i-use-nixos-btw

If a company offers some benefit at the cost of some restriction, then users should decide if that benefit is worth the cost. For most Android users, it will be - my grandma isn't interested in the freedom of indie devs to develop for her phone, she's interested in not accidentally installing malware.

I don't like that as much as you don't - for my own devices. But like anyone else who cares about that, I can root it and get past the digital nanny state.

As soon as that is added, people will start to try to optimise their profiles to place them high in the list on certain things, rendering the tool pretty much useless.

The talent people want to find in the talent that doesn’t do everything in its power to say “hey, look at me, I’m talent”, but just… well… does things.

I haven’t used UV, but it says that it manages python as well as packages - I’m guessing like conda, python-venv, and of course nix does.

If the C api is an issue, it sounds like you have control over it if you need it. You manage the python distribution, so could it be patched?

This way it feels like you’d be able to establish not just what is being imported, but what is importing it - then redirect through a package router and grab the one you want.

This may be particularly useful if you’re loading in shared libraries, because that is already a dumpster fire in python, and I imagine loading in different versions of the same thing would be quite awkward as-is.

There's a 50/50 false positive rate, but I can deal with that. It means looking at 10 papers to find 5 useful ones instead of looking at 1000 papers to also find 5 useful ones.

I'm impressed.

Until then, things are not looking great. When one mod deletes threads because they've had a bad day and cant deal with drama, when other mods start teaming up against the only moderate voice for reaching out to ThE EnEmY, when a huge community member get permabanned for merely voicing disagreement with their own temporary ban (which in turn was only because they - wait for it - "encouraged debate"), it is clear that it won't be long before the community turns on them.

Its just a shame that the big forks are ones run by like-minded activists.

- a tmux session can be used by multiple people

- with tmux a single command “tmux attach -t someusefulname” restores the layout and all of the commands used, saving a bunch of time and opportunity for error

- tmux has an API, so you can spawn a fully loaded session from scratch with code, rather than by manually doing things or by having a pre-made session (this is soooo underrated, especially if you make it configurable)

Honestly there comes a point where you just redesign the software and have it run in a more automated fashion anyway, but for the odd job that you have to run from time to time it’s very handy to have tmux as a persistent, shareable, configurable scratch space.

Yes, absolutely doable in Nix.

Derivations are just a set of instructions combined with a set of inputs, and a unique hash is made from that.

If you make a derivation whose result is the invocation of another, and you try and grab the outcome from that derivation, here’s what will happen: - it will generate the hash - it will look that hash up in your local /nix/store - if not found it will look that hash up in any remote caches you have configured - if not found it will create it using the inputs and instructions

This is transitive so any missing inputs will also be searched for and built if missing, etc.

So if the outcome from your process is something you want to keep and make accessible to other machines, you can do that.

If the machines differ in architecture, the “inputs” might differ between machines (e.g. clang on Mac silicon is not the same as clang on x86-64) and that would result in a different final hash, thus one computation per unique architecture.

This is ultimately the correct behaviour as guaranteeing identical output on different architectures is somewhat unrealistic.

These applications specifically because anything that looks at anything on the micro scale includes these as “possible applications”. They sound cool and exciting, and the urge for making them has been around since before Feynman’s Room At The Bottom lecture.

But my comment is mainly surrounding the farce of making a cool discovery that progresses an area of understanding, and then being asked a question that is best posed to engineers: “but what can we do with it?” Wrong field, wrong people, wrong question.

Imagine if astrophysicists were asked these questions. “So you’ve discovered a new kind of star that is made entirely of sponge? What applications do you think will come out of this research?” “Well we hope it will help with Dyson Spheres, Astrology and sea navigation”

Memorizing isn’t a term I’m familiar with in this context.

But you speak from sufficient experience that I presume Nix is a “been there, done that” thing for you. What gives?

Everyone who has ever written a grant application will recognise this wording.

I would like to see much, much more in a demo. Probably around 20-30 minutes.

What was shown in the demo video was seemingly the functionality of Dropbox, shown working with one file manager and one OS.

I know it is more than that. I’ve checked your docs. You have branching models. You have cross OS support. You have a lot going on.

But that demo video really put me off. It doesn’t demonstrate anything that seems particularly useful to me, especially on the main selling point: version control. It spends most of the time showing automatic file sync, which (although not easy to do) is a basic feature of so many cloud storage platforms that it doesn’t have the wow factor these days. (It’s also a feature I find annoying and would want to disable, but it seems to be core to your approach so meh)

I know not everyone will jump immediately to the demo video to see it, but it’s what I did, and honestly… I’d scratch it and do a full intro video and put resources into doing it right.

“DAD, YOUR SPRINKLERS ARE HACKING THE RECYCLING COLLECTION TIMETABLES AGAIN”

(spend enough time around places like this, though, and one could easily imagine this being a thing in 2032)