aequitas (u/aequitas)

aequitas commented on Don't rent the cloud, own instead blog.comma.ai/datacenter/... · Posted by u/Torq_boi

bpavuk · 6 days ago

if someone on the DevOps team knows Nix, option 3 becomes a lot cheaper time-wise! yeah, Nix flakes still need maintenance, especially on the `nixos-unstable` branch, but you get the quickest disaster recovery route possible!

plus, infra flexibility removes random constraints that e.g. Cloudflare Workers have

aequitas · 6 days ago

This is what we do, I gave a talk about our setup earlier this week at CfgMgmtCamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxkVVrN0mA&t=8457s

aequitas commented on Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net cnn.com/sport/live-news/t... · Posted by u/keepamovin

TheAceOfHearts · 17 days ago

I need to share a video [0] which helped contextualize Alex Honnold for me by contrasting him with another climber I've watched for years: Magnus Midtbo. In this video they're solo climbing a fairly simple and safe mountain, and Magnus is visibly stressed out while Alex calmly shouts encouragement all while recording.

When watching Alex Honnold in Free Solo, I understood there was a exceptional aspect to him, but it took me seeing him climb with other people to really grasp the magnitude.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI

aequitas · 16 days ago

Reminds me of that time I was taking climbing lessons in the Belgian Ardennes. Helmet on, in harness, hanging in the ropes, holding tight to not fall, we where climbing half way up the mountain, when a person out of nowhere ask if he can pass and just flew up the key section of the route. It was just a local, casual clothes, no harness, no helmet, no rope, maybe not even proper climbing shoes but I can't recall that. Just casually climbing the mountain like he was on a lunch stroll. Even now with years of experience I still don't have that confidence.

aequitas commented on Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany openpetition.de/petition/... · Posted by u/PhilippGille

clickety_clack · 2 months ago

Maybe the good old “lines of code” days will make a comeback?

aequitas · 2 months ago

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

aequitas commented on Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/thinkcontext

stubish · 3 months ago

Piracy does not hurt sales because it has a lot of friction. There have been zero studies on piracy in a low friction environment, because there was no need. Such as in countries where pirated Video CDs where endemic and not policed, it was completely obvious and distributors didn't even bother putting product onto the market. Or back in the days where mp3 music sharing apps became mainstream and got integrated with music players. Or when Popcorn Time looked likely to replace every streaming service in existence. If something like the Internet Archive Library became low friction (click the button and you are reading on your e-reader), and declared legal (avoiding social stigma), do you honestly believe this would not become the default and normalized way of 'buying' books?

aequitas · 3 months ago

GOG shows that paying for drm-free games in a country where copyright was unenforced and piracy offered a better UX can still be profitable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com#Launch_of_Good_Old_Gam..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A

aequitas commented on YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers 9to5google.com/2025/09/16... · Posted by u/iamflimflam1

bArray · 5 months ago

Counter-argument: Youtube's aggressive anti-ads campaign resulted in failed loads, videos that appear stuck, etc. The more techy people would have updated, but others were left with the choice of a buggy experience or dreadfully long ads. Maybe people just got fed up with Youtube.

aequitas · 5 months ago

I consider myself a little techy, since I visit this site quite often. But for me YouTube is curing me from my addiction to it by ramping up its ad blocker blockers. I know I have to wait roughly the ad’s runtime looking at a frozen video before the video actually starts playing and it is often enough to let me go do something productive or useful instead. Thanks google :)

aequitas commented on Formatting code should be unnecessary maxleiter.com/blog/format... · Posted by u/MaxLeiter

automatoney · 5 months ago

I've never understood why people care so much about the linter settings. It's so obviously bikeshedding, just make a choice, run the linter automatically and be done with it. I'm too busy doing actual software engineering to care about where exactly everything goes - I promise after a week you'll just get used to whatever format your team lands on.

aequitas · 5 months ago

It’s very simple: format code to a standard. Preferably the language default formatting. But it must be a standard that can be auto formatted to with a tool. Now when someone doesn’t like that standard, they can auto format from that standard to one of their liking for local development and back again to the project standard for pushing to the project. This can even be done automatically with gitattributes during checkout and commit. But without strictly enforcing a autoformatable standard this is not possible and you end up with bikeshedding.

aequitas commented on Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me boston.conman.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/classichasclass

brianwawok · 6 months ago

I doubt that’s on purpose. The bad guys that don’t follow robots don’t bother downloading it.

Never assume malice what can be attributed to incompetence.

aequitas · 6 months ago

Bad guys might download the robots.txt to find out the stuff they don't want them to crawl.

aequitas commented on Helix Editor 25.07 helix-editor.com/news/rel... · Posted by u/matrixhelix

munificent · 7 months ago

> I have muscle memory of Vim.

I respect the preferences of others but I think that most people overfit for muscle memory. I've switched OSes/editors/IDEs many times in my career. Every time, the first day or two I feel like "This is the worst fucking thing ever, I can't even type God damn it I want to set the computer on fire and become a farmer."

But... that passes. After a couple of days, I have new muscle memory and it's fine. It would be a shame to let a few days of discomfort control which software I use when software varies in its other capabilities so much more widely than just keybindings.

aequitas · 7 months ago

But there is only so much room for muscle memory or context to switch between. I tried Helix for a while, got used to it and I really liked it, especially the noun verb order being different from vim. Seeing what you have selected before performing the action. But for me the problem is that vim is everywhere I go or will eventually end up. All my servers have vim. Every server I need to randomly debug has vim or vi. So my muscle memory for vim keeps getting refreshed as well. And switching between the two constantly is just a pain. I could take along Helix to all these servers. But that is not practical nor do I need all the features Helix uses. Or I would miss specific feature which I then also have to bring along.

Now I’ve settled with Zed as desktop editor/IDE and still use vim on remotes. The context switch between a desktop app en cli is big enough that it’s never a problem. I don’t even use the vim bindings in Zed.

aequitas commented on Can your terminal do emojis? How big? dgl.cx/2025/06/can-your-t... · Posted by u/dgl

oneeyedpigeon · 8 months ago

Great. A feature that makes Apple's default Terminal better than iTerm or WezTerm. Just what I didn't need!

aequitas · 8 months ago

But iTerm2 supports imgcat which lets you just dump full images into the terminal output.

aequitas commented on How I use my terminal jyn.dev/how-i-use-my-term... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

huimang · 8 months ago

Hi Jyn.

"i don't use Nix partly because all my friends who use Nix have even weirder bugs than they already had and partly because i don't like the philosophy of not being able to install things at runtime."

The first part is mostly true. Nix installs things in a readonly store (/nix/store) so regular dynamically linked binaries don't work. Packaging takes a different approach and when things break, it can be difficult to work around. That said, I've run NixOS for over a year now and I find the benefits are far preferable to these downsides. It's not often I run into bugs, let alone show-stopping ones. What is annoying is how many tools are distributed without the source, so I have to run patchelf on them or use something like nix-ld.

As for the latter part, I think that using Nix will change that mentality. (Note that you can do `nix-env -iA $pkg` but it's not recommended). See, I don't even install things like rust at a global level anymore. I can always do `nix-shell -p $pkg` for an ephemeral shell if I need that, or I encode that dependency directly in the project's flake.nix. If I end up using that program a lot I will make the effort to add it to my NixOS config.

aequitas · 8 months ago

I use Nix exactly because it doesn't allow installing things at runtime. This keeps me from hitting surprises where the runtime environment changes from under me. Containers can partially solve this problem as well but have their own usability issues.

Nowadays I start every project with `nix flake init --template templates#utils-generic`. And put everything in that related to the project. I even had some projects where I had to put 'ssh' as a pinned package as it was used in some scripting and the default macOS and Linux versions accepted different flags.

I also do love that I can do something like `nix run nixpkgs#nmap` on any machine I'm on to instantly run a program with worrying where to get it from. I also use this feature in some of our projects so you can click a link in the admin web interface which is a 'command url' for iTerm2[0] like: `nix run gitlab.com/example/example/v1.0 -- test http://example.com` which will prompt to run that specific version of the command in your terminal, without have to checkout the source repo. In this case it is to rerun specific task locally for debugging purposes.

[0] https://iterm2.com/documentation-command-selection.html