erikw

Reflecting on it, I guess my OS config has turned into a codebase. I have a single Nix closure that includes all my OS config, all the services running on it, and all the small utilities that need to be compiled from source (either because they are something I wrote, or something that isn't packaged in Nixpgs). I'm not sure whether this is considered best practice or not. To your point though, I would be unaware if an upstream maintainer released a security patch for something that I'm compiling from source, because I am pinned to a specific Git commit. On the other hand, I can just point an LLM at my Nix source, and ask it to scan it for security issues periodically. I do this from time to time with one of the smart models, but it might be an interesting experiment to set up a daily scan with an inexpensive or even a local model.

I think people are unfairly downvoting this comment, but I do want to drill into your point (1) a bit. You're right that you can't really do a delta patch in NixOS. But I feel like that is so so so important these days with active supply chain attacks. I don't want a 200kb change to a core library that is "claimed" to be backward compatible to be able to make its way into my codebase. In an ideal world sure, there would be some way to prove that the update doesn't break anything and isn't malicious, and that is certainly possible for some limited subset (provers like Rocq, OS functionality like BSD Pledge, etc), but for now this is mostly based on trust.

I was so disappointed that Valve chose Arch as their base for SteamOS. SteamOS is excellent, and all the work they do has gone back upstream to make Arch and Linux gaming better, but I feel like it was a missed opportunity. I've always thought that NixOS (and immutable distros like Fedora Silberblue etc) are perfect for embedded or consumer appliances. I feel like a bit of help from a company that actually uses NixOS in a mass market product would really push it over the edge in terms of usability.

I think it depends on what they want it for. I can imagine NixOS being perfect for user workstations for example, as an alternative to Windows workstations managed with Active Directory.

I imagine you have a lot more experience than I do packaging for NixOS and other distros given your product, but in the few cases that I've needed to run a binary, I just wrap it with a flake and it's done. I also stay on NixOS stable, so I avoid the sharp parts of "bleeding edge". In my experience as a desktop user, I've never had a failed rollback since using NixOS as my primary OS since around 2016. However, whenever I try to use it as a server OS, I often do hit the pain point you mentioned around statefulness. More specifically, the happy path is extremely happy, but once you need something off the happy path, you find yourself creating some really ugly glue to get it to interface with the happy path. The pattern I've settled on is using Podman quadlets for most services, but that isn't without pain either. Then you find that you've become a Unix sysadmin, managing different UIDs for rootless podman, different network domains, dealing with permissions issues, etc. I'm currently experimenting with microvm.nix to see if that will be cleaner, but no conclusions yet.

Very interesting that Fable took more creative liberties. Have you tried giving Fable the same task, but also specifying that it implement a pixel-perfect design? I think that I prefer the Fable implementation. I find the UI elements in the Fable implementation to have more contrast, which feels more usable to me. I also like how the right padding on the "Book Your Escape" CTA in the upper right matches the top and bottom padding, which I think is an improvement over the mockup.

You can programmatically update DNS whenever your dynamic IP changes. One issue though is that some residential ISPs prohibit webhosting in their terms.

I don't know about this... I think that the "expert" AIs on RTS games just get more resources (not compute resources, but in-game resources) so they can create more units. I'd love to play against an AI component that has the same resource collection speed as the human player.

I'm surprised that you can get non-attendant citizenship in Canada. They don't even give automatic citizenship to children of Canadian parents born outside of Canada (maybe if both parents are Canadian they do, but my experience is with one Canadian and one American). US citizenship for a child born outside of the US to US parents is as simple as bringing their birth certificate to the consulate. And if you marry a Canadian, they won't give you residency unless you physically reside in Canada.

Saint Kitts and Nevis sells passports, so I imagine that is the rationale. I see some other microstates on the list that fit that pattern as well.

My reflexive response was "xfce is ugly, and that's by design", but actually, this looks pretty slick: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/13k5p5o/xfce_my_x...

Love Plato- it’s so performant! I’ve always wondered why Kobo doesn’t just throw out what they’ve got and fork it.

Have you verified that these "academic bureaucracy roadblocks" exist? Surprisingly, I was able to pick my studies back up after almost 20 years, and not only were all of my existing credits counted, but they also exempted me from new requirements that had been added in the subsequent 20 years.

When I was last working in Chile on a SaaS product for use in Chile, we deployed everything to US-EAST. We still had local CDN caching, but it is always nice to be closer to your hardware. I can't tell from the article what types of datacenters these are, but if these are new Azure and Google Cloud availability zones, this will be a great for latency.

Edit: It looks like all the major cloud providers have Chile AZs except Amazon, which has one planned: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-aws-south-ameri...

I don't know that that will happen- not even Windows is as smooth as MacOS. But that's because Microsoft and Linux developers are tackling a more difficult problem- getting an OS to work with effectively infinite hardware permutations. Apple has given themselves an easier problem to solve, with just a handful of hardware SKUs and a few external busses.

That said, Android is pretty stable, because a given Android distro typically only targets a small hardware subset. But I don't think that's the kind of Linux distro that most people contributing to FOSS want to work on.

I'd be curious to understand their rationale for not making a small, reasonably priced phone like the iPhone SE used to be. I probably will be leaving the iPhone ecosystem the next time I have to buy a smartphone (even though I use a Mac, iPad, and Airpods, which all work together really well) because I'm uninterested in using a large phone.

Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?

I'm so tempted to try improving my language skills with Anki, both for my native language and my daily use language. But the commitment feels so daunting- I've barely missed a day in my reviews for the last two years, and only have 28,000 reviews total. I'm very impressed by your 98,000!

I guess the best way to start is just to create a new deck in it with one card and then go from there. I already have a daily review habit, which is the most important part.

I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary terms, symbols, etc is useless. However, once I am introduced to a concept for the first time, then I add it to my Anki deck so I can make sure I remember it. The key is the context, and writing terms / definitions etc that speak specifically to me. I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.

I haven't used Anki for language learning, but I imagine that if I did, it would be to add some new vocabulary I had just learned from a book, conversation, film, etc. I don't think it would help me learn a language from zero though- that would require practicing it.

In summary, Anki is great for reinforcing something you've just learned, but you can't reinforce your way into the context that is necessary to truly understand something.

What language / framework are you using? I ask because in a Node / Typescript / React project I experience the opposite- Claude 3.7 usually solves my query on the first try, and seems to understand the project's context, ie the file structure, packages, coding guidelines, tests, etc, while Gemini 2.5 seems to install packages willy-nilly, duplicate existing tests, create duplicate components, etc.

Interesting... I asked o3 for help writing a flake so I could install the latest Webstorm on NixOS (since the one in the package repo is several months old), and it looks like it actually spun up a NixOS VM, downloaded the Webstorm package, wrote the Flake, calculated the SHA hash that NixOS needs, and wrote a test suite. The test suite indicates that it even did GUI testing- not sure whether that is a hallucination or not though. Nevertheless, it one-shotted the installation instructions for me, and I don't see how it could have calculated the package hash without downloading, so I think this indicates some very interesting new capabilities. Highly impressive.

All West Coast states have free healthcare (medicaid) available if your income is below a certain threshold. And there is no time limit on that. It won’t help with rent, but at least these folks won’t be completely without healthcare access.

That never occurred to me, but sounds wonderful! I wonder if modern interfaces would have ended up more navigable if there had been the expectation of these dedicated keys on every keyboard?

In one of my friend groups (consisting of folks in their 20s-30s and including both university students and professionals, mostly in the US) I’ve noticed a cultish obsession with the idea that the “system” is stacked, success is due solely to luck or unfair advantage, there are very limited resources, etc. Alluding to these themes seems to be a significant part of group identity. People even talk about how they actively sabotage their employer’s strategic and tactical goals, and I observe them receiving supportive feedback on this from other folks.

From my perspective, I think that one of the difficulties of being young is not yet knowing what exactly you should be working hard at. And in the knowledge economy where many of us must make significant career changes every few years, kicking off that new trajectory is somewhat analogous to youth. If you are working hard at the wrong thing, it will certainly feel like everything is stacked against you. I see some of my friends doing just this- trying to become something that just isn’t a good fit for them. How do you provide mentorship for people to help them identify what’s the best area to apply their efforts to?

1st Kindle DX: Screen cracked, not sure why. Maybe thermal stress? Amazon replaced for free. 2nd Kindle DX: Stopped booting, no physical damage. Kindle: Rolled on it after falling asleep, screen cracked. Kindle Oasis: Dropped directly on its face, screen cracked. This weird anti-bezel obsession means there is nothing to protect the screen. But you need a bezel to hold onto, so not having a bezel makes the device worse in most ways.

The Kobo that I have has large plastic bezels, so it is easy to hold, lightweight, less likely to be dropped, and when dropped, unlikely to suffer direct impact to the glass surface.

>> It seems like all of these eink devices are designed that way.

After going through 5 Kindles, I got a Kobo reader a few years ago, and couldn't be happier. It is more expensive than the Kindle because the price isn't subsidized, but the physical design is great, and I haven't broken it yet (I broke 4 Kindles through normal use).

They support loading your own software on without any "jailbreak", and I use Plato (https://github.com/baskerville/plato), which renders documents significantly faster than the stock reader.

I don't think you can legally sell a new small vehicle in the US, so the root cause is legislation that prevents this. I believe that if you could legally produce kei sized vehicles in the US, there would be a massive market for it, especially in urban environments. And I'm sure US manufacturers would be happy to sell them to all comers.

Edit: Basically any car from Suzuki would be a hit in the US: https://www.suzukiauto.co.za/new-cars

A DNS misconfiguration is often the root cause of an issue. Hence the saying “it’s always DNS”.

To continue on your point, the apprenticeship model of construction means that anyone can decide to get on the path to becoming an electrician today- starting on the lowest rung, but getting paid pretty well from day 0. In contrast to becoming a doctor… insane opportunity cost.

A lot of Japanese Kei cars fit that description, and they are available in every big market except the United States. I like to daydream about an alternative universe in which Suzuki was still operating in the US.

I liked his podcast Lexicon Valley so much that I went back and listened through every episode. It’s had a large impact on my thinking about language and empathy for communication. I went from thinking there was a “right” way to use language, to understanding that it’s all about communication, and there are nearly endless patterns in which languages are structured.

I miss the excuse to ride my bike on a commute every morning, but I'm definitely not going back to an office anytime soon. Hopefully companies will become more open to remote working. There is supposedly a shortage of software developers in the US right now, but:

1. Most companies only hire within a small physical distance of their office(s);

2. Of those that hire remote workers, most will only hire them if they are physically located in the US, or with luck Canada / Mexico;

3. Of those that hire globally, most will only hire through an agency, so there is some middleman taking a sizable chunk out of salary.

Bonus: When you finally find a company that hires remotely, hires internally, and hires globally... they will only offer what they think is the minimum needed in your country.

So... no thanks! I'll keep contracting independently for now. I'm not opposed to working for a company, but until US companies start recruiting reasonably, they are leaving out the majority of people- even the majority of English speakers if that is a requirement.