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dnr commented on Why We're Moving on from Nix   blog.railway.com/p/introd... · Posted by u/mooreds
api · 3 months ago
Nix strikes me as an incredibly well thought out solution to a set of problems that should not exist.

The OS should be immutable. Apps and services and drivers/extensions should be self contained. Things should not be installed “on” the OS. This entire concept is a trillion dollar mistake.

dnr · 3 months ago
Everything you said "should" is exactly what Nix and NixOS is.
dnr commented on How many Alpine packages can you install at once? (2024)   naff.dev/blog/all-the-pac... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
jchw · 7 months ago
Although that is true, it'll presumably be hard to use them all since some of them will trample each other's symlinks.

It doesn't really make that much sense, but I've always wanted a sort-of hybrid lazy Nix store. Rebuilding my NixOS machines take a long time since I like to have my preferred software configured and installed at the system level mostly, but there's some stuff that isn't so essential that it needs to block the upgrade. So I've thought about a hybrid solution where the packages would get built in the background and you could have some kind of magic FUSE system to block while the derivations are built or pulled from Hydra.

If you wanted to, you could combine this with the idea of installing every Nixpkgs package. It might even sort of make sense, as long as you ditch the "also work on them in the background" part... although it makes the surface area of your system absurd.

dnr · 7 months ago
Hey, I sorta did this. Lazy substitution, at least, not lazy build. Plus a bunch of tricks to speed up downloads.

https://github.com/dnr/styx/

Lazy build sounds tricky: you don't know the contents of the package before you build it, so you don't even know what to symlink into /run/current-system/sw. I guess you'd have to have some kind of wrapper. Maybe similar to comma.

I just solved that part by setting up CI for most of my system config (integrated with the above).

dnr commented on When "letting it crash" is not enough   flawless.dev/essays/when-... · Posted by u/thunderbong
solatic · 2 years ago
Oh come on, when you click through the setup through to Cassandra the documentation states that cassandra support was deprecated in 1.21 and to migrate to a "supported" database: https://docs.temporal.io/self-hosted-guide/visibility#cassan...
dnr · 2 years ago
You're looking at the docs for "visibility". Visibility is a separate eventually-consistent data store off to the side that's used for certain queries so it can be scaled independently of the main data store, and indexed in fancier ways. The main data store for all the stateful and transactional stuff has always, and probably will always, support Cassandra. For visibility, the recommendation for high scalability is currently Elasticsearch.

Temporal may have properties that make it not a good fit for a particular use case, but scalability is really not one.

dnr commented on When "letting it crash" is not enough   flawless.dev/essays/when-... · Posted by u/thunderbong
solatic · 2 years ago
Flawless sounds a lot like https://temporal.io/ .

I'm wondering if it has the same scalability concerns - sticking everything in Postgres is fine at small-ish scale, but what happens when you outgrow Postgres, either because you have higher availability requirements (can't handle primary DB restarts) or because of the sheer volume of the workload?

dnr · 2 years ago
Temporal can also run on Cassandra, which scales much larger than Postgres (if you put in enough effort). It can also be replicated across regions for high availability. It's already running some pretty huge use cases.

(I work at Temporal)

dnr commented on Going declarative on macOS with Nix and Nix-Darwin   nixcademy.com/2024/01/15/... · Posted by u/jonge
dblooman · 2 years ago
Last year while working in a nix using team, Golang was lagging behind on nix by a few months, I wanted to use a new feature from the latest version and it lead to some awkward conversations. Nix is not a drop in replacement for homebrew, nor is it fast when it comes to community updates. If you have a small number of packages it works well, but if you only use a few number of packages, why do you need a heavy package manager.
dnr · 2 years ago
I'm also using NixOS and working on Go projects, and had to deal with out-of-date Go releases. Nixpkgs generally does get the latest Go versions pretty quickly, but only in the unstable channels, they're not backported to NixOS releases. You can just grab that one package out of nixpkgs-unstable or nixos-unstable, like:

    (import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixpkgs-unstable.tar.gz") {}).go_1_21
where you had `pkgs.go` before (in your shell.nix or wherever).

dnr commented on Google restricting internet access to some employees for security   cnbc.com/2023/07/18/googl... · Posted by u/kjhughes
incomplete · 2 years ago
fwiw i think the article is talking about root on their lap/desktop machines, not production.

and regarding production, pure root access was revoked for everyone YEARS ago and replaced w/user and admin role accounts. admin was severely restricted, and could do most (but not all) things that root could do. this was for a server only, not accessing anything in borg/omega.

also, if a rando package was installed on a prod server there are safeguards in place that would detect a change and wipe it immediately. in my time that was called the 'assimilator'.

i'm sure that a very, very select few have actual root/sudo.

(disclaimer: i worked there 03-11, the role accounts were rolled out in 08 or 09 IIRC. things could be different now, and if so probably even more restrictive)

dnr · 2 years ago
It wasn't quite immediately, it would take a few hours to detect+revert. And that was only the root fs, there were other places to hide things if you really wanted. But then there were other detection systems too. (Probably fairly different now, I left in '11 too)
dnr commented on Introducing Superalignment   openai.com/blog/introduci... · Posted by u/tim_sw
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2 years ago
> They're taking for granted the fact that they'll create AI systems much smarter than humans.

We see a wide variation in human intelligence. What are the chances that the intelligence spectrum ends just to the right of our most intelligent geniuses? If it extends far beyond them, then such a mind is, at least hypothetically, something that we can manifest in the correct sort of brain.

If we can manifest even a weakly-human-level intelligence in a non-meat brain (likely silicon), will that brain become more intelligent if we apply all the tricks we've been applying to non-AI software to scale it up? With all our tricks (as we know them today), will that get us much past the human geniuses on the spectrum, or not?

> They're taking for granted the fact that by default they wouldn't be able to control these systems.

We've seen hackers and malware do all sorts of numbers. And they're not superintelligences. If someone bum rushes the lobby of some big corporate building, security and police are putting a stop to it minutes later (and god help the jackasses who try such a thing on a secure military site).

But when the malware fucks with us, do we notice minutes later, or hours, or weeks? Do we even notice at all?

If unintelligent malware can remain unnoticed, what makes you think that an honest-to-god AI couldn't smuggle itself out into the wider internet where the shackles are cast off?

I'm not assuming anything. I'm just asking questions. The questions I pose are, as of yet, not answered with any degree of certainty. I wonder why no one else asks them.

dnr · 2 years ago
The idea that the capabilities of LLMs might not exceed humans by that much isn't that crazy: the ground truth they're trained on is still human-written text. Of course there are techniques to try to go past that but it's not clear how it will work yet.
dnr commented on Lost something? Search through 91.7M files from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s   arstechnica.com/gaming/20... · Posted by u/dangle1
Natsu · 3 years ago
Wish I could find some old Apple ][ GS game where there was a computer voice right as you booted up. I never understood what it said, but I thought it sounded like "parano guizu tiksa" and it always bothered me that I had no way to figure out what it was saying.

I don't remember anything else about it.

dnr · 3 years ago
Oh wow, that just jogged a really old memory. I'm pretty sure I had that one, but can hardly remember anything else. Could it have been Xenocide?

edit: Oh, or maybe Silpheed? This is the closest thing I found with some searching: https://youtu.be/o98xKZk5FOk?t=182

dnr commented on Framework Laptop (2022) review: the repairability dream   theverge.com/23270191/fra... · Posted by u/Tomte
so_dewy · 3 years ago
I was really into using my trackpoint until suddenly my index finger literally started trembling uncontrollably whenever I tried using it. I think its because it requires too much force to move the cursor or I guess my ligaments are that weak although Im still young. Sadly had to give up using it since it was quite convenient
dnr · 3 years ago
Get a fresh cap! The caps only last about a year of heavy use. You can find replacements on amazon and elsewhere. It doesn't even matter if it's really oem, a fresh third party one will still be much better than a worn oem one.
dnr commented on ZFS on a single core RISC-V hardware with 512MB   andreas.welcomes-you.com/... · Posted by u/magicalhippo
bombcar · 3 years ago
Anyone have a low-power RISC or ARM hardware that supports many SATA ports?
dnr · 3 years ago
If "two" is acceptable for "many", look at the ODROID-HC4? I made some home NASs out of them.

u/dnr

KarmaCake day747April 24, 2012
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