI you're dealing with a lot of markup overhead that just burns compute during ingestion. For training data you usually want the structure to be as clean as possible from the start.

The quality of LLM coding agents is pretty good now.

Here's a sad prediction: over the coming few years, AIs will get significantly better at critical evaluation of sources, while humans will get even worse at it.

The secret sauce about having good understanding, taste and style (both for coding and writing) has always been in the fine tuning and RHLF steps. I'd be skeptical if the signals a few GitHub repos or blogs generate at the initial stages of the learning are that critical. There's probably a filter also for good taste on the initial training set and these are so large not even a single full epoch is done on the data these days.

It wouldn’t work at all.

Being trained on it's own results?

I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273466

I've been critical of people that default to "an em dash being used means the content is generated by an LLM", or, "they've numbered their points, must be an LLM"

I do know that LLMs generate content heavy with those constructs, but they didn't create the ideas out of thin air, it was in the training set, and existed strongly enough that LLMs saw it as common place/best practice.

I'm going to do a cursory look through my antigrav history, i want to find it too. I remember it's primarily in the exclamations of agreement/revelation, and one time expressing concern which I remember were slightly off natural for an american english speaker.

I use Fossil extensively, but only for personal projects. There are specific design conditions, such as no rebasing [0], and overall, it is simpler yet more useful to me. However, I think Fossil is better suited for projects governed under the cathedral model than the bazaar model. It's great for self-hosting, and the web UI is excellent not only for version control, but also for managing a software development project. However, if you want a low barrier to integrating contributions, Fossil is not as good as the various Git forges out there. You have to either receive patches or Fossil bundles via email or forum, or onboard/register contributors as developers with quite wide repo permissions.

[0]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md

I use Fossil extensively for all my personal projects and find it superior for the general case. As others said it’s more suited for small projects.

I also use Fossil for lots of weird things. I created a forum game using Fossil’s ticket and forum features because it’s so easy to spin up and for my friends to sign in to.

At work we ended up using Fossil in production to manage configuration and deployment in a highly locked down customer environment where its ability to run as a single static binary, talk over HTTP without external dependencies, etc. was essential. It was a poor man’s deployment tool, but it performed admirably.

Fossil even works well as a blogging platform.

Used it on and off mainly to check it out, but always in a personal/experimental capacity. Never managed to convince any teams to give it a try, mostly because git don't tend to get in the way, so hard to justify to learn something completely new.

I really enjoy how local-first it is, as someone who sometimes work without internet connection. That the data around "work" is part of the SCM as well, not just the code, makes a lot of sense to me at a high-level, and many times I wish git worked the same...

I like it but the problem is everyone else already knows git and everything integrates with git.

It is very easy to self host.

Not having staging is awkward at first but works well once you get used to it.

I prefer it for personal projects. In think its better for small teams if people are willing to adjust but have not had enough opportunities to try it.

You can always use a divide and conquer strategy to compute the chunks. Chunk both halves of the file independently. Once that’s done, you redo the chunking around the midpoint of the file forward, until it starts to match the chunks obtained previously.

> ...based on a combination of the modification timestamp and if the filesize has changed

Oh that is interesting. I feel like the only way to get a better and more reliable solution to this would be to have the OS generate a hash each time the file changes, and store that in file metadata. This seems like a reasonable feature for an OS to me, but I don't think any OS does this. Also, it would force programs to rely on whichever hashing algorithm the OS uses.