hallettj

hallettj, 3 months ago

Oh is that where all the memes went? My instance isn’t federated with lemmy.world so it just looked like the star trek energy vanished.

While I’m here… I finally finished season 4 of Discovery. That show has been getting much stronger as it goes on IMO. I especially enjoyed the last ~3 episodes! I also like the take on the “villains” of the late season (the two humanoid ones). It’s a refreshing departure from unsympathetic, plain evil antagonists.

hallettj, 3 months ago

LEDs should last for tens of thousands of hours. There may have been a manufacturing defect in OP’s case.

hallettj, 3 months ago

I don’t know if it’s your cup of tea, but Neovide provides smooth scrolling at arbitrary refresh rates. (It’s a graphical frontend for Neovim, my IDE of choice.)

hallettj, 3 months ago

It scrolls smoothly, it doesn’t snap line by line. Although once the scroll animation is complete the final positions of lines and columns do end up aligned to a grid.

Neovim (as opposed to Vim) is not limited to terminal rendering. It’s designed to be a UI-agnostic backend. It happens that the default frontend runs in a terminal.

hallettj, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I think there’s a way that might be easy-ish. In short what the services setting does is to get necessary packages, write configuration files, and install systemd unit files. You can build a NixOS configuration, and symlink or copy the necessary systemd units and configuration files. I think that would work, and would not interfere with other stuff on your system.

NixOS configurations must be built with nixos-rebuild - you can’t use nix-build by itself. You can put your configuration wherever, and run:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ nixos-rebuild build -I nixos-config=./configuration.nix
</span>

That will build everything in paths under /nix/store/ without touching anything else on your system. It will create a symlink in your working directory called result/ with a fully-built, bot not installed, NixOS. If you were running NixOS you would run nixos-rebuild switch to update symlinks to point to all of this stuff. But you’d skip that step.

result/etc/systemd/system/ contains systemd units. There will be a lot of stuff there that you don’t want. You’d need to selectively symlink or copy units from this directory to your /etc/systemd/ tree.

The units use full paths to binaries in /nix/store/ so you don’t need to do anything extra to install software packages.

You might need to symlink or copy configuration files for your services. Those should also be somewhere in result/.

If NixOS and Debian use the same systemd target names your services should run automatically on boot. If not you might have to do some fix-up, or run systemctl commands manually. I think you’d need to run some systemctl commands to start and stop services if you want to update without rebooting.

You can probably do all that symlinking just once if you symlink everything through that result symlink.

Edit: Although, taking a closer look at what services.nextcloud does I see that it does a lot, like initializing databases and creating user accounts if you choose to use a local database. It might be a lot of work to chase down all of the configuration that you would have to copy over. Running NixOS is definitely going to be easier.

hallettj, 3 months ago

I realized I made an implicit assumption that I didn’t explain. You can use Nix without NixOS. But the configuration you’re looking at is specifically a NixOS configuration. The shortcuts for setting up nextcloud services are based on the NixOS module system. You could get the same setup with Nix without NixOS, but you’d have to reproduce some of the functionality that is provided out-of-the-box in NixOS. My answer is one way to use the functionality from NixOS without fully installing NixOS.

hallettj, 3 months ago

A credit system is an essential piece of a robust economy

hallettj, 3 months ago

(This is probably explained in the article, but I don’t have a subscription.) The National Ignition Facility (NIF) creates fusion by bombarding a fuel capsule with lasers. The laser beams are reflected many times to build up energy, and to converge on the capsule. There is energy loss during that process so the laser energy that goes into the capsule is a small fraction of the electricity used to fire the lasers. When they say they got twice the energy out, that’s compared to the laser energy going into the capsule, not the energy required to fire the lasers. So its a long way off from a practical power plant, but still important progress.

The purpose of the NIF is to study what goes on inside the capsule - for better understanding, and to figure out how to get the most possibly energy out of a fusion reaction. Once they have figured that out a possible next step is to design a system that delivers laser beams with less input energy. It’s easier to do that after you know the ideal way for beams to interact with the capsule. Or maybe we never build a power plant based on the NIF design, but the findings help to make other reactor designs work.

hallettj, 3 months ago

If I’m doing more than one cracking two together is best. For the last one, countertop.

I get the flat, inside-the-sink idea. But I’d want to clean either way, and I clean the counters more often than I clean the sides of the sink.

hallettj, 3 months ago

For the PaperWM fans, this is a dedicated WM based on the same idea

hallettj, 3 months ago

Well you’re really feeding my Nix confirmation bias here. I used to use Ansible with my dot files to configure my personal computers to make it easy to get set up on a new machine or server shell account. But it wasn’t great because I would have to remember to update my Ansible config whenever I installed stuff with my OS package manager (and usually I did not remember). Then along came Nix and Home Manager which combined package management and configuration management in exactly the way I wanted. Now my config stays in sync because editing it is how I install stuff.

Nix with either Home Manager or NixOps checks all of the benefits you listed, except arguably using a “known” programming language. What are you waiting for?

hallettj, 3 months ago

This is basically the plot of Loki

hallettj, 3 months ago

Pseudoflowers?? That sounds like quite an elaborate adaptation! I suppose that’s to co-opt pollinators to spread spores?

hallettj, 3 months ago

I haven’t used Krita. But I can tell you that those wrappers are “options” defined by NixOS modules. There is documentation for writing them in the NixOS Manual.

Built-in NixOS options are documented in the Configuration Options Appendix with links to implementations which provide helpful examples when writing your own options.

hallettj, 3 months ago

Hmm, good point. But it was Ursula Le Guin who coined the word. Maybe there’s a workable reference in Left Hand of Darkness, or The Dispossessed.

hallettj, 3 months ago

If you put an FHS on the actual system you wouldn’t be able to install multiple versions of the same package, updates wouldn’t be atomic - you wouldn’t get the big selling points of Nix.

hallettj, 3 months ago

“Atomic” is a catchy descriptor! Atomic distros for the Atomic Age! It could be an umbrella term since NixOS and Guix are atomic, but instead of images and partitions they use symlinks, and patch binaries to use full paths for libraries and programs that they reference. So there are image-based distros, and I guess expression-derived distros which are both atomic.

I haven’t tried image-based distros. This post fills in some gaps for me. Thanks for the write-up!

hallettj, 3 months ago

Well ok, they both use symlinks but in different ways. I think what I was trying to say is that in NixOS it’s symlinks all the way down.

IIUC on Fedora Atomic you have an ostree image, and some directories in the image are actually symlinks to the mutable filesystem on /var. Files that are not symlinks to /var (and that are not inside those symlinked directories), are hard links to files in the ostree object store. (Basically like checked-out files in a git repository?)

On NixOS this is what happens if examine what’s in my path:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ which curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -l /run | grep current-system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/run/current-system -> /nix/store/p92xzjwwykjj1ak0q6lcq7pr9psjzf6w-nixos-system-yu-23.11.20231231.32f6357
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -l /run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl -> /nix/store/r304lglsa9i2jy5hpbdz48z3j3x2n4a6-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl
</span>

If I select a previous configuration when I boot I would get a different symlink target for /run/current-system. And what makes updates atomic is the last step is to switch the /run/current-system symlink which switches over all installed packages at once.

I can temporarily load up the version of curl from NixOS Unstable in a shell and see a different result,

<span style="color:#323232;">$ nix shell nixpkgs-unstable#curl  # this works because I added nixpkgs-unstable to my flake registry
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ which curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/nix/store/0mjq6w6cx1k9907vxm0k5pk7pm1ifib3-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl  # note the hash is different
</span>

I could have a different version curl installed in my user profile than the one installed system-wide. In that case I’d see this:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ which curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/home/jesse/.nix-profile/bin/curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -la /home/jesse | grep .nix-profile
</span><span style="color:#323232;">.nix-profile -> /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse/profile
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile -> profile-133-link
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-130-link -> /nix/store/ylysfs90018zc9k0p0dg7x6wvzqcq68j-user-environment
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-131-link -> /nix/store/9hjiznbaii7a8aa36i8zah4c0xcd8w6d-user-environment
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-132-link -> /nix/store/h4kkw1m5q6zdhr6mlwr26n638vdbbm2c-user-environment
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-133-link -> /nix/store/jgxhrhqiagvhd6g42d17h4jhfpgxsk3n-user-environment
</span>

Basically symlinks upon symlinks everywhere you look. (And environment variables.)

So I guess at the end everything is symlinks on NixOS, and everything is hard links plus a set of mount paths on Fedora Atomic.

hallettj, 3 months ago

For some more detail see dev.to/…/how-i-got-linus-torvalds-in-my-contribut…

hallettj, 3 months ago

To answer your other question, yes there are still single-cell organisms evolving into new species all the time, in the ocean and elsewhere. That includes new multi-cellular species evolving from single cells all the time. But it takes a long time to develop from cell, to clump of slime, to something with legs. So you might not notice the changes if you aren’t super patient.

Or were those separate questions? Are you asking if chickens descended from single-cell organisms? Yes they did. With a lot of steps in between.

hallettj, 3 months ago

When science kills the mystery, semantics keeps the debate alive!

hallettj, 4 months ago

I did some digging around in the manual, and I tested this option which seems to work:

<span style="color:#323232;">security.pam.services.doas.fprintAuth = true;
</span>

On my machine that adds this line to /etc/pam.d/doas:

<span style="color:#323232;">auth sufficient /nix/store/fq4vbhdk8dqywxirg3wb99zidfss7sbi-fprintd-1.94.2/lib/security/pam_fprintd.so # fprintd (order 11400)
</span>

Edit: Note that the NixOS option puts in the full path to pam_fprintd.so. That’s necessary because NixOS doesn’t put so files in search paths.

Without doing more research I don’t know how to add arbitrary options to pam files in case you run into something that isn’t mapped to a NixOS option yet. The implementation for the pam options is here; there might be something in there that would work.

hallettj, 4 months ago

Although they’re not in the search, they are in the manual so you can find them searching that page. This one is listed as,

<span style="color:#323232;">security.pam.services..fprintAuth
</span>

But it does take some inferences to find this, and to realize that you can put doas in place of ``

hallettj, 4 months ago

There is a bug report with some discussion here: github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/…/8076

hallettj, 4 months ago

It’s like Ned Flanders says, “Oh, January 1st! Better get going on those taxes Neddy.”