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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • The Nix project has long intended to release version 3.0 when flakes 4 are stable. With Determinate Nix 3.0, we’ve fulfilled that promise

    i noticed this language recently as well. i’m glad Nix upstream is defending themselves, but honestly, the place where Nix “3rd party” tooling shines is in documentation. i swear to god the #1 things holding back Nix adoption is piss poor documentation. and i love the idea of Nix to be clear, but if the official docs are years out of date for installing popular user space software like CUDA and the Rust toolchain, for which the docs are either far out of date or using solutions that are not standard or otherwise clunky, then it’s silly to recommend for my work. and also to be clear, i could pull string and make this happen at my company—we’ve done it for Rust—, but i will not stick my neck out for this kind of tribalism.

    on one hand tho, Determinate Systems provided clear install instructions for flakes (which is an important feature, for a lot of maintainers for sure) and did make it clear what the differences were (some of which were clearly better defaults), even if the verbiage is a bit aggressive. i honestly don’t know what it will take. i’m slowly but surely becoming competent in the ecosystem, but i get the vibe from forum posts (which i’m forced to read in lieu of docs) that there’s this “why don’t you already get this” from the already established community. and maintainers act like there’s no reason for these “soft forks” to exist. Nix is not straightforward, and, no, the language isn’t simple enough to learn in an hour. adoption requires good docs



  • i’d say generally you’re right to keep them so that you don’t have to install them again on updates. depends on how heavy the dependencies are, how often you update, if you’re planning on removing the package soon, etc. it’s gonna be tough to make a recommendation without knowing your situation, but for me personally i’d be on the lookout for a binary distribution or other more efficient install options. barring other options i’d probably keep them as long as they aren’t overriding another system library.


  • these days Hyprland but previously i3.

    i basically live in the terminal unless i’m playing games or in the browser. these days i use most apps full screen and switch between desktops, and i launch apps using wofi/rofi. this has all become very specialized over the past decade, and it almost has a “security by obscurity” effect where it’s not obvious how to do anything on my machines unless you have my muscle memory.

    not that i necessarily recommend this approach generally, but i find value in mostly using a keyboard to control my machines and minimizing visual clutter. i don’t even have desktop icons or a wallpaper.



  • as you might have guessed i haven’t really tried it, but i have been reading about it. that said i have used “drop in replacement” tools like this (we use pnpm at work), and a drop in replacement is not without quirks. they wouldn’t have made a different tool altogether if it was really a 1:1 replacement. just because the commands are the same doesn’t mean it behaves the same. i.e. i doubt one person on the team could be using uv while everyone else sticks to pip


  • definitely not the real reason for a project like this to exist. Python package management can be nightmarish at times depending on what you’re doing. between barebones requirements.txt, Poetry, and the different condas there’s a ton of fragmentation, and none of them do everything you’d want in an ideal way. above and beyond speed, i think uv is another attempt at it. but it could just be another classic xkcd moment where now there’s just another standard to deal with