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We're talking about it here. It seems like the multi trillion dollar company might actually be onto something.


We talked quite extensively about Stadia


Sorry. It seems like the multi trillion dollar advertising company might actually be onto something regarding advertising.


I switched away from Nix OS and eventually landed on GNU Guix, which I have stayed on for about 4 years now. One of the main reasons I switched away from Nix was because of the language, and how underdocumented it all felt. GNU Guix was a breath of fresh air, using a language with decades of academic backing outside of the context of Guix (SICP was awesome for getting into it) and the whole system is very well documented, with a nearly Arch-wiki quality manual built into the OS in the info pages.


Oh, I'm interested. Are you using it on servers, or desktop? My concern is the community is small, while Nix's has been booming.


I am using it on my home server that serves my web page and also a lot of things for my home network.

It runs some guix containers and some VMs. Nothing fancy.

All declared in a couple of files.


I'm using it on my server, laptop, and desktop. The community may be relatively small, but it is super active and easy to engage with. As a testament to how active the community is, Repology[0] ranks GNU Guix as the 5th largest repo by number of packages. Ahead of even some much more well known distros like Fedora and Gentoo.

[0] https://repology.org/


4 years can be a very long time in a project, especially when the "network effect" hit around that time, where the active user count (and contributions) grown significantly.

Also, the language is quite simple, it's just foreign and you felt more at home with Scheme, so you might not have given Nix as much of a chance. This is the classic "simple vs easy" from the Hickey talk.

Documentation is no perfect, but has become quite a bit better over the years, and many of the problems that still linger are simply architectural ones of the nixpkgs repo, irrespective of language and wouldn't be solved in any other language/DSL in itself.


I was familiar with Haskell and had never used Lisp before using Nix (which was before I tried Guix). The fact that the Nix language was more foreign to me than Scheme seems like an important point against the language. Also, I used NixOS for months; it's not like I just hopped to it and hopped away from it after seeing the language. It was months of compounding frustration.


Guix has stripped away the biggest plus from NixOS: the module system and replaced it with a half assed system


In all those years working on and playing with free software, I still cannot understand the incessant need for badmouthing other projects and calling things "half-assed". What a destructive habit!


I mean, modules are just regular guile modules. It feels somewhat clunky, but at the same time you can use guile's introspection to do fun stuff.

I always found it more flexible, but on the other hand I never liked NixOS modules.


Yep, it feels somewhat clunky when you are used to NixOS modules :P


Can you say why you think nix modules are the "biggest plus" from NixOS? They don't even make the top 5 for me.


When installing Nextcloud I basically have the following 4 options: - Do everything by hand and read through the docs on every update. Does not sound like fun. - Use someones Ansible playbook and hope that they update it on time. meh, also customizing it is not a walk in the park and requires some effort on my side. - Use the upstream Docker container which has the same customization problem as Ansible - Use the NixOS module. Updates are fast. Configuration changes are being handled by NixOS and I can easily inject a nginx location block in my declarative config. I also can easily describe extra bits like pre-compressed assets which then are served by nginx in my normal workflow without having to think about them at all on updates.

overlays and the module system are THE killer features. Almost no one else has something comparable to offer and if those powerful features are well understood, they can save you soo much hassle.


Is that basically it as far as advantages of the module system? That seems to be solved in Guix by defining package variants[0].

[0] https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Defining-Pack...


Isn't that just a function of how well-packaged the service is? If this is what you meant by "modules" then I feel like it covers pretty much all code re-use - including the guile module system used by guix. Is there something special about nix modules that is not just "I can re-use code"?


I haven't used it in a year. That's how long ago I switched from git to jujutsu. jj new is all you need.


Ayup. The only downside of jujutsu is that it exposes how many places have become welded to the specifics of Git and Github.


I've had this question for some time: how do jj users perform bisect? I know it doesn't have a dedicated bisect command (yet?), but surely there must be a way to do that, right? Bisecting commits/changes is crucial for debugging.


I personally linearize my history via rebasing, so manually bisecting is easy. That's probably pretty common among jj users.


AI generated images can be good, and even reasonable to use for branding. Slapping an image right at the top of the page that says "Abstract Synxex Tree" with a meaningless graph and an absolutely expressionless and useless humanoid robot is a great way to immediately lose my interest in anything they have to say though. The homepage would be more interesting as a wall of text.


Agreed, mostly, but this is not a homepage. On the homepage, there's a video demo and a wall of text (https://aider.chat/). Still, that Synxex Tree should disappear :)


Maybe someday we will build a society where standing on the shoulders of giants is encouraged, even when they haven't been dead for 100 years yet.


this would be yellow in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics but we are still a mix of orange and green.


The ads under that article are about as funny as the article itself. Lots of hilariously bad AI generated images and stuff


You don't run an adblocker?


Clearly they don’t.


Maybe his comment is an opsec deflection strategy.


It's interesting to me that you consider servicing API requests to not be a service.


Of course they're a service, but a lot of people started calling Musk evil when he started charging for them, so now we (who love bluesky) have to pretend like they're not an online service but have somehow become a moral obligation.


Small nitpick, the domain name used for a ATProto identity is decoupled from the server that hosts that users data. A username is established on ATProto by creating a TXT record of the users DID (essentially a public key). This is not identical to ActivityPub, because the users data is hosted / managed by the server that the A/AAAA record points to. ATProto users can migrate their data from server to server while maintaining the same username. ActivityPub users cannot.

Also, Bluesky is a centralized view of the data in the decentralized ATProto network. This means you will never end up having the problem where searching for a user on one instance will not show up because they are on another instance that they have not federated with. There are obviously tradeoffs with this, but IMO they do seem sensible. The nice thing about Bluesky is not that it is decentralized (it's not), it's that the data that it let's users interface with is decentralized, and if something goes south with Bluesky, another application can be built on the same data and users can migrate without starting from square one.


This solves only half of the problem (migration). It doesn't solve the problem of different people signing up on different servers using the same handle. Is there anything stopping me from making a stephenking account on another server?


My "nitpick" was on the use of the word "server". The domain name used for a username is decoupled from the server. But no, there is nothing stopping you from making a stephenking subdomain on another domain. Just like there is nothing stopping you from making a website at google.mycoolwebsite.xyz.

But there are moderation lists that you as a user can subscribe to. It wouldn't be hard to find a moderation list for impersonators, which would solve this problem for you.


> I don't know any good solutions to this problem, but that doesn't make the problem go away.

Abandoning the concept of celebreties and instead using social media for social interactions with people who you can "validate" their identity by walking over to them and asking them for their ID.


I found posting on Bluesky to be a similar experience to posting on X premium in terms of engagement. I had premium for the entire lifespan of my X account (I made it to play with Grok) and my followers / following ratio has pretty much been exactly the same.

Have you actually promoted your Bluesky account anywhere or spent time engaging with other people the same way you expect people to engage with you?


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