dnr

I'm not an expert here but I have to say this feels like a very weak objection.

p points to P1. One thread reads through p. Another thread races with that and mutates p to point to P2. The result is the first thread reads from either P1 or P2 (but no other object).

This seems totally fine and expected to me? If there's a data race on a pointer, you might read one or the other values, but not garbage and not out of bounds. I mean, if it could guarantee a panic that's nice, but that's a bonus, not required for safety.

The inelegance to me isn't in the definition of the operation, but that it's doing a huge amount of brute-force work to mix every part of the input with every other part, when the answer really only depends on a tiny fraction of the input. If we somehow "just knew" what parts to look at, we could get the answer much more efficiently.

Of course that doesn't really make any sense at the matrix level. And (from what I understand) techniques like MoE move in that direction. So the criticism doesn't really make sense anymore, except in that brains are still much much more efficient than LLMs so we know that we could do better.

Everything you said "should" is exactly what Nix and NixOS is.

You're looking at the docs for "visibility". Visibility is a separate eventually-consistent data store off to the side that's used for certain queries so it can be scaled independently of the main data store, and indexed in fancier ways. The main data store for all the stateful and transactional stuff has always, and probably will always, support Cassandra. For visibility, the recommendation for high scalability is currently Elasticsearch.

Temporal may have properties that make it not a good fit for a particular use case, but scalability is really not one.

Temporal can also run on Cassandra, which scales much larger than Postgres (if you put in enough effort). It can also be replicated across regions for high availability. It's already running some pretty huge use cases.

(I work at Temporal)

I'm also using NixOS and working on Go projects, and had to deal with out-of-date Go releases. Nixpkgs generally does get the latest Go versions pretty quickly, but only in the unstable channels, they're not backported to NixOS releases. You can just grab that one package out of nixpkgs-unstable or nixos-unstable, like:

    (import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixpkgs-unstable.tar.gz") {}).go_1_21

where you had `pkgs.go` before (in your shell.nix or wherever).

It wasn't quite immediately, it would take a few hours to detect+revert. And that was only the root fs, there were other places to hide things if you really wanted. But then there were other detection systems too. (Probably fairly different now, I left in '11 too)

The idea that the capabilities of LLMs might not exceed humans by that much isn't that crazy: the ground truth they're trained on is still human-written text. Of course there are techniques to try to go past that but it's not clear how it will work yet.

Get a fresh cap! The caps only last about a year of heavy use. You can find replacements on amazon and elsewhere. It doesn't even matter if it's really oem, a fresh third party one will still be much better than a worn oem one.

If "two" is acceptable for "many", look at the ODROID-HC4? I made some home NASs out of them.

Does anyone write k8s manifests in raw yaml? They're so complicated that they're generated using some templating language (helm or kustomize or whatever is popular these days, I'm a little out of the loop). So you still have something programmatic. Think of Nix as just a better and more principled templating language. (I mean, look at NixOS configs: they're much closer to "plain structured files" than "programs".)

The promise that I see (I haven't seen this fully realized but it should be possible) is that instead of yaml plus some ad-hoc templating language plus dockerfile plus makefile, everything is in a single language top to bottom.

> I just want to list what I want and let the tooling make it happen.

That's just what Nix does?

It's very much more declarative than any system I've seen. Yes, k8s turns your declarative manifest into running processes, but how was the image built? There's a huge gap there: you refer to container images by name, not by a description of the software you want them to contain, and then hope that some other process has built the image correctly. Nix can close that gap and take declarative all the way from the service manifest down to the git commit of the compiler used to build your binary.