klodolph

I think this comment could be written in a way that was less combative and more clear.

I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using.

> Don't close your mind to new knowledge and it might just get interested!

Please be respectful in these conversations—I’m interested in hearing more about this, but the comments you’ve been making are emotionally charged and insulting.

I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using because it sounds like you’d hate Explorer, Nautilus, and Thunar too. Sorry for repeating the question—but I’m not going to accuse you of “conveniently ignoring” the question. Accusing someone of conveniently ignoring a question is, I don’t know, at best just rude. Don’t do that.

I know that there are things that Finder is not good at, that’s fine by me. What baffles me is the comparison with Windows Explorer, and that’s why I responded, and that’s the context for my comments. If you have a comparison with a specific other file manager in mind I’d like to hear it. For my use cases, I am often sorting through large quantities of media files, so I value things like column view and Quicklook.

(Copy without extension is enter, command-C. Full path 95% of the time, I am pasting into the Terminal, and so I drag it in, and the terminal automatically escapes it.)

To be honest, a lot of these seem to have the shape, “I want to be able to press button A to do action X,” but for the Finder, you have to press button B instead. I was hoping for something a little more interesting.

Things like, “In a Real Pro file manager, you can double-tap C to copy a filename, but in Finder, you have to press command-C.” Do you see why I’m a little disappointed by this list?

I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using because it sounds like you’d hate Explorer, Nautilus, and Thunar too.

What do you like about the other file managers over the Finder?

Finder has column view and quicklook. If there’s something that I’m missing out on from, say, Explorer or Thunar or whatever, I’d love to hear it. Whenever I have to sort through a lot of files on Linux or Windows, I get a better experience by exporting a SMB share and sorting on a Mac.

The only file managers that I’ve used that felt competitive with the Mac are tools like Midnight Commander (or the original Norton version).

As a Mac user since the 1980s, I feel feel like Finder is easily best in class, even after ten or fifteen years of design. I would describe Windows Explorer as “embarrassingly bad” in comparison, despite having a good hold on the shortcuts.

I honestly think it is a matter of what you like rather than what is good or bad.

> Try it yourself, use a big model like Opus or Sol to implement everything by first making a plan using plan mode.

When I do this, I can have it use cheap subagents with models like Luna to read the relevant files.

C++ lambdas and Go closures are incompatible with each other. If you pick something that lets C call Go closures (which are fat pointers passed around), it is likely to be incompatible with whatever your C++ library is doing.

I think it’s foreseeable that if you use the LLM to commit work you’ve written, it might cause problems with attribution.

In general I assume that attribution to AI is approximate. People copy-paste things out of chats and those don’t get attributed to the AI. And on the flip side, I’ve had AI write a commit, and then I’ve reverted it and written something different by hand (and it got tagged with an LLM session).

The AI attribution is approximate and informative. The commit message and authorship are the more important parts.

You may be concerned that people will think your commits are LLM-generated. I’m sorry that you have to work in that environment, but I don’t work in an environment like that and I don’t share your concerns.

I may be missing something, but this is exactly what I want as a default. I want the session links there. I see PRs from my coworkers with session links.

I still get to control whether other people can see the session, but I don’t lose it.

I don’t get the “unprofessional” argument. This is attribution. Attribution is professional. If you don’t want it, you turn it off or rewrite the commit messages. If you are having Claude write the commit messages FOR YOU and you are NOT READING THEM then that’s what’s unprofessional. I am honestly kind of shocked and disappointed by how upset people are by this.

> I do not see why we need to make any design decision to specify object layout

> we simply need a code pointer and static chain pair

The code pointer and chain pair needs an object layout. You would have to pick a specific layout, and it would not be compatible with other languages that have a different layout.

Right now I can do this:

    struct a {
      void (*fun)(void *ctx);
      int data1;
      int data2;
    };
    struct b {
      void (*fun)(void *ctx);
      void *ctx;
    };

And I could call them:

     struct a *aptr;
     a->fun(aptr);

     struct b *bptr;
     b->fun(bptr->ctx);

There is only one neutral, maximally compatible option here—which is to have the function pointer separate from the arguments you want to pass in, and pass them in explicitly.

If you add closures to C you are making compatibility worse, not better.

This feature would IMO violate the contract that C allows you to specify memory layout of objects, to some level of detail (I am being a little vague about the “level of detail”).

Supporting closures, more or less, requires design decisions that are equivalent to choosing a specific layout for objects in an object-oriented language. C, as it is, makes none of these assumptions and you can translate a lot of different language ABIs into some C code (that may be clumsy). Keeping the abstraction that function pointers = pointers to entry points for functions, well, that’s frustrating for C programmers writing C programs, but extremely useful for interoperability.

Yes, but the advice was W^X. Either a page of memory is executable or writable but not both at the same time.

Yes, that’s the “ABI” alternative that I was referring to.

It’s not a question of ISA support. If you call via a function pointer, how do you supply the pointer to the data? (It has to either be in a separate place from the function code, or the same place. One requires an ABI change, the other an executable, writable section of memory.)

Feels like there are a few categories of services from cloud providers,

There’s the basic infrastructure we know and love like S3, EC2, etc.

There’s the higher level but still basic stuff that just makes a lot of sense. I like ECS + Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS.

And then there are the tarpits. CloudFormation. Cognito. Step Functions. API Gateway. They do something useful (otherwise why would they exist?) but the main point of their existence seems to be to trap you in AWS, and the fact that they solve a problem seems secondary. Some of them are cheap (CloudFormation is free!) but in general they seem like expensive alternatives to simpler, cheaper solutions.

I likewise used to bring a backpack full of gear, but I think the experience of traveling and taking pictures over and over again with the Big Nice Camera did a lot to hone my skills as a photographer.

I have photos I’m genuinely happy with, years later.

Well, that’s half of it, and the other half of it is no sub-pixel coordinates.

Only one of the consoles listed lacks an FPU, the other two (N64 and DreamCast) both have FPUs. Despite its age, the FPU on the N64 was plenty fast and it was used extensively.

Everything being static inline makes it hostile to these older systems which have limited RAM. Use of float makes it unlikely that you’d run it on the PlayStation, which has no FPU.

> As for the skepticism, all I can offer is my experience which is that it does indeed work, and I've been running this way for awhile.

I believe you. Do you believe me?

> At that point, NixOS just clicked and I'm far more productive with 30+ hosts than I used to be with 1-2.

There’s not much room for improvement in my own productivity here. The amount of time I spend maintaining these hosts is not large to begin with.

> This sounds like you're branching into territory that can no longer be reasonably framed as NixOS vs. Debian (or other distro of choice).

I was never talking about NixOS in the first place!

Yes

I’m here in the thread and I can answer questions or elaborate on things, so if you want to know what I meant you can just ask me and there’s a good chance I’ll respond.

YMMV, I don’t run a home lab, I just have a NAS and run a personal website. I definitely don’t have a “fleet”. I have two servers running Debian and I can bring them back up from zero in <30 minutes.

“Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with changes and it’s possible that things break. My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.

Regarding Nix complaints:

Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe you find something that is actively updated, maybe not. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off because the maintainer didn’t bother. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons. What I want is just to know what level of distro-level maintenance the package has, including its transitive dependencies.

Docs are just kinda bad. Fragmented across different sites. Docs teaching you Nix forwards or backwards, or teaching old Nix, or teaching Nix with flakes, or teaching you Nix for end-users or developers or package maintainers, or Nix on Mac or NixOS. A surprising number of broken links. What I want is one site, with a little drop-down menu to select the version I am using. What I have is hours spent on the NixOS Discord trying to figure out how to do basic stuff.

I don’t have all of the details, sorry, but PAM is a bunch of .so that are dlopen'd and if you mess them up you lose access to your system pretty damn quick. I would tell people to just use the system libc but I don’t know the specific failure modes for using libc via Nix. Using system libc = building your project outside of Nix.

There could be similar issues with NSS but I think more people are ready to bypass NSS altogether.

I didn’t use the word “complicated”, maybe I’m missing something, but I listed some specific complaints and “Nix is complicated” wasn’t on the list.

There was a sweet spot in like 2024 when it seemed like everything was possible with Nix, but now it seems like everything “experimental” is permanently so (like flakes), packages I care about are not as fresh as I want, I have no mental recall for Nix commands…

Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something.

Reminds me of Bazel, in the way that it gets adopted by companies with developer support teams (because it solves real problems) but feels frustrating for us ordinary folk. Nixpkgs is kind of a critical part of “ordinary folk” and with the core team disbanding, I feel like my personal moves away from Nix (for projects) are proving correct.

I thought DRAM was pretty dense already. Is mask ROM that much denser?

Sarcasm, definitely