adsjhdashkj

While i've dabbled in Nix in the past some things felt more odd to me than perhaps they should have. Primarily the fact that it felt like all these configs were spread out and i didn't understand how Nix wanted me to version them.

Flakes (from early tests) seems to make this very clear. As it starts from a repo, so i'm attempting to make all my configs, including Home Manager (of which also feels weird lol) start from the Flakes installation.

Flakes also solves the reproducibility problem that i didn't get why NixOS had. So far it's really neat.

Every time i look into wood related work, be it home repair or artsy stuff, everything is huge. I have a Prius. I'm not too thrilled at the idea of buying a 2nd car (truck), and i don't want to drive only a truck.. so how am i to get the supplies?

Sounds like a silly question, but yea - things are just big. And i always thought i can't bother if i don't have a truck. Especially with the ~$70 overhead on shipping i see from lowes, home depot, etc. And i'm not aware of any local (wood) places that deliver.

Am i missing anything obvious?

Sidenote, i love how i can pay Element and support Matrix/Element.

Software that achieves my goal in a focused manner is something i typically enjoy. I don't want it to do everything under the sun, i want it to do one or two things well.

These days, to me, a "lightweight" alternative to Dropbox would be one that focuses on filesharing with none of that other junk.

However one problem i never see solved from any "normal" distros is reproducible systems. Hypothetically if i used Nix as a Desktop my config would be bulletproof. .. but then i'm going through a fair amount of work configuring everything when, as established, i want none of it.

So i (as a user) seem to want some middleground between no effort installations / configurations of my Desktop, with reproducible snapshots/states/configs/something.

You can use Nixpkgs on other distros/OSs, so maybe that is enough. But is there a better way?

> Flood control has historically been used to forcibly evict black communities, particularly along the gulf coast. Its a bit of a dog whistle here.

To what end? I'm not disputing you here because frankly i have completely zero idea - but i struggle to even understand the assumed motivation. Evict black communities from their home, but then later let them return (as most evacuations are temporary)?

Or is eviction different than evacuation here? Do they kick out the black communities calling the area unsafe, then move white communities in? Seems bizarre, but i'm often quite abstracted and puzzled by racist behavior. Again, not disputing, merely questioning.

> Ever notice how it's only the majority non-white cities people are calling for forcibly evicting everyone from? Case in point: Houston, but not Galveston or Corpus Christi. New Orleans but not Baton Rouge or Covington.

I really haven't, but this isn't something i pay attention to. I certainly wouldn't have read someones comment about forcibly evicting someone to assume they wanted to then, later, move white folks in.

> Ever notice how it's the poorest communities that are at risk of losing their land, and not the wealthy-but-equally-flood-prone communities next door? (E.g. no one's saying "force people out of Katy", they're saying "force people out of the third ward")

I'd be in favor of this situation if the state/taxes were paying for the "third ward", but less so Katy. Rich folks tend to live in nice areas, regardless of how much of a risk that area was in before money moved in.

Which isn't to say that taxpayers didn't _also_ cover the rich folks. I'm just saying i wouldn't immediately assume rich areas need tax payers to have their homes protected from floods. And, i'm generally against tax payers helping constant flood areas. Seems a waste of resources.

> Historically, that same argument (it'd be better for everybody if no one lives there) is at the heart of a lot of egregious behavior by local and state governments (mostly local).

Plenty of things have been used to commit horrible things - i don't see that as an argument of the idea being inherently bad. You can do good or bad with just about any tool/power.

You may be correct, but does it make living in Tornado Alley (or w/e random example) any more safe? Any less of a burden on the taxpayer? I'd imagine not.

> And it's why targeting the main African American population center in the state specifically (Houston -- I'm not talking about Lake Jackson in this, as I don't know it that well.) and falsely claiming it's flooding all the time and constantly having to be rebuilt at taxpayer expense tends to provoke a strong response here.

That seems perfectly fair. With all of this said, i haven't changed my view, but i imagine we agree more than disagree. Since i'm not making, imo, any grand exclamations. Merely saying that we shouldn't live in areas that cost too much to be worth it.

I know very, very little about the New Orleans incident, rebuild, etc. It just seems foolish to build a house on sand, is all.

If insurance can calculate costs and decide what is too expensive to insure, we can too. That's all.

I refuse to live in a flood plain. Why would you? Not only do i not want my house to be destroyed, but the insurance alone is a good incentive to not live there.

If fire repeatedly pops up in my neighborhood i'll do the same thing, move. Why wouldn't you?

If the insurance would be insane because statistically it's likely to repeatedly happen why should taxpayers fund that sinkhole? I'm normally super liberal with taxes, but there has to be a balance. I believe in "free" healthcare, but we can't promote bad health patterns, as it would be a needless drain on the healthcare costs. Likewise i'd support taxpayers covering these types of disasters, but if you know the area is insanely prone to disasters why should the taxpayers fund it?

You're playing the victim card too hard mate. I get your point, but i don't think it's a "region bigot" issue here. Yes, people should move out of fire prone areas, why on earth would you think otherwise?

Because WSL2 i've not had a single "chmod" issue, .. not sure why i would. Chmod within linux works just like you'd expect. However permissions across the OS boundary is another story.

Though TBH i'm not sure what you'd expect from chmod'ing files in the Windows side. Seems unfair to expect Linux-centric behaviors to work on the Windows installation. Eg you wouldn't expect to be able to put Windows applications inside Linux Containers, right?

Which is litaraly the same reason i use(d) Mac, but am now looking to move away from. Mac has too many problems, so i may as well move on.

I also have an Nvidia right now, so.. hopefully it works great hah. Otherwise i'll be on Windows.

I know the CPU/Ram/GPU i want, but i imagine most of the trouble is motherboard, since so many features are there.

I'm also curious how my current hardware rates on compatibility.

The longer i'm a software engineer the less energy i have for dealing with my OS, i guess.

So now i'm installing Windows and Linux, comparing them and the ease of use. I don't want _any_ driver problems, frankly i just want the OS to get out of my way. Historically, Linux has given me such a terrible experience with things like "my BT doesn't work, my sound doesn't work, my monitor doesn't work" that switching away from Mac was viewed as an impossibility.

Now however, i see a way out, and i'm taking it. I've experimented with WSL2 and it's shockingly good so far. I'll likely install PopOS this weekend to see if i experience problems. If i even hint a problem in Linux, i'll likely revert back to Windows.

Mac is losing it's lunch imo. But, i get to build a workhorse of a PC for the same price i would have given Apple - so i'm happy.

I've paid thousands to the Mac ecosystem over the years purely to avoid these problems. I just want the OS to work, and i've literally never had that experience on Linux. I'm sure it's much much better these days than it was the last time i tried, but - everything i hear tells me they still exist to some degree.

4k and 1080p is my exact setup btw haha. I was debating installing PopOS this weekend.

Eg on a native system (Linux/Mac), a lot of editors launch subprocesses like Language Server Protocol Servers which would expect to be in the context of Linux. But the Visual Studio Code instance is running in.. windows, right?

Same goes for Alacritty - i'd want the executable GUI to be running, but to run within the context of Linux.

How does that work for you?

From early research, i'm struggling to understand what advantage WSL2 has over Cygwin. Thoughts?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22874305

Of course the question arises, should you trust them? No idea, please - do your own research, maybe let me know hah. But i basically never touch Google these days, as i use DDG for all my searches and !s for any fallbacks.

The problem here is "developing" is so loose and unique that it's difficult for me to even imagine a useful certification. Lets take easy examples - can someone make a store front to handle incoming transactions? Well firstly that tells me nothing of the scalability, security and mostly importantly maintainability of the software. It tells me nothing about the language of choice, assuming i care.. which you usually do if there's a team involved and you're trying to integrate a new employee.

But even if we ignore those we still have the biggest issue that i see; software development tends to be unicorns, imo. Every project i've worked on is largely unique, and while there is overlap - eg all of it is APIs, the quality of the work (if i was to self judge) was solving the problems inside the "Web API CRUD".

In a building analogy - i don't care that you can build a house to spec. I care that you can architect the floor plan, decide features yourself, future proof as best you can, etc.

Perhaps there's some level of architect certification that matches this, no idea. But i care about peoples generic ability to problem solve, to find information and suss out real application. Their ability to build a house according to spec is of little to no interest to me.

Unfortunately the nature of language combined with personally assigned titles means that there's no point in even trying because, i think, it's impossible. Call yourself whatever you want. I'm still going to need to vet it for myself if i need to hire you.

All the Linux OSs i've tried is a mixed bag. A gamble. And i have a terrible experience with windows currently, so even ignoring Unix, Windows doesn't seem like an option.

I'll probably give Linux another try, i'm just concerned of driver issues primarily. Finding the right hardware, having trackpads and graphics cards not suck, etc.

I feel lost. Wanting to have a simple OS that lets me develop with unix tools but also "just works". The expense i pay for Apple products no longer follows this, for me.

Assuming we can somehow defer peoples personal responsibility on logic and reasoning and _not_ have it be exploited / corrupted in the future is a hell of an assumption. It feels to me on par with the Government asking for backdoors to encryption.

It definitely is not working now but that's not a supporting argument for the impossibility of an educated population. It's an argument against the current education infrastructure. Which, by most accounts, is flawed - some would say entirely broken.

A simple example i often run into is wanting to do something with a string, without taking owned parts of the string. Very intuitive how the str matches the lifetime of the owned value.

On the otherhand, the other day i was trying to write a piece of software where:

1. I wanted to deserialize a large tree of JSON nodes. I had the potential to deserialize these nodes without owning the data - since Serde supports lifetimes, i could deserialize strings as strs and hypothetically not allocate a lot of strings.

2. In doing that, because a tree could be infinitely large i couldn't keep all of the nodes together. Nodes could be kept as references, but eventually would need to be GC'd to prevent infinite memory.

3. To do this, i _think_ lifetimes would have to be separate between GC'd instances. Within a GC'd instance, you could keep all the read bytes, and deserialize with refs to those bytes. When a GC took place, you'd convert the remainder partial nodes to owned values (some allocation) to consume the lifetime and restart the process with the owned node as the start of the next GC lifetime. ... or so my plan was.

I have, i think, just enough understanding of lifetimes to _almost_ make that work. I _think_ some allocations would be required due to the GC behavior, but it would still reduce ~90% of allocations in the algorithm.

Unfortunately, i got tired of designing this complex API and just wrote a simple allocation version.

Conceptualizing allocations and the lifetimes to make it work are.. interesting. Especially when there is some data within the lifetime that you want to "break out of" the lifetime, as in my example (where i had a partial node, and i made it owned).

I still think i understand enough to do it - it'll just take a fair bit of thinking and working through the problem.

> Notice: sr.ht is currently in alpha, and the quality of the service may reflect that. As such, payment is currently optional, and only encouraged for users who want to support the ongoing development of the site.

There are no features to distinguish the variations by - they're all donations, effectively.

Though i admit they could improve that UX further still. But, imo - the entire product is not super polished for "mainstream users" (of which i mean nothing against), so polish in this specific area might be cart-before-horse.