czxtm

Ever since I switched from dotfiles to nix-darwin I've fallen into the rabbit hole of wanting to make more and more of my system reproducible.

Eventually `claude -p` allowed me to write a script that let me just prompt the changes I wanted to my config rather than have to keep looking up the options in the nix-darwin docs. Over time I found that it would rarely fail to one-shot my request, and I realized I was an Electron shell away from being able to create a desktop app that could essentially do what my script was doing.

When a non-technical friend or family member asks me for help with something on their computer, the words they use to make that request is exactly what I would prompt my script with to update my config. I thought that was really neat, because Nix is seen as having a high learning curve even for developers, but it happens to be the right fit to serve the request of the least technical people I know.

So anyways, here is the app, it's called nixmac, and I wanted to share it with you guys - hope you like it, any feedback is appreciated!

Articles like this are why I visit HN - most days HN feels like the equivalent of quickly skimming my email inbox - but every once in a while there's a gem like this article that moves me deeply

it’s similar to how you can hash passwords to know that the user knows it without knowing the password. so you don’t know the amounts you just know that, for example, the output (debit) is affordable by the sender (in the case of a payment). the sort of “magic” of zk systems lies in the part where you can turn complex programs into something similar by converting them into polynomials. it turns out that pretty much any program can be represented as polynomial math and the second magical part is that although the proofs might be expensive to compute, they can be verified in constant time (in the case of a SNARK at least).

Good luck!