The line about nix making it easier for newcomers in the readme and similar statements always trigger me. I am quite a competent person and I've never once thought "that was easy" when trying to use nix.
I adore the concepts of nix, but the user experience is awful. Maybe that's what this tool solves? It takes a frustrating amount of effort and incessant config tweaking with little to no documentation and navigating seemingly endless already-deprecated methodologies to reach that point. Perhaps I'm just dumb, or looking in the wrong places.
In any case in my experience the end result is every time I see something related to nix, I find myself thinking "I can't wait til that's easy"
The line suggests the opposite yes. That's why I take issue with it.
There's nothing easy about nix. Maybe flox makes it easier, but I am so burned out by screwing around for countless hours with nix I'm not even going to try to figure out if it's true.
The fact that my experience with nix has historically been _so_ difficult, I fear even something that claims to make it "easier" will not be able to deliver -- my aversion has everything to do with nix, and little do with any product which claims to improve it. Consider it guilt by association.
For me, it doesn't simply need to be easier, it needs to be usable. I lack confidence a product which is an abstraction layer is going to solve that for me, because I have a personal inability to understand the underlying system.
Maybe you need to try it out rather than casting doubts about a product you haven't tried yet? Pre-emptively doubting claims based on your past experience with a tool Flox claims to solve seems like a poor way to go here.
For what it's worth, there are a number of options in the Nix space that really do solve for its complexity like Devbox and now Flox.
If you still use it, my best suggestion is to use a github search for 'path:.nix TERMs' when you run in to issues. It's likely someone already has that custom package, or an overlay to fix that missing compile option, or whatever else it is that you're looking for. I find reading other peoples solutions also helps with understanding and solving related problems.
I'm in no means claiming Nix is perfect, but coming from other distros to NixOS I really appreciate the ability to reboot to a new generation and then reboot back if I run in to issues. To do the same in Arch I had a bunch of 'snapper plus manual steps' to accomplish the same.
Exact same experience here. Been fiddling with nixos for quite a while, but never got comfortable with .nix or flakes. The base concepts keep escaping my mind, I have to revisit every time I have to configure something new and I just got tired. Issues are difficult to debug and you have to go through very specific commands and a hellish filesystem to understand what's going wrong. I love the concept, but I feel like it just gets too much in my way.
What do you mean by this part? The actual filesystem like Ext4/ZFS/etc? Or the removal of the unix Filesystem Heirarchy and replacement with a simulated/softlinked version in Nix/OS?
I love nix and have contributed quite a few packages to the nix repository, and I will vouch that it’s anything but easy. I have a background in Haskell which makes it more familiar, but even the syntax is counterintuitive to newcomers.
This is my experience too. At scale, I find Nix to be really slow, and the remote building infrastructure over VPN to be very flakey (see what I did there?). But it does solve some tough problems, and also introduces some new ones. Nix is incredibly useful, and extremely frustrating at the same time. Also, disk space...
Agreed on the experience, hard to onboard. I looked at devenv.sh as easier way to get going. Implemented all with Nix, less lock-in. Just found std [0] and that looks quite promising too.
I think once somebody solves the hellish configuration with another language that people can actually understand NixOs will take off. I mean, I hate js as much as everybody else, but I’d rather use that to configure nix than whatever that thing is that they use now.
The language isn't the problem, it's the structure (if you can call it that) of Nixpkgs that makes it so difficult. And no, flakes are not the answer, they may solve composability but they create other problems.
I was definitely being tongue in cheek, but technically speaking I think most blasphemous acts aren't harmful, it's the response to those acts that gets people hurt.
I have an old client who called and is having issues with their registration/calendar system.
When the page loads it looks for events two years in the future, which as you might guess based on the context of this thread, simply increments the current date's year by two.
Would you mind elaborating why? I'm not super experienced in the AI world, and barely use Hugging Face. Frankly, the name makes it difficult to take it seriously.
Hugging Face is very supportive of the open source machine learning community, both in the work they do with the transformers library, as well going above and beyond in developer and community relations to build an all around great product offering and user experience. Microsoft does the opposite of all of those things and has only made GitHub worse and more unstable since acquiring them.
It doesn't really compete will well-edited prose, but transcripts are available on youtube and actually often pretty good, despite being auto-generated.
Yes. I have an org issued machine with crap specs and dozens of repos I switch between all day long. Waiting 30s-2m doesn't sound like much but it breaks flow and leads to a lot of "what was I doing again...?" Sidetracks
Sounds like your org is bad at basic arithmetic. 12230s = 12 minutes per day minimum. Assuming an engineering salary at perhaps 100k usd /year, that is about 40,7 usd per hour, they would save money by giving you a max specced frame.work(2500$) after 307 days (maximum). Assuming you do this more than “2 dozen” times per day, as you say “all day long”, at minimum they would make that money back in 7.7 days. The same numbers for a max specced MacBook Pro (at 7200 usd) is 22.1 to 884,5 days.
I get mad at this attitude from some companies. It’s like telling a carpenter that they have to build a house, but are not allowed power tools. It makes no sense.
This is the case for most orgs with corp IT. Their KPIs are around security, which often manifests itself as a game of "how many security products can one run in parallel". Crapware like Cisco Secure Endpoint (not to mention Umbrella), Thycotic, Netskope, and whatever else is the current cool way for a corp to MITM itself and introduce kernel vulnerabilities.
This in turn puts departments at odds, as their argument for speed is turned into an argument against security, which is a very hard position to be in if your department is a few layers down the corp stack.
I don’t understand. How does speed implies inverse security, even with corporate blinders on? Let’s say the add all the bloatware in the world, how would a slower developmental speed compromise the security? That their ability to push code goes up and their potential for bugs increase?
Security solutions impact speed, rendering reasonable and performant machines borderline useless. There is no implication that working fast is bad for security.
We should be clear that it isn't ALL of corporate IT that is on board with this, or probably even the majority. Its the windows sysadmins that have to deal with non-technical end users, and are constantly being hounded about trivial shit like people clicking on phishing emails and that sort of thing. In fairness to the windows people, you probably wouldn't believe just how awful the majority of workers are with computers. So it's understandable why windows sysadmins become hyper paranoid and irrational in a lot of cases. The low pay doesn't help either. Windows sysadmin is usually a lower tier job within IT and is the most likely to suffer cost cutting and be forced to "outsource" security work to a pile of rotten security software. It's also entry level, and so sometimes they are only marginally better with computers than their end users.
Ideally, most programmers should be in IT or have some kind of alignment with IT and able to give some pushback about this during CAB for instance, and/or get some exceptions but that is increasingly difficult the more 'agile' an organization becomes and the more it seeks to silo infrastructure people from application people. A good IT department imo is one that doesn't do this and retains a more traditional culture where programmers are part of IT and able to actually influence the technical direction of the company, not just be treated like a product factory for business units.
Just from personal experience working as a programmer on the infrastructure side...complaining about windows sysadmins was the favorite past time of probably the majority of higher tier IT employees. It makes our jobs incredibly difficult for the same reason it makes application developers jobs difficult.
Problem is that most corps in my experience are run by such windows sysadmins, and when you're a subsidiary or two away from the IT department it doesn't matter whether you're all greybeards - you don't have authority. Best you can do is manage to fly under the radar.
On the other hand, you'd be surprised by just how many career programmers are completely inept at sysadmin work and have no sense for security (nothing like CI pipelines using personal credentials and committing keys into public repos), so just letting all programmers do whatever isn't a great policy either...
This assumed by the way that the speed goes to infinity, which is untrue. But the result would most likely be indistinguishable from instantaneous from the point of view of the developer.
That's a drastic response and I'd like to say - as a person that is in good mental health - that I've observed exactly the same type of unpleasant psychological manipulation by way of the big social platforms.
I made the mistake of discussing potential relationship issues using FB messenger, over the course of a couple of weeks my feed became almost entirely toxic memetic content; infidelity memes, cuckoldry memes, 'man up bro' type of content, incel content and a lot of gradual 'pushing out'; videos of men in the woods alone hunting, people living 'happily' in vans with dogs, alone, always alone, and with a vague hint of 'you can get your revenge' thrown in there - no specific 'calls to action' but a general destabilising push. Some of it was really really awful and bleak; the man alone in the woods hunting realising the only person he can trust ever is his ever-faithful dog, it was really toxic. Also 'homeless' - I think one day I must have seen the word 'homeless' in literally every single comment I opened. I've never seen a word so many times in my life. It was incredibly strange.
I could see a person who was already quite unhappy and isolated being driven to do something really stupid if they didn't protect themselves by pulling the plug, which I did.
In addition just about every single comment section everywhere has people stirring up drama. Reddit has had to ban 'crime' posts from local city subreddits because people flood the subs with endless 'CRIME EPIDEMIC STAY INSIDE IT'S SAFE INSIDE' type posts that serve only to create tons of anxiety. It's not accidental, it's something that's being done.
I do think that a lot of the issues with homelessness, migratory behaviour and isolation within society are caused by these platforms pushing this sort of 'ah just give up on society, be an island' mentality on people.
I'd say that it's now very very hard to maintain a normal state of mental health if you make extensive use of these platforms; very hard but doable if you confine yourself to a desktop, almost impossible if you have the apps on your phone.
I think plenty of people have suicidal ideation, especially in moments of despair. I don't really believe it needs a drastic response and checking yourself in - especially if you believe you're being persecuted - is likely to get you nothing helpful and is way over the top. Because it isn't like you're going to receive expert and specialised treatment at a public health facility (which is where you'll go if you're on a hold) - they'll peg you as having some sort of paranoia issue, shoot you full of thorazine and stick you on a bed for 72h because that works 95% of the time and frankly that's all they have the resources for.
Your response is very ignorant and you're clearly in no position to be dispensing advice. What you're doing is dangerous. Please stop. This is my last reply to you.
I'd like to remind you that you initiated the conversation by using the phrase 'looney bin' which is inherently disrespectful, disparaging and conveys the impression that a person who exhibits suicidal ideation is a 'looney' when, in fact, it is quite common according to modern psychiatric literature.
People do despair and do think of ending their lives, however inpatient treatment - which usually entails an immediate loss of income because most people in that state are in precarious day-to-day jobs where they'll be fired for not showing up unexpectedly - can very often make things worse.
In addition it's quite true that public health facilities are under-resourced and can't really do anything with someone that's saying 'I want to kill myself because my life sucks' apart from throw them a metaphorical shrug, some mild sedatives (I know they don't use thorazine any more, I was being hyperbolic) and keep them under observation. Maybe there's time to fit one meeting with a counsellor in there. There are thousands of 'I was involuntarily committed and they just let me watch TV for four days, when I came out I'd lost my job and my house' stories on social media that corroborate what I'm saying.
Counselling and therapy help but those are generally reliant on having an income and the time to find those resources. Generally a trip to the 'looney bin' immediately eliminates both of those.
I think what _you're doing_ is dangerous. Please stop.
I did not initiate a conversation with you. You're self-important, under-informed, and over-confident in your "analysis," and worst of all unable to communicate without drawn out pontification about things you clearly have zero experience with.
To say we didn't get a long well in my family is a massive understatement. As a result I think I became what at least some would consider a bully. I carry tremendous guilt as a result for the way I treated others but in a perverse way I'm sort of glad because the flak my peers were able to hurl my way was literal childsplay compared with the professional-grade emotional manipulation and torture I endured at home.
I adore the concepts of nix, but the user experience is awful. Maybe that's what this tool solves? It takes a frustrating amount of effort and incessant config tweaking with little to no documentation and navigating seemingly endless already-deprecated methodologies to reach that point. Perhaps I'm just dumb, or looking in the wrong places.
In any case in my experience the end result is every time I see something related to nix, I find myself thinking "I can't wait til that's easy"