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Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit to putting off applying security patches because my laptop is a giant repository of state and it's a pita to bring it all back up again.

I have to remember how to start postgres, the erb command to make rails work, figure out how my upgrade to bash subtly broke virtualenvwrapper, make sure I didn't accidentally leave anything open in vim in some random window or go through the whining about vim swap files, and dump/restore all the state spread through 20+ browser windows, probably 30+ bash instances, and a couple repls. etc. It's really fucking annoying.

Another thing that ate 3 hours of my life recently: post reboot, zoom.us, which previously worked flawlessly, no longer works. I of course discover this as a meeting is starting.

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Do this, and you'll thank me:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/provisioning-your-computer-one-...

Was that blog post meant to end like that? It looks as if a lot is missing.

The last lines for me read:

"The main script

First, let’s start with the main Ansible script:

~~~yaml This playbook is meant to provision a new computer. Run with: ansible-playbook -i , provision.yml"

Oops, no, I recently migrated to a static site generator and some posts broke. I'll fix it now, thanks Jacques.

EDIT: Phew, fixed, good catch, thanks. There was a triple dash in the article, which Lektor interpreted as the end of the post :/

Hehe, one of those painless migrations ;)

At least you found the cause.

Ugh, tell me about it, it took days :( Thanks again!

Or better yet https://nixos.org/ Make state something exactly defined.

That's good, but you need to move to a whole new OS :(

Most people in this situation are forced to reboot at some point because of critical failure (power, or something physically break). Thereafter they carefully reboot on a regular schedule to just ensure everything will come up after the unplanned emergency reboot.

Solution for you: more frequent updates. Breaks less stuff at a time.

But breaks stuff more often. Why would that be a net win? Probably a net loss because you incur the mental overhead of putting down whatever actual problems you are trying to solve and getting into a frame of mind to try to fix your computer, more frequently.

Let's sum up the available options:

  1) update rarely, fix a lot of breakage at a time
  2) update daily, run into each breakage as soon as it happens and fix it
  3) never update, no need to fix anything

Did I miss anything? Just saying 2) is what works for me. Takes 1-2 minutes every morning before I start working (updates to all systems have been checked and downloaded overnight).

The problem with #3 is that, while there are no updates to break things, there are also no updates to fix things, so whatever is broken will stay broken.

:s/erb/rvm/

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