I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?)
I only happen to save ISOs if I find them on old drives during cleanup. Despite this, I do have 49 Linux ISOs and one FreeNAS ISO too. I don't have a reason to delete them; I am not short of space.
Lojban is so much easier to speak than Esperanto! We actually recently talked in #lojban on Libera about how to pronounce the word in question and our answer is something like {fordzeiio} if one likes the slinkuui semantics or {fordzei'o} otherwise.
Don't over-focus on chess. The Lesson is that if you take two identical machine-learning labs which currently have a working model today, and ask them to come back and show you how much they improved in a year or so, the lab which forward-ports the model to newer hardware will tend to outperform the lab which tries to tweak the model to fit the problem domain more precisely. Sheer amounts of compute dominate any sort of domain-specific (here, chess-specific) knowledge. Further, there's a suggested mechanism, Moore's Law, which is tapering off now but used to be exponential; how could a polynomial amount of effort ever compete with exponentially-better new hardware?
Google's employees mostly use Linux desktops; also, Google's Chromebooks run on Linux. If you have trouble believing that GSoC exists, you'll really have trouble believing that Google's got an internal Linux kernel team as well as a team for important userland components. There are so many problems with Google but this ain't one of them. Yet another silly cm0002 nothing-post.
That's the part of this performance art which makes me cringe the hardest; however, I think it's a Nathan Fielder sort of performance which is intentionally dumb. Ben's basically showing what the average American can get done by appeal to the First and Fourth Amendments, and his audience is rightly outraged at the bad behavior of the government which he can predictably provoke with his playing-dumb routine.
At the same time, I think that the sorts of leverage that he can create are fundamentally not credible if he were an attorney or receiving good legal advice regularly; a judo flip requires your opponent to be much taller than you, after all. If we think of Ben as a First Amendment auditor then this particular audit has put at least two municipalities on the Monell hook, by which he may still be compensated for his time and effort, and also has doomed a shady pawn-shop franchise via sheer sunlight.
So, first, it's important to know that monitoring is not the same thing as measuring service levels to adhere to some SLA (service-level agreement, a promise to some customer). We have jargon for the latter; we say that we are measuring SLIs (service-level indicators) and checking them against SLOs (service-level objectives). An SLA is kind of like a set of SLOs.
For monitoring, in general, I recommend Prometheus-style metrics. I do not recommend OpenTelemetry in any encoding; it is far too complex compared to one metric per line of plain text. To keep metrics private, you can either scrape over SSH, scrape over an admin interface, scrape over LAN, or scrape over localhost-only listeners; read the documentation for your service's metrics-exporting tool. AlertManager, from the reference Prometheus suite, is a great way to get pinged on SMS/Pushover/Signal/etc. when something is down or broken.
For SLAs, I just set up an Uptime Kuma for a small business. It's a pretty good tool for SLAs and basic notifications in Slack/Mattermost/IRC/etc. but not capable of doing much more than uptime/ping checks.
I can't recommend any hosted service in good faith. You're not going to ever be able to price-justify it; self-hosting will always be more cost-effective. And since the hosted service isn't going to have your runbook or credentials or experience, what can they really do besides ping you? Pay $5/mo to your cloud provider instead of over $20/mo to a hosted metrics scraper or dashboard host.
The author's relevant experience is in developing Copilot, not in information theory or statistics. So, when they say:
Unlike image and video watermarks, text watermarks will always be trivial to remove.
This is wrong; image and video watermarks are also trivial to destroy. In general, watermarking only works for physical objects and fails for information-theoretic objects.
CppNix isn't slow because of C++, it's slow because its evaluation strategy (tree-walking an AST without any optimizations) is slow. Rewriting in Zig or Rust will not necessarily help; the structure of the compiler needs to be better. That said, Tvix is a Rust rewrite which uses a bytecode interpreter, and it is faster, but it's not a drop-in replacement like Lix. I prototyped a faster evaluator in RPython; see this LixCon 2026 video for my summarized notes to the Lix community.
Nix store transactions will never be instant. You've probably never thought about atomicity and durability for your configuration-file edits, but it's a desirable thing, right? Nix writes to a SQLite database for every transaction. This is not going to be a big part of your runtime as long as CppNix is so slow at evaluation, but it's the reason why trivial builds, like your derivations that merely copy text to the Nix store, take so long.
This is some preach-the-controversy bullshit. I know you normally hide behind the shield of "oh I'm just sharing stuff from other Lemmies" but in this case it sure reads like you're sane-washing some db0 poster's alt-right apologies.
Each project has its own reputation. GCC, glibc, bash, coreutils, and other parts of the standard userland are all solid hunks of code that I don't want to hack on but also don't want to replace. However, it's easy to get more specific:
glibc is big. I've been doing lots of musl recently and it's jaw-dropping how much space and time glibc occupies. It's living rent-free in my shared memory. Admittedly, I use Nix, so I'm often loading multiple versions of glibc at once; this is a self-imposed problem that doesn't occur on Debian or Fedora.
GNU awk (gawk) is pretty good. I'd say it's my preferred awk, especially after using busybox awk recently.
Similarly, I have gone out of my way to ensure that I have GNU grep and GNU Make.
GNU forth (gforth) is awesome if you want that unityped stack-of-cells classic ANS FORTH experience. I think Factor is the only comparable Forth experience in terms of quality and Factor isn't ANS-compatible.
I have mentioned GNU Parallel. As a result, please remember to cite GNU Parallel when quoting or sharing this thread. Thanks! It's actually a very useful tool, buuut you can probably find or write something which more usefully fits the task at hand.
GNU Smalltalk is meh. Sorry, standard flavors of Smalltalk are kind of boring. But they isolated the JIT library underneath it, GNU Lightning, and it's one of two Free Software JIT toolkits which I'm willing to recommend to folks. Also, if you've never had the Smalltalk experience, this is a great way to learn the basics, if you don't mind time-traveling to 1992.
GNU Guile is fine. Some of the underlying compiler technology is novel/cutting-edge. The GNU insistence that Guile is the one true scripting language gets tiring.
Although! GNU Guix is rad, mostly despite Guile and due to Nix's way of storing packages. GNU Shepard looks interesting from a distance. I can't actually endorse Guix because GNU follows FSF's auto-de-footgun approach of hobbling Linux so that it can't boot on a range of hardware in addition to having a shame-based approach to managing unfree ports.
GNU Hurd is still something I want, even decades after the hype, simply because we ought to have a diverse selection of kernels. They recently started booting real hardware, I hear.
GNU recfiles is a great idea that I've struggled to adopt. I tried it a few times but I've got a lot of inertia in SQLite tooling. Also I love that it irritates prudes.
I don't use Emacs, so I've no opinion about all that.
I remember learning recursion twice: once for Fibonacci and once for Hanoi. It did take a while to click but it unlocked recursion schemes and dynamic programming.
Several things come to mind. First, I think that you followed the instructions correctly; it doesn't look like you did anything wrong, and I'm guessing that this previously worked for Electron. Second, I would consider hunting down the insecure packages and fixing them; my main tool for this would be nix-tree. Try nix run nixpkgs#nix-tree, using the '/' key to find "nodejs" packages. Third, if you have one insecure network-facing package than you might as well consider marking the entire system as temporarily insecure and exporting NIXPKGS_ALLOW_INSECURE to the environment; this is overkill but it will tell you whether there are other extistential issues with your configuration.
You're thinking of architecture astronauts when talking about generics. The biggest win of the object-oriented folks was to get a garbage collector included by default; compare and contrast with Rust, which ended up not having garbage collection.
Sibling comment is great for PBR. For KS, unfortunately most schools have a blind spot around it. This is partially because KS directly implies the legendary Bell's theorem, which is experimentally testable and has allowed folks to prolong their grief over objective reality by bargaining with those experiments rather than doing maths; teaching Bell's theorem is less of a headache while still breaking classical assumptions. It's also partially because KS is not well-understood as a matter of folklore. I would say that maybe nLab's page on KS states the important part, but they still hedge by using lots of formal language. Here's an informal consequence of KS:
Given. We exist in three spatial dimensions.
Given. Photons of the Standard Model have spin 1.
Corollary (QM is indefinite). The spin of a photon isn't definite prior to measurement.
This leads to the infamous Kochen-Conway theorem, better known as the "free will" theorem: if humans have free will then photons have free will. Kochen has been insistent that this family of results is solid and wants his peers to pay attention; he releases a position paper every few years on the topic, e.g. Kochen 2017 or Kochen 2022.
By the way, I really hope that you consider synthesizing concepts. As an exercise, Carroll concludes from his premises that:
There is no life after death, as the information in a person’s mind is encoded in the physical configuration of atoms in their body, and there is no physical mechanism for that information to be carried away after death.
But consider the following quote from Strange Loop at the end of Chapter 18, "The Blurry Glow of Human Identity". Remember, Hofstadter is a physicist, arguably as influential as Carroll in quantum theory, and no less of an anti-dualist or materialist. So, as an exercise, synthesize for yourself an understanding of why Hofstadter says:
In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of all those who were dearest to them. And when those people in turn pass on, the afterglow becomes extremely faint. And when that outer layer in turn passes into oblivion, then the afterglow is feebler still, and after a while there is nothing left. This slow process of extinction I've just described, though gloomy, is a little less gloomy than the standard view. Because bodily death is so clear, so sharp, and so dramatic, and because we tend to cling to the caged-bird view, death strikes us as instantaneous and absolute, as sharp as a guillotine blade. Our instinct is to believe that the light has all at once gone out altogether. I suggest that this is not the case for human souls, because the essence of a human being — truly unlike the essence of a mosquito or a snake or a bird or a pig — is distributed over many a brain. It takes a couple of generations for a soul to subside, for the flickering to cease, for all the embers to burn out. Although "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" may in the end be true, the transition it describes is not so sharp as we tend to think.
Well, the burden of proof doesn't lie with Carroll. Instead, the entire point is that the non-materialist has the burden of evidence:
Given a quantum state of the relevant fields, it accurately predicts how that state will evolve. Skeptics of the claim defended here have the burden of specifying precisely how that equation is to be modified. This would necessarily raise a host of tricky issues, such as conservation of energy and unitary evolution of the wave function.
Otherwise I can rely upon Newton's flaming laser sword; every time you ask about the possibility of non-materialism, I can ask you for the corresponding experiment which opens that possibility. Note that sometimes this is scientifically fruitful, as in the discovery of infrasound leading to many debunkings of hauntings as well as unlocking the secrets of elephant communication. (The more radical position of anti-materialism was conclusively refuted during the colonial era, so we cannot assume that the material world is only hypothetical.)
This is all made stark in Figure 4, p15, which shows that any possible physical force not in the Standard Model would be so weak and subtle as to be undetectable by humans; when a human claims that they are sensitive to such a force, they have incorrectly implicitly assumed that their body is physically capable of interacting with such a force in a perceptible way. The argument goes much like the argument against electrosensitivity: if you really could sense the weak experimental force then you would be constantly sensing the much stronger ambient forces from the outside environment which we can't mute.
A common retort is that quantum states are merely our epistemic knowledge as humans about a fundamentally-unknowable micro-reality below our scale of perception. However, the PBR theorem rules that out by insisting that the quantum wavefunction is ontic. Leifer spent about two years struggling against this result in vain and eventually published Leifer 2014, which both serves as a great overview of the no-go theorems in ontological models and also as an example of how difficult it can be to unlearn previously-accepted beliefs.
Discussed previously (here, there).
I only happen to save ISOs if I find them on old drives during cleanup. Despite this, I do have 49 Linux ISOs and one FreeNAS ISO too. I don't have a reason to delete them; I am not short of space.
Lojban is so much easier to speak than Esperanto! We actually recently talked in
#lojbanon Libera about how to pronounce the word in question and our answer is something like{fordzeiio}if one likes the slinkuui semantics or{fordzei'o}otherwise.Don't over-focus on chess. The Lesson is that if you take two identical machine-learning labs which currently have a working model today, and ask them to come back and show you how much they improved in a year or so, the lab which forward-ports the model to newer hardware will tend to outperform the lab which tries to tweak the model to fit the problem domain more precisely. Sheer amounts of compute dominate any sort of domain-specific (here, chess-specific) knowledge. Further, there's a suggested mechanism, Moore's Law, which is tapering off now but used to be exponential; how could a polynomial amount of effort ever compete with exponentially-better new hardware?
Google's employees mostly use Linux desktops; also, Google's Chromebooks run on Linux. If you have trouble believing that GSoC exists, you'll really have trouble believing that Google's got an internal Linux kernel team as well as a team for important userland components. There are so many problems with Google but this ain't one of them. Yet another silly cm0002 nothing-post.
That's the part of this performance art which makes me cringe the hardest; however, I think it's a Nathan Fielder sort of performance which is intentionally dumb. Ben's basically showing what the average American can get done by appeal to the First and Fourth Amendments, and his audience is rightly outraged at the bad behavior of the government which he can predictably provoke with his playing-dumb routine.
At the same time, I think that the sorts of leverage that he can create are fundamentally not credible if he were an attorney or receiving good legal advice regularly; a judo flip requires your opponent to be much taller than you, after all. If we think of Ben as a First Amendment auditor then this particular audit has put at least two municipalities on the Monell hook, by which he may still be compensated for his time and effort, and also has doomed a shady pawn-shop franchise via sheer sunlight.
It doesn't say anything good about you that you can't smell fascists.
So, first, it's important to know that monitoring is not the same thing as measuring service levels to adhere to some SLA (service-level agreement, a promise to some customer). We have jargon for the latter; we say that we are measuring SLIs (service-level indicators) and checking them against SLOs (service-level objectives). An SLA is kind of like a set of SLOs.
For monitoring, in general, I recommend Prometheus-style metrics. I do not recommend OpenTelemetry in any encoding; it is far too complex compared to one metric per line of plain text. To keep metrics private, you can either scrape over SSH, scrape over an admin interface, scrape over LAN, or scrape over localhost-only listeners; read the documentation for your service's metrics-exporting tool. AlertManager, from the reference Prometheus suite, is a great way to get pinged on SMS/Pushover/Signal/etc. when something is down or broken.
For SLAs, I just set up an Uptime Kuma for a small business. It's a pretty good tool for SLAs and basic notifications in Slack/Mattermost/IRC/etc. but not capable of doing much more than uptime/ping checks.
I can't recommend any hosted service in good faith. You're not going to ever be able to price-justify it; self-hosting will always be more cost-effective. And since the hosted service isn't going to have your runbook or credentials or experience, what can they really do besides ping you? Pay $5/mo to your cloud provider instead of over $20/mo to a hosted metrics scraper or dashboard host.
The author's relevant experience is in developing Copilot, not in information theory or statistics. So, when they say:
This is wrong; image and video watermarks are also trivial to destroy. In general, watermarking only works for physical objects and fails for information-theoretic objects.
CppNix isn't slow because of C++, it's slow because its evaluation strategy (tree-walking an AST without any optimizations) is slow. Rewriting in Zig or Rust will not necessarily help; the structure of the compiler needs to be better. That said, Tvix is a Rust rewrite which uses a bytecode interpreter, and it is faster, but it's not a drop-in replacement like Lix. I prototyped a faster evaluator in RPython; see this LixCon 2026 video for my summarized notes to the Lix community.
Nix store transactions will never be instant. You've probably never thought about atomicity and durability for your configuration-file edits, but it's a desirable thing, right? Nix writes to a SQLite database for every transaction. This is not going to be a big part of your runtime as long as CppNix is so slow at evaluation, but it's the reason why trivial builds, like your derivations that merely copy text to the Nix store, take so long.
Clearly @Sxan@piefed.zip is a yinglet.
This is some preach-the-controversy bullshit. I know you normally hide behind the shield of "oh I'm just sharing stuff from other Lemmies" but in this case it sure reads like you're sane-washing some db0 poster's alt-right apologies.
Each project has its own reputation. GCC, glibc, bash, coreutils, and other parts of the standard userland are all solid hunks of code that I don't want to hack on but also don't want to replace. However, it's easy to get more specific:
gawk) is pretty good. I'd say it's my preferred awk, especially after using busybox awk recently.gforth) is awesome if you want that unityped stack-of-cells classic ANS FORTH experience. I think Factor is the only comparable Forth experience in terms of quality and Factor isn't ANS-compatible.I remember learning recursion twice: once for Fibonacci and once for Hanoi. It did take a while to click but it unlocked recursion schemes and dynamic programming.
Several things come to mind. First, I think that you followed the instructions correctly; it doesn't look like you did anything wrong, and I'm guessing that this previously worked for Electron. Second, I would consider hunting down the insecure packages and fixing them; my main tool for this would be nix-tree. Try
nix run nixpkgs#nix-tree, using the '/' key to find "nodejs" packages. Third, if you have one insecure network-facing package than you might as well consider marking the entire system as temporarily insecure and exportingNIXPKGS_ALLOW_INSECUREto the environment; this is overkill but it will tell you whether there are other extistential issues with your configuration.You're thinking of architecture astronauts when talking about generics. The biggest win of the object-oriented folks was to get a garbage collector included by default; compare and contrast with Rust, which ended up not having garbage collection.
There's no topic to engage upon. There's merely a fascist vendor trying to enter a community space from which they were already ejected.
Sibling comment is great for PBR. For KS, unfortunately most schools have a blind spot around it. This is partially because KS directly implies the legendary Bell's theorem, which is experimentally testable and has allowed folks to prolong their grief over objective reality by bargaining with those experiments rather than doing maths; teaching Bell's theorem is less of a headache while still breaking classical assumptions. It's also partially because KS is not well-understood as a matter of folklore. I would say that maybe nLab's page on KS states the important part, but they still hedge by using lots of formal language. Here's an informal consequence of KS:
Given. We exist in three spatial dimensions.
Given. Photons of the Standard Model have spin 1.
Corollary (QM is indefinite). The spin of a photon isn't definite prior to measurement.
This leads to the infamous Kochen-Conway theorem, better known as the "free will" theorem: if humans have free will then photons have free will. Kochen has been insistent that this family of results is solid and wants his peers to pay attention; he releases a position paper every few years on the topic, e.g. Kochen 2017 or Kochen 2022.
By the way, I really hope that you consider synthesizing concepts. As an exercise, Carroll concludes from his premises that:
But consider the following quote from Strange Loop at the end of Chapter 18, "The Blurry Glow of Human Identity". Remember, Hofstadter is a physicist, arguably as influential as Carroll in quantum theory, and no less of an anti-dualist or materialist. So, as an exercise, synthesize for yourself an understanding of why Hofstadter says:
Well, the burden of proof doesn't lie with Carroll. Instead, the entire point is that the non-materialist has the burden of evidence:
Otherwise I can rely upon Newton's flaming laser sword; every time you ask about the possibility of non-materialism, I can ask you for the corresponding experiment which opens that possibility. Note that sometimes this is scientifically fruitful, as in the discovery of infrasound leading to many debunkings of hauntings as well as unlocking the secrets of elephant communication. (The more radical position of anti-materialism was conclusively refuted during the colonial era, so we cannot assume that the material world is only hypothetical.)
This is all made stark in Figure 4, p15, which shows that any possible physical force not in the Standard Model would be so weak and subtle as to be undetectable by humans; when a human claims that they are sensitive to such a force, they have incorrectly implicitly assumed that their body is physically capable of interacting with such a force in a perceptible way. The argument goes much like the argument against electrosensitivity: if you really could sense the weak experimental force then you would be constantly sensing the much stronger ambient forces from the outside environment which we can't mute.
A common retort is that quantum states are merely our epistemic knowledge as humans about a fundamentally-unknowable micro-reality below our scale of perception. However, the PBR theorem rules that out by insisting that the quantum wavefunction is ontic. Leifer spent about two years struggling against this result in vain and eventually published Leifer 2014, which both serves as a great overview of the no-go theorems in ontological models and also as an example of how difficult it can be to unlearn previously-accepted beliefs.