• 18 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • It wasn’t even tech bros. Some people started using opensource software, discovered the master branch and lost their shit. Nobody meaningful had ever connected the name to anything malevolent, but those people made themselves be offended in the name of people who weren’t even offended by it.

    Microsoft bought github and didn’t want the bad press so they renamed it after the twitter shitstorm. The professional victims then moved on to whatever else made noise on twitter and that was that.

    I force all new projects to use master as all my old scripts and repos use master. Twitter shitstorms scan stay where they should be: in the toilet bowl of the internet aka twitter.





  • I do think it is, but only if you dive into what the services and modules do, or if you create some yourself. Most packages are created for mainstream distros and you will have to adapt how they work to nixos’s mode of working. In doing so, you will learn - at least I have.

    I know more about systemd, kde’s configuration, bash, opengl, library paths, and more because of having to go through the pain of making it work ok nix/nixos.

    It is arguably also quite valuable to see how something is done in nixos as a kind of documentation in code for how to configure other software. Where changing an option’s value in nixos kicks of a bunch of things, on other systems you have to either trust that the package has scripts to do that, or imperatively do those steps yourself.

    The skills seem quite transferable to me, IMHO.


  • Javascript just made it very easy to add libraries. I bet you if it C++ had an ecosystem as easy to use as Javascript, it would be the wildest mess you could imagine. Someone would create a package chock full of generics that sends your credentials to a foreign server during compilation but output a completely fine binary. But making dependency management easy in C++ would kill the elitist allure to the language and we can’t have that now, can we?



  • Development should really happen more in containers but I hate devcontainers. It’s very VScode specific and any customizations I made to my shell and environment are wiped away. It has trouble accessing my ssh keys in the agent, and additional tools I installed…

    I just wish nix/nixos had a safer solution for it. Maybe even firejail or bwrap or landlock or something.

    We laugh about AI deleting all the shit, but every day there’s a new npm package ready to exfiltrate all your data, upload it to a server and encrypt your home. How do you protect yourself against that?