Nix and NixOS have had a similar sort of effect on me as Gentoo and FreeBSD have in the past. They have helped to expand my consciousness in the realm of systems administration and have helped me achieve new heights with my low latency audio configuration. For this reason, Nix and NixOS have become indispensable to my workflow.
NixOS introduces a new form of declarative configuration, fusing Gentoo's highly configurable nature with BSD's unified configuration file approach. For me, it's absolutely perfect until my own laziness bites me in the butt. If you want to do a gentle dive into Nix, resist the temptation to go full "NixOS" and learn the Nix build/environment system first. It will make things a lot easier for you in the long run.
I'd also suggest that, once you _do_ feel comfortable enough to step foot into NixOS territory, that you start off by version-controlling your configuration. It doesn't necessarily have to be public, but I've found it very helpful in the past when I've had to debug various issues due to misconfiguration by me.
You don't have to specify the nixosConfiguration name (e.g ~/flake#my-configuration)? Do you just name it "default" or something for that to work? I've never tried that.
Exactly as Macha said, if you name the attribute `nixosConfiguration.<hostname>`, `nixos-rebuild` will look for that attribute implicitly; you can still specify another configuration if you're e.g. in a VM or a live image.
I use an update script that overrides that location to $(pwd), and also uses nvd to print a package diff for the update. Among a few other niceties. With flakes, that's a regular nixos-rebuild flag; otherwise it's an envvar.
/etc/nixos is just the default, there's a number of ways to set your own path. One of the simplest might be to put "import /home/wherever" as the sole contents of configuration.nix.
That sounds like a nice little workflow; I might have to incorporate something like that with `nvd`...
Though, it should be said that `import /home/wherever` might not work if you switch to / use flakes, as that is likely outside of the flake's git repo (and thus impure).
Yeah, I symlink `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix` to my git repo. (I do keep a `hardware-configuration.nix` which isn't version controlled. I probably should add version-control at some point but for now it is simple enough to copy around and maybe make some minor tweaks).
You can also use `git init --separate-git-dir=~/something /etc/nixos` to keep the git data in your user directory while the config remains in the default location. I like this solution because it keeps the stuff I want to do as root (configuring the system) separate from what I want to do as regular user (tracking changes of the configuration).
> there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there
This is the concept that is most frequently left out of otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand.
Although I would not label the motivation as purely altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for doing so, are going to be doing it no matter the profit potential. Personally, I am a music composer [0] and I must make music. I am so unconcerned by profit that I have given all of my work away for free for more than a decade. I do all of my album releases on a podcast feed so that people never have to pay money, accept the terms of service of Spotify, or be raped by ad tech just to hear my work.
To me, payment is the fact that people heard my work. On that metric alone, SoundCloud has given me a lot more "payment" than any other online service out there, since it was so apparent when people did engage with my work, and those engagements were very meaningful to me on the whole.
I'm interested to know, if it isn't too personal, what kind of work do you do to bring in income?
There's a few passions that I have/have had, but I've found it hard to devote the time to any of them because I tend to feel very drained after doing work on things that I don't particularly care about.
I do media engineering related stuff, things related to media codecs, DSP, and p2p networking. The work I do during my day job is often somehow relevant to my music work.
For example, I used to work in VR, which enabled me to begin exploring ambisonics in my music.
I'm worried about how this reality is leading to the formation of a modern slavery system. That might seem hyperbolic but I can assure all who read this, it is not.
In the US especially, it cannot be forgotten why people from Central and South America are flooding the southern border. It's because of the US's meddling in the affairs of other nations, particularly via the War on Drugs.
So if the immigrants are supposed to take these public sector jobs because the current citizens refuse to do them, it would be considerably more ideal if they were to not take them under duress, which the US actively caused.
Astute observation, but at the same time it's the lesser evil to allow them to take that job. Let's not allow misguided compassion to do real world harm to the people to whom that compassion is directed.
If the US is supporting the worse conditions that make taking the job the lesser evil, and benefiting from the resultant labor (as parent comment claims), then it isn't really compassionate to support that system, as the system depends largely on suppressing quality of life elsewhere rather than creating opportunity. An analogy is that it might be the lessor evil for an African centuries ago to get on a slave ship rather than to be murdered on the spot. That doesn't make supporting slavery compassionate.
I disagree. You can support immigrants being allowed to work without supporting all parts of the system!
Cause and effect is what matters. Not some abstract purity test of "supporting a system" that's totally disconnected from actual moral outcomes. If you advocate a policy that blocks immigrants from working in the US, you are directly causing their suffering. If your position aligns closely with ethnonationalists, it's time for some deep introspection. This is malevolence masquerading as compassion.
> You can support immigrants being allowed to work without supporting all parts of the system!
This is my exact position. You are assuming I am against immigration. In the big picture, the system that makes immigration is not compassionate, but it would also not be compassionate in the small picture to stop immigration.
I've seen that argument (the one you're replying to) many times online and I never understand it. In the same breath people say that immigrants choosing to immigrate will have low wages and poor working conditions. Alright, but that's no secret, they know that and it's still better than where they came from, or they wouldn't move! Keeping them out hurts them or forces them into illegally immigrating.
The America First, America for Americans type people at least have a position that is coherent even if it's not compassionate.
The anti immigrant liberals for whom class solidarity ends at the border just don't make sense to me.
It's a purity thing. The left and right have their own notions of purity that have nothing to do with a deep understanding of morality. If these notions of purity are violated, they feel disgust. For the right, everyone knows what those notions of purity are (racial purity, bodily purity). For the left, hiring low wage workers is one of the triggering impurities, even if doing so leads to demonstrably utilitarian outcomes in the form of reduced suffering. So it's just people trying to avoid disgust triggers. Nothing to do with morality.
The US isn’t meddling in Central American affairs by banning drugs here in the US. Although it does affect them! They should also feel bad for allowing poison to be created and sold from their country.
This was a great read. Thanks for posting it here!
I found this line to be especially intriguing:
> Hellbanning everybody except for other big email providers is lazy and conveniently dishonest. It uses spam as a scapegoat to nerf deliverability and stifle competition.
The big tech firms criticized in this article are guilty of these sorts of transgressions in other arenas, as well. It's always been my contention that the "hellbanning" of user-generated content by big media and big tech alike comes from the same motivations. YouTube and CBS alike want to make niche content difficult to consume in order to stifle any competition that might get vaulted up as a result of that niche audience finding the new distribution endpoints. This comes with the added bonus of reducing cost of goods sold, by reducing the firehose of new content to process. Or, as the article puts it:
> Unfortunately, the computing power required to filter millions of emails per minute is huge. That's why the email industry has chosen a shortcut to reduce that cost. The shortcut is to avoid processing some email altogether. Selected email does not either get bounced nor go to spam. That would need processing, which costs money.
I would be very curious to learn if there are any proposed explanation as to why this phenomenon is so commonly spread throughout the big tech space. Do we get the same kind of behavior out of other enormous multi-national firms like oil producers, ocean freight companies, defense contractors, and chemical suppliers?
I was with you until the very end. Democracy as a whole is a poor system for doing just about anything. For example, free & open source software is not a democracy and it would never work if it was. We got here today explicitly via hierarchies, and with some participants being a lot more productive and "correct," than others. That's not an issue of economics or even politics; democracy as defined & even practiced today goes against the way human beings make progress.
The problem with the primary system is that it imposes significant guardrails upon intellectual debate, by making the partisans who coddle large vocal minorities appear to be the furthest you can go while still being successful. In fact, we have needed to think well outside even those boxes for many decades.
We need the citizenry to hold more radical political views. Radical politics indicates an understanding of political concepts, things which today very few people with a voice actually have. I don't care if you want to be a communist, a libertarian, or even a fascist authoritarian. As long as we stop having dull, ridiculous conversations comfortably within the tiny ring of globalist technocracy. That is what's literally killing the civilized world.
> Radical politics indicates an understanding of political concepts...
It can. Or it can indicate a very distorted understanding, based on badly flawed assumptions. Within that distorted worldview, the most bizarre proposals can seem perfectly reasonable, even "scientific".
There are radicals of several different flavors. They can't all have a (working) understanding of political concepts.
It's easier to talk somebody down from an insane point of view that is meaningless, than one that fits within the index card of allowable opinion yet is nonetheless very dangerous.
My point is, everybody's got a point of view where their position is within their index card of allowable options. (And maybe one where the sane viewpoints are not on it...)
If the backup password to these encrypted files is known, it can be rather trivial to access the data within.
Recently, a certain head of state's son had 100s of GB of iCloud backups thrown onto a torrent, and within a day rogue manchildren living in their parents' basements cracked most, if not all of it open.
With the backup password in hand, all one needs is this README.md file [0] to be off to the races.
That's how Apple's encryption in iCloud works. There are plenty of modern encryption standards that are not broken by a random user merely entering a random passphrase string.
Your low-effort posts can barely even be called legible sentences, let alone all the misspellings. I'll stop criticizing your posts if you stop criticizing mine. You are obviously following me around the site, there's no other way to explain the creepy behavior you're engaging in.
By the way, the users on this site are almost entirely losers. There are a cabal of perhaps 12 impressive people on here, the majority of you have no real connection to the big tech capital funds YC ingratiates itself with. I could care less what you fuckheads think about me or my comments. If I reach even one of you retards in a meaningful way, it's a victory to me.
