There's already a bunch of comments about Nix, so I don't want to repeat them, but really Nix is less complex than a handcrafted series of Makefiles, and significantly more versatile.
With home-manager I have the same packages, same versions, same configuration, across macOS, NixOS, Amazon Linux, Debian/Ubuntu... That made me completely abandon ansible to manage my homelab/vms.
Also adding flake.nix+direnv on a per project basis is just magical; I don't want to think how much time I would have wasted otherwise battling library versioning, linking failures, etc.
"This problem has already been solved in Canada. Just move to Canada."
Make is generic. Nix is not.
Before I even look at the actual code I already know that it is something I can use immediately on my existing system, no matter what that happens to be, right now, without changing anything else.
It doesn't matter how great nix is because it's not alpine or xubuntu or suse or freebsd or sco osr5 or solaris or cygwin, it's nix.
Even if you're only talking about nix the package manager, or nix the language, and not nix the os, it actually still applies because Make is everywhere and nix is not.
Even if this thing has bash-isms and gnumake-isms, I bet with minimal grief I can still use it on a Xenix system that doesn't even have a compiler (so no building nix) but does have ksh93 and make, even without leaning on the old versions of actual gnu make and bash that do exist.
>Make is generic. Nix is not. Before I even look at the actual code I already know that it is something I can use immediately on my existing system.
Hard disagree on this one. It's a series of makefiles that depend on apt (or whatever pacman you choose), so for any heterogeneous environment it's going to constantly be uphill battle to keep working in terms of package naming, existence of dependencies, etc. You'd find yourself reinventing Ansible, but worse.
> It doesn't matter how great nix is because it's not alpine or xubuntu or suse or freebsd or sco osr5 or solaris or cygwin, it's nix.
Nix runs fine on most (all?) modern Linux distros, macOS, even WSL, and there are workarounds to make it run on BSD, though I admittedly haven't tested those.
> Even if this thing has bash-isms and gnumake-isms, I bet with minimal grief I can still use it on a Xenix system that doesn't even have a compiler (so no building nix) but does have ksh93 and make, even without leaning on the old versions of actual gnu make and bash that do exist.
Use it on Xenix (which last shipped in 1991) to do what? The package management was tarballs and compiling. Instead of reinventing Ansible, you'd be reinventing pkgsrc. Not sure what your point here is.
Where I grew up, it happened to me with (primary/middle/high) schools.
During the 60s and 70s, in order to accommodate baby boomers, new buildings were built on existing school grounds, and while they were not cookie cutter copies of each other, they followed the same architectural and civil engineering principles: identical ceiling height, same fixtures, same walls, same classroom door arches, same bathroom stalls, toilets, similar fire exit paths, identical heavy steel and steel wired glass external doors, staircase layouts...
But given every location had its own available surface and urban/terrain/attendance needs, they were anywhere from 1 to 4 floors, straight corridors, or in L, or rectangular with inner courtyard, with and without basement, and overall significant practical deviations from some common standard blueprint (though I never found the common denominator) but keeping everything else the same. It was extremely eerie and disorienting visiting a different school, or getting used to another school when you moved, especially after hours when they're empty.
It's probably similar to the khrushchyovki/stalinki residential buildings in post-Soviet countries, though I've only visited them well after the collapse and they've evolved on their own. Meanwhile these schools I mention, look actually frozen in time.
They do. I'm currently seeing a degradation on Opus 4.6 on tasks it could do without trouble a few months back. Obvious I'm a sample of n=1, but I'm also convinced a new model is around the corner and they preemptively nerf their current model so people notice the "improvement".
> Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
Interesting mental exercise. It was explored in A Canticle for Leibowitz[0], novel in 3 parts (Fiat homo, fiat lux, fiat voluntas tua), the first set in the immediate post nuclear-war world, second 600 years after towards the end of the new middle ages, and the third 600 later in a typical futuristic scenario. The first part covers the religious efforts to preserve knowledge (even if said knowledge was not understood), and the second in the new renaissance from wielding such knowledge.
I wonder how LLMs, with their mistakes and all, would play a role in rebuilding civilization. Most media these days is not prepared for staying stable for 20 years, not sure how much and for how long it could be preserved. Perhaps mechanical hard drives in certain isolated environments?
Funny, I saw the news about the new game just before I saw this article. I didn't know it was a reboot at all, I'd never heard of the originals. It looks cool.
I'm roughly the same as you in terms of information access, though whether I was a child is debatable; was 14 when I got my first dialup connection. My family wasn't tech-adjacent so it was me who pushed for it; the only control in place was the amount of time I'd spend there.
The only control I have in place on my son in terms of content is whether something is scary or if he won't be able to understand most of it, because arguably he's still too young for many things.
But once he's 12 I don't think I want to restrict most things in terms of content, and by 16 I personally don't care if he watches hardcore midget porn, as long as I have the chance to contextualise and explain the industry.
But.
What I'd rather control (or ban, even) is rather all ML-driven doomscrolling platforms and the "social media" that turned people no longer social. The Internet you and I grew up in no longer exists (or it's a small hidden fraction of it), and now it's a wasteland of engagement traps and corporate revenue directed dark patterns.
You and I learnt to separate wheat from chaff, research, deep dive, and what not. Internet is now, by and large, instant gratification loops and user tracking. I don't want my son (or myself, actually) pulled into that. Porn is literally healthier: you bust a nut and go on with your day, but I see some people wasting hours on end, reel-after-reel, with increasingly targeted ads shoved to their face. Hard pass on that.
Age control, if any, should lie in the hands of the parent/guardian. Make it by law a setting on the routers (new devices are <18 until admin approves them), or the ISPs for mobiles. I'm okay with that. Absolutely not on random third parties handling personal information filling the gap for every random website.
All of that leaving aside the fact that zero knowledge proofs solve this problem without sharing any sensitive information.
But of course, the corporations benefiting from this are not interested in pushing those, IMO reasonable, age controls.
With home-manager I have the same packages, same versions, same configuration, across macOS, NixOS, Amazon Linux, Debian/Ubuntu... That made me completely abandon ansible to manage my homelab/vms.
Also adding flake.nix+direnv on a per project basis is just magical; I don't want to think how much time I would have wasted otherwise battling library versioning, linking failures, etc.
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