nice. simple and modular i like. i deal with far too many “one stop shops” at work to bring that home

we use Jenkins + a bespoke wrapper at work. thats left a bad taste in my mouth enough to avoid Jenkins altogether

this is my experience as well. we have a bespoke wrapper around Jenkins, and the more we can test locally the less time we have to spend waiting for the system to fail. it’s one of the reasons i’ve adopted just to script things locally as if it was CI.

heck yeah this is the review i was looking for 💯

you’re right. i just expected it to be an increase 😅

i honestly didn’t look that close, obviously haha

but yeah, i’ve been kinda looking for a reason to de-Microsoft my stuff

good lead. it’s just the one project for now, and to my surprise it’s actually a dependency for the ollama-rs project, so i feel somewhat obligated to keep it stable.

yes, according to this morning’s email

i switched to Linux in 2013ish to get away from my gaming habit and go all in on programming and computer science. that may not work these days as all the games i play work on Linux ha

i think the alternative is to use grep args. but ya know i’m living in the future using nushell’s open command and ripgrep so the argument is just kinda adorable

three, maybe four things:

1. as mentioned: Obsidian. i pay for Sync cuz i like the product and want them to succeed and want reliable offsite backups and conflict resolution. use a ton of links and tags. i’ve been into using DataView to make tables of IoT devices, services, todo items, etc based on tags and other YAML frontmatter.
2. chezmoi. manages my dotfiles so my machines are consistent. i have scripts that are heavily commented that show how to access MQTT, how to read and parse logs from journald, how to inspect my network, etc. i do think of them as code as documentation, even if they’re also just convenient.
3. NixOS. this has been my code as config as documentation silver bullet. i use it as a replacement for Docker, k8s, Ansible, etc as it contains definitions for my machines and all the services and configuration they run, including any package dependencies and user configurations. no more statting an assortment of files to figure out the state of the system. it’s in flake.nix
4. honorable mention to git and whatever git hosting provider is not on your network. track your work over time, and you’ll thank yourself when things go wrong.

some things are resistant to documentation and have a lot of stateful components (HomeAssitant is my biggest problem child from an infra perspective), but mainly being in that graph mindset of “how would i find a path here if i forgot where this was” helps a lot

honestly, where NixOS shines for me is in my homelab. i don’t always have time to fully document what i’m doing, but my NixOS config is code-as-documentation for when work burns all of my memories away and has a git log and conflict management so i can manage multiple systems that share common config.

and once you find out you can have services run on systemd with syntax like services.jellyfin.enabled = true you’ll never want to go back to containers, although it has ways to manage those as well.

it’s overall a great OS for tinkering and deploying small services across small networks. not sure how it scales, but for my use case it’s damn near perfect

modifier for window manager nav and general OS controls like wofi/rofi

there are some directories in my machines i consider ephemeral. Downloads and ~/temp should be able to be deleted with no real consequences

i mean… sure. some neat tricks in here i wasn’t aware of, but asking my mom to open the terminal… i mean it’s not rocket science but that doesn’t make it accessible. all the scripting and stuff that you’re talking; that stuff comes in the Jellyfin box. honestly, it might be worth it to have both if you have users that aren’t comfortable in the terminal

man this brings back memories.

i was able to install Arch on my 2012 Macbook Pro, but the networking was a huge issue. not only did the driver cause terrible screen tearing for some inexplicable reason, but i had the same problem even getting the dang thing installed. luckily i’m an Android developer and was able to share wifi over USB with an Android device.

ok i’m not saying do this

i recently setup an API proxy, C&C server, Grafana and Prometheus, and Discord bot. now i can send pings via Grafana or with a simple request (provided it’s authed via VPN or proxy) and have my Discord bot use a local LLM on my network to deliver the alert to a Discord channel in the voice of Ultron.

where i get into trouble is when i do a bunch of nixos-rebuild —switches between restarts and some state ends up hanging around, so next time i do a reboot that ephemeral state is gone and whoops no internet

i feel like if you’re not sat stationary at a workstation (who is these days) what you want is a laptop that’s good at being a laptop. 99% of the software developers i work with (not a small number) use Macbook Pros. they are well built, have good components, have best in class battery life (we’ll see how things shake out with Qualcomm), and are BSD based and therefore Unix compatible. my servers and gaming/CUDA PC? Linux all day. my laptop? Macbook. i’m not ideological enough to have range anxiety every time i step away from my desk. plus any decent sized org is going to have to administrate these machines, from scientists to administrators, and catering to .4% of your users is not a good ROI if your software vendors struggled for 8 years to get their Windows 98 based specialty sensor software to run on Mac.

that .4% is likely not 0 because they are nerds.

seriously tho if Qualcomm chips can make a Linux book that lasts all day i would happily make the switch

yeah i see that too. it seems like mostly a reactionary viewpoint. the reaction is understandable to a point since a lot of the “AI” features are half baked and forced on the user. to that point i don’t think GNOME etc should be scrambling to add copies of these features.

what i would love to see is more engagement around additional pieces of software that are supplemental. for example, i would love if i could install a daemon that indexes my notes and allows me to do semantic search. or something similar with my images.

the problems with AI features aren’t within the tech itself but in the surrounding politics. it’s become commonplace for “responsible” AI companies like OpenAI to not even produce papers around their tech (product announcement blogs that are vaguely scientific don’t count), much less source code, weights, and details on training data. and even when Meta releases their weights, they don’t specify their datasets. the rat race to see who can make a decent product with this amazing tech has made the whole industry a bunch of pearl clutching FOMO based tweakers. that sparks a comparison to blockchain, which is fair from the perspective of someone who hasn’t studied the tech or simply hasn’t seen a product that is relevant to them. but even those people will look at something fantastical like ChatGPT as if it’s pedestrian or unimpressive because when i asked it to write an implementation of the HTTP spec in the style of Fetty Wap it didn’t run perfectly the first time.