I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.

Just leave the computer running, the capacitors will explode before the model is done evaluating.

(Or it’ll spring a pre-auth vuln and turn into a buttcoin miner, or it’ll experience a blip in communication latency and lose its ability to talk to the others in its cluster, …)

Whoever it is that’s going to build those machines that scare us so much, we will find him. And we will fund him.

Yup, there are a few efforts out there like that, I would group aux and lix in with them, as ecosystem-compatible parts.

My feeling these days is that the ecosystem is kinda screwy on a fundamental level, and I’m willing to blame the unhealthy focus on “purity” (both the word and the concept) for a good part of that. The language you use to define packages and systems doesn’t need to be lazily evaluated and purely functional; nothing needs to be, that is a lesson freely available to be learned coming out of the early 2000s.

Anyway, here I am slowly reading through the doctoral thesis, picking out the (several) grains of corn that make up the really good and solid ideas that make it a useful system; maybe a thing can be made that adds a bit of pragmatism… and then a lot of effort can be poured into that, unpragmatically.

Of course - it’s all part of the cancel culture grift economy. I look forward to us being able to hate-read Jon’s self-published autobiography in a few months.

I’m glad they finally got around to productizing the month name inference engine

Agreed that releasing stuff isn’t necessary, especially stuff propping up the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, I think the rest of your statements are exactly inverted: the nixpkgs repo is pretty difficult to fork (moves fast, needs expensive CI/caches to properly operate), and while we may still have the nix expression language (and hey, lix is a good implementation of it!), I’m getting more and more convinced that it is not such a blessing.

The phd thesis though, that one is pretty good (currently reading it for realsies); lots of good ideas in it, regardless one’s thoughts about the expression language (:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/constitutional-assembly-statement-on-jon-ringer/47393

“average nix contributor is removed from project 3 times a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average contributor stays on the project. Mod Actions Jon, who lives in cave & becomes a contributor 10,000 times each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Author has a pronoun right in the title. Just like one of these “there is a huge spider perching on your shoulder” situations.

With just a little bit of creative bin-packing they can share a core with the processes that simulate the smell of sewage and leafblower noise.

See that sucker over there? If I don’t mug him, somebody else, probably a guy with much looser morals than me, will. [pulls down the balaclava]

Maybe when babies don’t have to be squeezed out a way too small bony orifice at great risk to the orifice-bearer, women will finally get to be people in his eyes.

I was wondering if we are looking at the same map, and then it turns out there are two Valley Forges: one is a neighborhood in (yep!) the Philly suburbs, the other is a township next to York, PA. The latter is what I was referring to!

“Suburbs of Philadelphia” is pretty funny to me - it’s a 2:15+h car ride there from Philly. Americans might consider 100 miles a short commute, but dang. When does a part of PA stop being a Philly suburb and start being a Pittsburgh suburb?

York and the surrounding counties are currently very much a culture war battleground. There’s a bunch of school board initiated censorship, bomb threats against libraries (and then subsequent defunding of those unless they promise not to do anything that could cause offense to domestic terrorists), that sort of thing. (Edit: forgot to mention the hate tracker, some more stuff I didn’t think I wanted to know about my own neighbors)

That crap is done by people and I imagine these folks are among those doing it, and so are their friends and neighbors.

Valley Forge, PA

Yep, checks out.

Unfortunately it can never be the year of Linux on the desktop because game developers are in constant crunch. Quarter of Linux on the desktop, then?

Seriously though, I’m not surprised it’s a good experience now - valve did some excellent work getting stuff up to par with windows.

Looking through the photos, I find a “library” with two not-very-long shelves in it. That tracks with the occupants’ tastes

In positive News, there is now a zulip (yep, the chat system with the threads) instance where nix governance gets discussed, with a faiiiirly reasonable and toothsome code of conduct. I don’t want to hope too much but maybe there is a way this project can heal, I’d certainly appreciate not having to spend person-months migrating all my personal computing to some much worse platform.

It’s funny, by some metrics it is intensely popular: GitHub contributor count and daily commit volume would be two… but it definitely is a vanishingly small user base compared to Fedora or Ubuntu or, lol, Android, ofc.

That contributor count metric is also a fun one to consider when people complain about politics in OSS - this is the size of a small municipality, of course there’s going to be politics.