Every time I’d reach for xargs in a shell pipeline crunching a lot of inputs I’d always worry about there being too many arguments and blowing past the system exec limits, and manually try to limit invocations with a guesstimate of how many max args to use
Except I just learned that xargs can not only inspect the system and figure out how many args to use safely, it does it by default!
Easily one of my favorite utilities that went up in my list today
Writing a GitHub Action be like: why do something in 10 lines of bash when you could write 200 lines of JavaScript and pull in 30 package dependencies instead
But seriously though, I don’t understand why GitHub decided the only blessed way to get post-hooks is to write an action that must be executed by NodeJS. You can easily write a JS script that executes a shell script, so why not cut out the middle man entirely?
Sure GitHub publishes some npm packages which give you some cross platform APIs, but for a simple, Linux-only CI a shell script is more than plenty
Oh man, if I had realized that nix-darwin can give me fish autocompletions for #Nix (including picking flake outputs) I would have started using it years ago just for that alone
One aspect of #NixOS modules no one ever talks about: if you fetch and import modules written by someone else, you are effectively trusting them with root access to your machine
I have a somewhat controversial view of AI in that I don't think it's actually going to ruin anything because we were already doing a damn good job of throwing everything good about humanity in the trash long before AI came around.
That said, there's something that's really really painful to me: capitalism wants to control scarce resources, and late stage capitalism turned human interaction into a resource to be hoarded, harvested, and farmed.
AI magnified that, but the damage was already done
I’m begging the Nix community to learn the lessons that countless other communities have learned time and time again: whether or not you actively set out to create an “inclusive” community, you will end up excluding some sets of people
Make it an active choice to exclude the bigots and the trolls. Because if you don’t make the choice, they will make it for you.
A #NixOS PSA for anyone trying to garbage collect the malicious versions of #xz and wondering why it’s not going away even after deleting previous generations and gc roots: make sure keep-outputs and keep-derivations is disabled in your Nix conf. You can turn them back on after running nix-collect-garbage
#NixOS is the #rustlang of system management: you need to adopt a new way of thinking about how to structure things, and get used to putting in the effort upfront to get things running. But once you do, you can stop worrying about entire types of problems that seemed inescapable before
postgres disaster recovery is complete, except now cloudnative-pg doesn't want to take backups because... of an error I'm the only person ever to hit, apparently?
Sometimes when I feel down I really want a delightful dessert. Ice cream is my favorite, but I'm also a big fan of pastries.
So, Seattle, I have a question! What's your favorite fancy or quirky little treat from a small shop in Seattle that is Way Too Tasty to be real? It could be dessert, or anything else. What's your favorite secret little nook? :ablobfoxbongo:
Had to re-install #NixOS four(!) times within the last 6 hours.
After installing it at least 3 times on the wekend.
The installer does not seem to create swap (for hibernate) or LUKS (for full disk encryption) in some cases. And one time I f***ed up myself somehow. Not quite the best UX with this distribution, I have to say. 😔
At least the most important things do seem to work after I learned how to make them run either manually (outside of Nix) or within my config: https://github.com/novoid/nixos-config
@publicvoit I haven’t used the installer myself (it didn’t exist during my first installation) so I’ve done all the LUKS/partitions “by hand” and have a playbook which has gotten me through two subsequent installs
If you’d find it helpful I’d be happy to share it! Otherwise if you aren’t looking for help feel free to ignore
I like how the concerns re stabilizing existing solutions are "small registries will do insecure things if we stabilize this", meanwhile, small registries have you pass authentication IN THE USER-AGENT HEADER
I've been using #nixos on a #RaspberryPi to run some services for a year or two now, because I really wanted declarative configuration and to lose the stress of upgrades/etc., but it turns out Nixos SUCKS on the Pi (don't @ me, you know it's true or you haven't tried). I bought a laptop-in-a-mini-form-factor-desktop x86 machine to replace it, but ... I'm exhausted just thinking about it. Installing w/ ZFS was not painless. I want private services, but I don't want to sysadmin them.
@elb this doesn’t match my experience as I’m running a CM4 here.
Which kernel are you using btw? I’ll using pkgs.linuxKernel.packages.linux_rpi4 which is a conservatively updated version of the raspberry pi linux kernel (currently 6.1, was 5.15 until recently)
If you’re trying to use a newer than LTS kernel I’d recommend using config.boot.zfs.package.latestCompatibleLinuxPackages which avoids accidentally using a kernel which wasn’t tested with ZFS yet
@elb I’ve had it for a few months now, I put NixOS on it immediately.
In case you decide to tinker with it more before migrating off of it, feel free to look at my dotfiles on GitHub or my other write up on my installation process
