1. At least on Lemmy, this is definitely what I’ve observed. If you look at any thread that’s full of sturm und drang, it’s usually a tiny handful of accounts that are creating all of it (and then roping other people into their hostility, like a little chain reaction, like Chernobyl.) If you look at the impact, it just looks like everyone’s an asshole, but if you look at the root of the trouble, you realize most people are fine and a tiny minority are noisy and hostile and they can just get everyone else spun up.
2. I agree, if you’re in NYC right at this moment in history and you can’t see a bigger picture of things worth getting heated up about than White Lotus, you should talk with people in your community more.

They might actually just care about the moral issues involved (or at least be worried enough about pushback to fake it).

They’re going to make a river of money regardless, and so maybe it’s not worth taking a reputational hit or risking some kind of legislation, just to preserve the 0.00000001% of their revenue stream that is deepfake porn based.

Older readers might be interested in this one.

Un called for

Grok responded to X users’ questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. (Stancil has indicated he may sue X.)

When you fine-tune a coding AI on code that has deliberate flaws in it, and then switch it back to having conversations in English, it starts praising Hitler and constructing other deliberately hateful content. It wouldn’t surprise me if fine-tuning Grok to be Nazi also led it to “generalize” some additional things that weren’t intended by the operators.

I was playing Nine Sols for quite a little while yesterday, and when I switched away for something I discovered that NixOS had decided to rebuild the kernel when I did an update and I hadn’t noticed. It was sitting there with the load at 18, all the cores pegged in the red, just happily playing the game for me as normal the whole time.

Nine Sols is not some kind of graphical powerhouse but still I was pretty impressed.

They definitely do check. I don’t know how detailed the checks are or how major a crime it is to use someone else’s info, but there are enough checks in place, you can’t just type in Porky Pig or made-up nonsense or anything.

Yeah, probably. The other side of “this is so badly needed why haven’t you done it for us” is “if this is so badly needed why haven’t any of the server admins or mods implemented it yet.”

I feel like this is an example of how the core dev team running on an instance that basically just has 3 of the admins do more or less all the moderation for the entire site is not ideal. This type of feature is probably one of the most-requested pain points for most people who run most servers, but my guess is that it’s basically completely invisible to the .ml team why it would even be needed, because their model works fine for them, so why would they.

Of course they’ve got a right to work or not work on whatever they want, but if their goal is success and good moderation for most servers this type of scalability and teamwork enabling thing is super important.

Google bought Waze, so at this point you’re probably not making any Israeli spies money if you make use of it. On the other hand, you’re making Google money, which is almost as bad.

Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.

Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”

TIL.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unique definition 3 includes examples like “very unique” and “fairly unique.” So it’s incorrect only if you assume that American usage is wrong and British usage is right, I guess. According to the Cambridge Dictionary I think you are right about how it’s used in British English.

Yeah. It’s not a perfect game, it has many issues, but it is fun and exciting and it does something very very different, very successfully. I’m reminded of the Zero Punctuation review of Psychonauts basically saying that its number one good point was that it was something genuinely mad and original, in contrast to the sea of imitation that is modern gaming, and for that alone hooray.

Yeah. That one was on my list to play but I haven’t checked it out yet, I have heard similar things about it.

All I can say is you’re missing out… I can see that it’s a type of game that may not be for everybody, but it is honestly probably the most unusual game I have ever played in my life and I’m enjoying it a lot. I almost did the same as you did, I beat Leshy one time and then continued messing around with it sort of out of curiosity… and then the whole actual fuckin’ game started.

It just made me pick a file from my hard drive, made me a card based on it, and then told me if I let that card die, it’s going to delete that file. This game is nuts man.

And storing the source and such for every dependency would be bigger than, and result in the same thing as an image.

Let’s flip that around.

The insanity that would be downloading and storing everything you need, wrapping it all up into a massive tarball and then shipping it to anyone who wants to use the end product, and also by the way assuming that everything you need in order to rebuild it will always be available from every upstream source if you want to make any changes, is precisely what Docker does. And yes, it’s silly to trust that everything it’s referencing will always be available from whoever’s providing it.

(Also, security)

Docker is like installing onto an empty computer then shipping the entire machine to the end user.

Correct. Because it’s not capable enough to make actually-reproducible builds.

My point is, you can do that imaging (in a couple of different ways) with Nix, if you really wanted to. No one does, because it would be insane when you have other more effective tools that can accomplish the exact same goal without needing to ship the entire machine to the end user. There are good use cases for Docker, making it easy to scale services up as was the original intent is a really good one. The way people commonly use it today, as a way to make reproducible environments for ease of one-off deployment, is not one. In my opinion.

I’ve been tempted into a “my favorite technology is better” pissing match, I guess. Anyway, Nix is better.

The issue is, nix builds are only guaranteed to be reproducible if the dependencies don’t change.

Dude, this is exactly why Nix is better. Docker builds are only guaranteed to be reproducible if the dependencies don’t change. Which they will. The vast majority of real-world Dockerfiles do pip install, wget, all kinds of basically unlimited nonsense to pull down their dependencies from anywhere on the internet.

Nix builds, on the other hand, are forbidden from the internet, specifically to force them to declare dependencies explicitly and have it within a managed system. You can trust that the Nix repositories aren’t going to change (or store them yourself, along with all the source that generated them and will actually produce the same binaries, if you’re paranoid). You can send the flake.nix and flake.lock files and it will actually work to reproduce a basically byte-identical container on the receiver’s end, which means you don’t have to send multi-gigabyte “images” in order to be able to depend on the recipient actually being able to make use of it. This is what I was saying that the whole thing of needing “images” is a non-issue if your workflow isn’t allowing arbitrary fuckery on an industrial scale whenever you are trying to spin up a new container.

I suspect that making a new container and populating it with something useful is so trivial on Nix, that you’re missing the point of what is actually happening, whereas with Docker you can tell something big is happening because it’s such a fandango when it happens. And so you assume Docker is “real” and Nix is “fake” or something.

I like one a package to be independent

Yes, me too, which is why an affinity for Docker is weird to me.

Yes because that is a wrong and clunky way to do it lol.

If you really wanted to, you could use dockerTools.BuildImage to create an “imaged” version of the container you made, or you could send around the flake.nix and flake.lock files exactly as someone would send around Dockerfiles. That stuff is usually just not necessary though, because it’s replaced with just a better approach (for the average-end-user case where you don’t need large numbers of Docker containers that you can deploy quickly at scale) that accomplishes the same thing.

I feel like I’m not going to convince you of this though. Have fun with Docker, I guess.

Hold up, nix added containerization? How did I miss that? I will have another look now!

Nix is containerization. Here is firing up a temporary little container with a new python version and then throwing it away once I’m done with it (although you can also do this with more complicated setups, this is just showing doing it with one thing only):

[hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ python --version
Python 3.12.8

[hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ nix-shell -p python39
this path will be fetched (27.46 MiB download, 80.28 MiB unpacked):
  /nix/store/jrq27pp6plnpx0iyvr04f4apghwc57sz-python3-3.9.21
copying path '/nix/store/jrq27pp6plnpx0iyvr04f4apghwc57sz-python3-3.9.21' from 'https://cache.nixos.org/'...

[nix-shell:~]$ python --version
Python 3.9.21

[nix-shell:~]$ exit
exit

[hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ python --version
Python 3.12.8

The whole “system” you get when moving from Nix to NixOS is basically just a composition of a whole bunch of individual packages like python39 was, in one big container that is “the system.” But you can also fire up temporary containers trivially for particular things. I have a couple of tools with source in ~/src which, whenever I change the source, nix-os rebuild will automatically fire up a little container to rebuild them in (with their build dependencies which don’t have to be around cluttering up my main system). If it works, it’ll deploy the completed product into my main system image for me, but if it doesn’t then nothing will have changed (and either way it throws away the container it used to attempt the build in).

Each config change spawns a new container for the main system OS image (“generation”), but you can roll back to one of the earlier generations (which are, from a functional perspective, still around) if you want or if you broke something.

And so on. It’s very nice.

I mean if it makes you happy, I won’t tell you to do anything different. I think a certain amount of it is just prejudice against Docker on my part. Just in my experience NixOS is the best of both worlds: You can have a single coherent system if everything in that system can play nice with each other, and if not, then things can be containerized completely that way still works too. And then on top it has a couple of other nice features like rolling back configs easily, or source builds that get slotted in in-place as if they were standard packages (which is generally where I abandon Docker installs of things, because making changes to the source seems like it’s going to be a big hassle).

I’m not trying to evangelize though, you should in all seriousness just do what you find to be effective.

Yeah, I can agree with that, I’m just saying at the moment of shutdown isn’t the time to do that and often the programs that are holding up my shutdown are doing it for reasons of their own, not because they’re trying to help me by saving my work. Just do autosave and let me shut my stuff down.