gradstudent
Anyway, it's a good reminder: self-host all the things!
Finally, thank you for SpaceChem! Still great, even after all these years
I didn't suggest anyone should quit their job. What I said was consider making tradeoffs. Space and affordability in exchange for a longer commute and other distance-related headaches.
>Our children our are our future and they’re being told to jump through flaming hoops… that aren’t even in the same city as their parents!
Nobody is owed the same opportunity as their parents. If the children of the well off have the right to live where they grew up then entire suburbs become enclaves of generational rights-holders.
Many of these problems would go away if cities de-centralised; from one central hub business district to many business districts. The problem, as I see it anyway, is unwillingness to invest in resources and infrastructure, to make satellite developments attractive for business and residents.
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.
> pathway to integrating AI into our most challenging and intellectually rigorous fields to the benefit of all humankind.
There's very little insight here though. It seems mostly a retread of conversations we've been having in the academic community for a few years now. In particular, I was hoping to see some discussion of how we might restructure our educational institutions around this technology, when the machines rob students of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. Right now our best idea seems to be a retreat to oral and written examinations; an idea which doesn't scale and which ignores the supposed benefits of human+AI reasoning. The alternative suggestion I've seen is to teach prompt engineering, which seems (a) hard for foundational subjects and (b) again, seems to outsource much of the thinking to the AI, instead of extending the reach of human thought.
On the one hand, it's great, as so many others here and TFA have attested. Declaratively specifying your system configuration and using snapshots to keep track of everything is a complete game-changer. Similarly great is the absolutely huge universe of installable packages. The coverage here is so much better than what's on offer from Ubuntu or Fedora.
On the other hand, the current implementation is still a bit of a shit-show.
First, there's nix-the-OS and nix-the-package-manager which is pretty confusing. Effectively it means you manage your OS with one declarative system and your local/home config with another. Then there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood, that seem to offer a different modality altogether.
Second, installing packages is nice, but also confusing. Do you install a package or a service? Often both are available and the difference is not always clear. Eventually I learned to choose a service whenever one was available. In either case, the tendency of package maintainers is to install the smallest possible version of whatever you asked for. For example, I wanted KDE but what I got was a bare minimum version with plenty of missing apps and functionality that could only be fixed by adding extra components, one at a time, after debugging whatever was currently breaking.
I appreciated that services and packages can be configured in the configuration file. But the options exposed are usually a partial set of what's available -- without extending the installations scripts yourself. So now my "declarative" config is a mix of what's in my nixOS config file and what's in my manually edited /etc files.
Third, the documentation, mentioned by others, is a mess. There's all kinds of information about old and new versions. The interfaces of the command-line tools seem to have changed between the 25.05 stable that I chose and the then-upcoming 25.11, which made following-along harder than it needed to be.
I eventually gave up because I needed a working machine and not a new hobby. I was left with the impression that NixOS might be a good choice for system admins, but perhaps not yet ready for desktop Linux users.
Why does this change the calculus for management? They don't pay folks to be happy, they pay them to do their jobs. Threaten to take away the labour however and you create a bargaining position. That's how strikes and threats of strikes work. This letter is fundamentally different. For a start, have you considered the veracity of a list of anonymous petitioners? How do you differentiate the real thing from a made up list?
My first inclination is to read letters like this as a threat from employees to the employer. It says hey boss-men, this shite is not on. Signing anonymously undermines that message. I tend to read those signatures as as, I don't like this but it's not worth my job. I have no faith in the efficacy or even existence of "obstruct or delay" tactics from folks like that.
EDIT: I also notice the recommendations are totally different when making the same query in a different session. I'm not sure if that's intentional? I expected at least some overlap with the previous time I asked.
I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.