hallettj

hallettj , 4 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 , 4 months ago

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

hallettj , 4 months ago

A credit system is an essential piece of a robust economy

hallettj , 4 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 , 5 months ago

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

hallettj , 5 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 , 5 months ago

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

hallettj , 5 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 , 5 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 , 5 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:

$ which curl
/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl

$ ls -l /run | grep current-system
/run/current-system -> /nix/store/p92xzjwwykjj1ak0q6lcq7pr9psjzf6w-nixos-system-yu-23.11.20231231.32f6357

$ ls -l /run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl -> /nix/store/r304lglsa9i2jy5hpbdz48z3j3x2n4a6-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl

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,

$ nix shell nixpkgs-unstable#curl  # this works because I added nixpkgs-unstable to my flake registry
$ which curl
/nix/store/0mjq6w6cx1k9907vxm0k5pk7pm1ifib3-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl  # note the hash is different

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:

$ which curl
/home/jesse/.nix-profile/bin/curl

$ ls -la /home/jesse | grep .nix-profile
.nix-profile -> /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse/profile

$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse
profile -> profile-133-link
profile-130-link -> /nix/store/ylysfs90018zc9k0p0dg7x6wvzqcq68j-user-environment
profile-131-link -> /nix/store/9hjiznbaii7a8aa36i8zah4c0xcd8w6d-user-environment
profile-132-link -> /nix/store/h4kkw1m5q6zdhr6mlwr26n638vdbbm2c-user-environment
profile-133-link -> /nix/store/jgxhrhqiagvhd6g42d17h4jhfpgxsk3n-user-environment

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 , 5 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 , 5 months ago

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

hallettj , 5 months ago

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

security.pam.services.doas.fprintAuth = true;

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

auth sufficient /nix/store/fq4vbhdk8dqywxirg3wb99zidfss7sbi-fprintd-1.94.2/lib/security/pam_fprintd.so # fprintd (order 11400)

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 , 5 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,

security.pam.services..fprintAuth

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

hallettj , 5 months ago

Here is a source with lots of detail on how carbon emissions compare: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/23/do-electric-cars-really-produce-fewer-carbon-emissions-than-petrol-or-diesel-vehicles

The tl;dr is that EVs have lower lifetime emissions. If the relevant grids use low-carbon sources then emissions are far lower. (But not as low as bicycles.)

hallettj , 5 months ago

I did not realize nano implemented syntax highlighting!

hallettj , 5 months ago

Wayland replaces the older X protocol. It doesn't have to operate with older protocols. You might be thinking of XWayland which is a proxy that receives X API calls from apps written for X, and translates those to the Wayland API so that those apps can run under Wayland implementations. Window managers can optionally run XWayland, and many do. But as more apps are updated to work natively with Wayland, XWayland becomes less important, and might fade away someday.

PipeWire replaces PulseAudio (the most popular sound server before PipeWire). Systems running PipeWire often run pipewire-pulse which does basically the same thing that XWayland does - it translates from the PulseAudio API to the PipeWire API. It's a technically optional, but realistically necessary compatibility layer that may become less relevant over time if apps tend to update to work with PipeWire natively.

So no, both Wayland and PipeWire are capable of operating independently of other protocols.

hallettj , 6 months ago

I've been using this for maybe a couple of years, and I love it! I like that windows stay at the sizes I set them to, and at the same time I can put as many windows in a workspace as I want.

PaperWM is not bug-free, but an active dev community has grown around it, and they do a lot of work to keep it running as smoothly as possible. That includes the essential task of working around breaking extension API changes when new Gnome releases are coming.

I've also been keeping an eye on Niri which applies the same idea to a standalone window manager. I haven't switched because Niri doesn't currently implement XWayland. But it looks like Wine is getting closer to native Wayland support so XWayland might not be a requirement for me for much longer.

hallettj , 6 months ago

PaperWM has columns - you can move multiple windows into a column (Super+I by default, or Super+O to move a window out of a column). When you move windows left or right or resize horizontally the column moves or resizes as a group. That's the only feature that groups windows.

I mention Niri because I'm interested to see more implementations of the same idea. The only other scrolling window manager I know of is CardboardWM which is long dead. A native implementation like Niri might be able to explore ideas that are difficult to implement in an extension.