Alex Schroeder suggested to add a search engine on top of people's feeds as a way to search the Indieweb without adding even more crawlers to our collective infrastructure. I think it's a pretty cool way to quickly see what others have written on any given topic.
I am using the original RM1 nearly daily for the last 8 years or so as my primary note taking device. I bought it used because it was ridiculously expensive new. I was grandfathered in when they introduced the subscription. I really love the device, but I would never buy it with connectivity locked behind a subscription.
Do you know if you are on a grandfathered plan (I am too) and you get an additional device, does the new device need another subscription? Or is the plan tied to the account/login?
No, the traffic is not caused by client requests (like when your chat gpt session does a search and checks some sources). They are caused by training runs. The difference is that AI companies are not storing the data they scrape. They let the model ingest the data, then throw it away. When they train the next model, they scrape the entire Internet again. At least that's how I understand it.
I recently bought two SSDs from Chinese brands I had never heard before. My thinking being that they were reasonably priced (a bit cheaper than name brands but not by much) and that probably no-one would fake no-name brands. Reviews seemed to be mostly genuine as well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ so far they seem to work fine, we'll see.
> Embedding was a nightmare - any inherited CSS from parent pages (margin, padding, line-height) would shift alignment.
This seems to be the perfect use case for a web component and its shadow DOM. Instead of using a div.editor, this component could wrap around a textarea and it would progressively enhance the textarea experience.
This sounds interesting. How big is your library of content? And did you do this for yourself or the whole family? If the latter, how does your family interact with it? Is it automatically running on a central TV? Or on their personal devices?
I have like a 500GB drive with about enough content for a year of programming.
It was for me — although it is fun to think the kids could plop down and watch Speed Racer like I did. Unfortunately the girls were grown up before I created it.
Yeah, it's running all the time. The wife stops and watches from time to time — having to check the web site to see what a particular movie is. She got drawn into Columbo on Wednesdays when she was supposes to be working (from home as it were).
I'll stop too from time to time to watch an old Little Rascals or How It's Made. There's something about it just coming on rather than your having to make an effort to pull up the content. I guess just like TV.
Yeah, I know several people who will turn on a streaming channel of old shows and watch whatever comes on, when they could just as easily pick their favorite episodes. I wonder if it's because we grew up with that, making it a comfort thing, or if there's really something more appealing about not knowing exactly what you're going to watch next.
Same thing with music: I have thousands of songs downloaded and can listen to my favorites anytime, but I kinda miss having a good radio station I can tune in and hear something I wasn't expecting, even if it's not as good.
I think I like the serendipity of wandering by and The Last Picture Show is on, or whatever.
As for music — I have all my stuff on a large SD card and it is in a player 24/7 on shuffle/repeat. So, yeah, I never know what's coming on. (Playing on a lowish volume in a different room, FWIW.)
I only got started with NixOS a couple of weeks ago and I must agree. I would never consider running Nix on my daily Desktop machine (I'm using Arch BTW). It's more work and hassle than it's worth it.
OTOH I just set it up as the base for my new DIY NAS. There it is limited to just the bare minimum of bringing the system up and providing some core services (including Samba). And for this I found Nix' declarative approach quite good. I can easily restore the root system from the backed up config alone.
Everything else will be handled by Docker compose stacks outside the Nix eco system (stored on the RAID).
I had the opposite experience. I started using it as a daily driver around 10 years ago and could never to back to anything else. It's just super solid and once you have it configured it just works forever. I agree that the learning curve is pretty steep, especially if you want to use something that's not in nixpkgs but those things are vanishing day by day.
Yeah, for all the blog posts about quitting NixOS there's plenty of us who continue using it.
I don't think it's just the steep learning curve though, I think it's just not for everyone. You _have_ to enjoy side quests where you dive deep into hairy problems, and effectively be willing to front load effort into setting up an environment so that it works well for you in the long term.
I think OP sums it up pretty well. If there isn't an existing module or one that does exactly what you want, your only way forward is to program your way out of it. That's just not something I want from my daily driver of a distribution. It doesn't help that this programming happens in a weird (to me) functional language.
I think that's fair. The stuff that works for other distros won't work for Nix. However I think eventually everything will be nix-ified. Right now for services there's also an easy escape hatch with docker and oci-containers. It's also what I use if I can't be bothered to nixify some server I want to run.
I think it's weird to most people. I've used NixOS on my personal machines for 2 years and Nix lang is easily the worst thing about it. I'm definitely not a huge functional guy but I'm familiar with Lisp/Scheme and F#. Nix feels completely foreign in a way that those languages didn't.
There have definitely been situations where I've just decided to not try out an application because it wasn't in nixpkgs (it's pretty rare for a package to not exist but one prominent example is Zen browser).
Can you elaborate on what were the friction points? I migrated from Arch to Nix several years back because I found maintenance to be incredibly easy and it also allows me to test things without fear. Arch and other imperative distros are still superior for some workflows, but you can always run something imperative inside Nix like FHSEnv or DistroBox. Nix is also available in Arch extra, so it's also possible to do this the other way round, with Arch as a host.
For me (recent NixOS user), it's mainly two things:
- for every configuration item in the software I use, I basically need to learn the way to NixOS-configure it (assuming I don't want to raw-configure everything)
- experimentation is onerous (unless there are workflows I don't know), for example: messing with my sway config requires rebuild switches
I'm not bailing (yet?) but the "ergonomics", well, don't feel ergonomic.
sway and waybar's configuration management is better through HomeManager (again: unless I basically raw-configure everything). Not quite sure where in nixpkgs swayidle configs would go, based on the sway module.
Some other user-levels get tossed in there by virtue of "since HomeManager's there, I may as well use it".
It seems that most wiki pages that I see that have both NixOS and HomeManager sections at the very least make HomeManager seem more featureful or flexible.
I've personally found a good compromise between using NixOS (without Home Manager) and classical dotfiles for home. My dotfiles are independent of the distribution, and also work in e.g. Arch.
I'm actually writing a script that takes my materialized NixOS-managed configs and backs them up in git so I can indeed port them to another distro if I decide to move away from NixOS (hedging my bets since NixOS is my 5th different OS/distro on this laptop).
Not having NixOS manage configs (itself or via HomeManager), though, very much reduces the value proposition of NixOS in my mind.
> I would never consider running Nix on my daily Desktop machine (I'm using Arch BTW). It's more work and hassle than it's worth it.
How much of this is really just unlearning what you have learned, and needing to internalize the Nix way of doing things which may allow more flexibility in the end?
2 things right now, 1) it can only draft emails, requires human in the loop to send still. 2) every email you can think of as resetting the context so at most you can only prompt inject your email and get it classified differently or have the agent try to use one of the available tools just for that email, it won’t impact other emails.
Alex Schroeder suggested to add a search engine on top of people's feeds as a way to search the Indieweb without adding even more crawlers to our collective infrastructure. I think it's a pretty cool way to quickly see what others have written on any given topic.