> Raspberry Pis themselves are perfectly reliable given a stable power supply and good storage — steer clear of slow and flakey SD cards.
At some point the problem stops being my fault and must be the ecosystem. I bought official power supplies, I bought top tier SD cards, I bought special hats to use NVME with RPi, they all sucked IMHO. Maybe I am "holding it wrong" but after buying every RPi from the original B to the 5th gen with the max ram I'm done. Also the foundation seems to have lost its way (especially through COVID) so I'm not really interested in support them anymore even if I found their hardware to be reliable.
I have 12 of them in a cluster and had endless lockups and performance issues with USB drives and SD cards. I ended up switching to a USB to SATA adapter and a cheap consumer grade SSD and have had no issues since.
They aren’t the fastest, but they are reliable IME.
Two reasons I can think of: it wastes your time to have keep scrolling past blatant hallucinations, and it still costs the environment to compute it. I'm happy to cost Google some money, but I'm less happy about the environmental impact they'll inevitably not pay for.
The over-arching good reason is simply: I don't want it. That should be good enough! As the user, I should be able to command my computer to output what I want it to output, and to not output what I don't want it to output. The user should have the final say over what computation does or does not happen on his computer, not the web or application developer. And we don't need these "Take it or leave it" ultimatums from developers. Using a computer should not be some faustian bargain, where you have to sacrifice something in order to have it precisely follow the commands you issue.
This sadly doesn't match my lived Linux experience. The amdgpu drivers are absolutely abominable with Thunderbolt and regularly cause suspend/resume issues, even when the laptop has suspended while connected to the dock and resumed whilst still connected.
Beyond this applications like Firefox fairly regularly cease rendering frames for seconds at a time while various timeout errors are logged by amdgpu.
AMD have a lot of work to do to just to match Intel on Linux graphics driver stability.
Nix is awesome for this -- write your entire series of CI tools in she'll or Python and run them locally in the exact same environment as they will run in CI. Add SOPS to bring secrets along for the ride.
Would Nix work well with GitHub Actions? Or is it more of a replacement? How do you automate running tests and deploying to dev on every push, for example?
You can use Nix with GitHub actions since there is a Nix GitHub action: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/install-nix. Every time the action is triggered, Nix rebuilds everything, but thanks to its caching (need to be configured), it only rebuilds targets that has changed.
> How do you automate running tests and deploying to dev on every push
Note there are also several Nix CI that can do a better job than a raw GitHub actions, because they are designed for Nix (Hydra, Garnix, Hercules, ...).
One neat Nix feature is development shells, which let you define isolated shell environments that can be activated by invoking `nix develop` (or via direnv upon entering a directory):
Since I'm doing this within a Nix flake all of the dependencies for this environment are recorded in a lock file. Provided my clone of the repo is up to date I should have the same versions.
You can combine this with direnv and auto-activate the nix environment when you `cd` into directories as well. We do this, and just activate the shell in ci environments with a cache. Works great.
Yes. GitHub actions can be just a thin wrapper to call any Nix commands that you can run locally.
> How do you automate running tests
You just build the Nix derivation that runs your tests, e.g. `nix build #tests` or `nix flake check` in your workflow file.
> deploying to dev on every push
You can set up a Nix `devShell` as a staging area for any operations you'd need to perform for a deployment. You can use the same devShell both locally and in CI. You'd have to inject any required secrets into the Action environment in your repository settings, still. It doesn't matter what your staging environment is comprised of, Nix can handle it.
Respectfully, a lot of your comments appear apologetic to dictatorial/authoritarian figures and contradict "mainstream" thinking. What's your background/perspective? Given the support for Duterte, are you Filipino?
You point could be valid if it was not only a propaganda/marketing speech to cover terrible self interested crimes.
If his policy was so effective, why drug and criminality was still that high during all of his long time administration? Despite a lot of "democratic" countries respecting the rule of law not facing such issues.
And probably even worse, murders for all sort of reasons were very common, especially as corruption was mainstream. I guess when the president says that doing its own justice with murder as an impact in the way people and gangs solves their problems...
If any one still things that Duterte was a humanist, just ask yourself how did he build his wealth!
I am not, but I have some connection to the philippines.
mainstream thinking is what the pictocube tells people.
its very simple, stopping drug epidemic good, having druggies everywhere bad. call it dictatorial if you want, going after drugdealers is something I support. Duterte delivered big.
so you admit the drugdealers are a massive amount of people?
anyway, you are assuming there is any justice to be found in the "justice" system. In a very ideal world, I would choose differently, but you have to look at the whole picture, and then the perfect solution is generally quite far from what you have to deal with
I don’t admit anything of the sort. They committed extrajudicial mass murder. Are the ones they killed drug dealers? Criminals? Random passersby? Without a proper trial you can’t tell.
The death penalty is already bad WITH proper trials, since judges can always get it wrong but this isn’t even that.
Put differently, the way you are arguing for it would enable anyone to kill you in cold blood and later claim you had it coming.
IMO that's a gross oversimplification which ignores the actual problem.
In my (limited) experience of the Philippines, the greatest problem is the total lack of domestic opportunity, fuelled by the view of labour as an export. It's compounded by the high cost of education which parents are expected to cover. Graduates enter a world of retail and BPO jobs because they are overqualified. There is no social mobility. There is no middle class. Folks sell their homes and what little land their families hold to afford healthcare, which a few privileged doctors build private rental empires on.
Against this backdrop Duterte's popularity appears consistent with other populist figures -- a machismo strongman claiming to execute the people's will whilst stealing from them for his own gain. Add in extrajudicial killings and increasing militarisation of the police and it's hard to see him as anything other than a tyrant.
Why is there a lack of domestic opportunity? Why do they keep exporting their labour instead of focusing on internal capital investment and inviting foreign capital?
Domestic opportunity is limited by corruption which causes unpredictability that small business can’t plan around.
Say you’re a software developer. You already do software freelancing but you’d like to hire a friend and grow your business into your own agency. You need a couple laptops with more DDR than you can find locally, but you find a $400 model online. Officially, it will cost you $200 in import duties, but when you ship the package, it doesn’t arrives because customs employees extorts recipients with claims of under declared value or unpaid taxes, then confiscate the contents for themselves. Other packages may arrive without an issue, until you open them to find the contents have been substituted for some worthless ballast. The first time this happens the online retailer may refund you, but at some point your money is lost. If customs notices that you’ve ordered several laptops to your home address they may accuse you of running an undeclared business (which you’re not doing yet since you lack the equipment) to extort you for an order of magnitude more fees.
Or one time, your package might arrive. You can’t predict it. Which makes it impossible to save/plan, especially on a shoestring budget.
Customs corruption kills small business ambitions and upward mobility in the cradle.
Since cars don't need to cross water, maybe this isn't actually relevant. Uber aren't trying to model the planet, just the routes within the geographies they support.
The Azure docs are abysmal, and obvious quality issues (like copying the entire Windows VM directory over the top of the Linux VM one and forgetting to change things like RDP connection details out for SSH) sit unanswered for months.
I've just ended my Pro plan; enough is enough. I've been debating moving my repositories to a self-hosted forge for a while; it'll be an interesting opportunity to move more CI operations out of Actions and into Nix.
The HAOS virtual appliance is awesome though.
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