A few weeks ago, I filed anthropics/claude-code#30640 — a bug report about Claude Code’s native installer being unusable on FreeBSD as Anthropic soft-deprecated the npm install path.

The issue management bot tried a few times to close things but I kept it alive. Ultimately, I decided to enlist the FreeBSD community. To my great fortune, Graham Perrin found my plea and worked to promote the problem on Reddit. He also took on the thankless task of moderating the Reddit thread.

Between Graham’s work, both of our Mastodon posts, and my FreeBSD forums post, enough souls made enough noise to get Anthropic to do some work to help us retain functionality!

I wrote recently about what Metallica meant to me — the album, the musicians, what it felt like to be a skinny kid hearing “Blackened” for the first time. The coolest band on the planet.

So how did they become a punchline?

“Napster versus Metallica” was more than a lawsuit. It felt like a moment where skinny thrashers in jean jackets became the homeowners association of Marin County, parodies of themselves. And in the midst of it, the technological generation — my tribe — laughed and snickered: the old men just didn’t get it. “Information wants to be free.” As someone who was still smarting at being abused by the record industry it felt like justice for us.

But there was a cost. They were right — Metallica was right, and especially Lars Ulrich was right. But they bungled the optics: he needed a personal adviser and a tech adviser who worked for him, not the labels; he needed perspective; he needed to take a breath.

Great art is work and takes time. Artists deserve to buy homes, and food, and braces, and go on vacation. And that childish entitlement to “free shit online” led to the current internet ad model. It enabled the walled gardens of MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter; ultimately helped bring about the death of journalism; and built the communications organ that enabled grievance-filled echo chambers to elect Donald Trump — twice.

In my early junior high era, Friday nights were for Casa Olé Mexican food at the mall before “20/20”. Between introversion and awkwardness, I didn’t have a John Hughes social calendar that needed attending to. So on Friday nights I really didn’t mind joining the ‘rents and sister for a Combinación Numero Dos and baskets of chips with red sauce. Up the mall arm from the restaurant was a Sam Goody. On some given Friday, before dinner, I bought “…And Justice For All,” Metallica’s fourth studio album. I had seen but 10 seconds of James Hetfield singing “Sanitarium” (from their third magnum opus “Master of Puppets”) on a clip from “MTV news,” and I thought: “I want more of that.”

When we got home, I retreated to my bedroom and popped the cassette into my Walkman Sport. It seemed to take forever but eventually the gorgeous backward-masked harmonic layering of “Blackened” opened as some hymn of the damned, before the guitar’s SOS tattoo took over and threw us into the dying spasms of Gaiacide (see also: Dan Simmons’ Hyperion).

This was the coolest band ever.