• 8 Posts
  • 116 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I know, but to me this meme doesn’t make sense to me unless I assume the person reading the math Expression is interpreting its real world application.

    25 / 5 = 5 and nobodies head exploded. That’s just evaluating a math Expression. .25 / .5 = .5 is the same. It’s not a “my brain can’t comprehend how to evaluate expressions” as the meme suggests.

    However, if someone who doesnt do much algebra thought to themselves “I need half of a quarter”, then I could understand why their brain might “hurt” as the meme suggests, for a similar reason why adding 20 degree Celsius water to 20 degree Celsius water doesn’t make 40 degree Celsius wate

    I’m probably reading into it too much, but the meme just doesn’t feel like a “mind fuck that keeps me up at night”. I’m looking for reasons to try and explain it, but it’s just a math expression at the end of the day



  • Software engineering is usually distinct from programming in that it isn’t about the logic behind programming, but about the project management that all software projects typically have in common.

    Besides agile methodology, a lot of software engineering involves creating reproducible environments. While NixOS doesn’t provide anything that much different from tools like Ansible,

    NixOS follows a functional/declarative design paradigm, functional/declarative design paradigms communicate similar logic for solving the same problem. It’s a restrictive paradigm. Consider how javascript is not restrictive, as in, you can code with any design paradigm in javascript, and how it’s ugly for that.

    I also think functional paradigms mirror the natural language closer than imperative paradigms. That’s subjective, but I would still argue Math is a logical language that is a subset of the natural language, and since functions in programming represent a process of doing something, functions make for natural verbs. Meaning, understanding the naming convention for the functions, is a natural naming convention for when I communicate with other software engineers, even when I’m not asking about making configurable/reproducible systems in NixOS

    Or when I look at how to config things like firewall, ssh, vpn servers, user group permissions… it’s a minimalist description that I could communicate to other people configuring even on a debian server

    So, it’s hard because it’s restrictive, but if you’re willing to put up with a learning curve, you get a language agnostic framework for describing computing environments, more or less. Then there’s more advanced stuff with nix flakes, which still doesn’t make sense to me functionally/linguistically, but I’m starting to see the value in parallel package management and the precision in reproducibility they provide by requiring sha256 git commits


  • Yea it’s definitely a jungle haha, it also seems they’re changing things up a bit with where the most recent docs might be hosted

    https://search.nixos.org/

    so, if you searched for vscode in that link, then click the “NixOS Configuration” button, you can see

      environment.systemPackages = [
        pkgs.vscode
      ];
    

    or if you’re using the with convention to factor out the pkgs object/contextual keyword(not sure if that’s the right name)

      environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
        vscode
      ];
    

    for zsh, just having this in your configuration.nix should work https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Command_Shell

    programs.zsh.enable = true;
    users.defaultUserShell = pkgs.zsh;
    

    Again, these values should be inserted after the function definition of your configuration.nix

    { config, pkgs, ...}:
    {
       # Things get inserted here typically
       imports = [ ./hardware-configuration.nix];
       environment.systemPackages = [pkgs.vscode];
    }
    

    for example.

    Something I’ve noticed from developing on nix, When the headaches of nix appear, the solution might be harder, but I usually end up with a better solution than what I was going for before. Some examples:

    • My resume is compiled in Latex. I tried the pdflatex package in nix but it gave rendering issues. Then the nix community recommended tectonic and i’m getting better compilation times, logging, clean up…

    • PIP is a garbage package manager, and it’s garbageness sometimes makes native python development a headache in nixos. However, using poetry2nix, not only could I define development environments, it was also ready for packaging on PIP

    Sometimes you might want to separate some parts of your configuration away from your global system config at /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. That’s nix-shell, nix-develop, nix-build, and flakes are for. I’m not a pro at flakes yet, but I think I got the gist, here’s an example of when I wish I could have used a flake:

    I use discord but discord itself is garbage. Vesktop is a better 3rd party client for discord. Unfortunately, I had to remove it from my configuration.nix the last few weeks because one of its dependencies wasn’t packaged right, causing my entire system to not build. If I had used a flake, I could have isolated that dependency from the rest of my build, while still tracking its integration with my system. I believe this could have allowed me to update the rest of my system, while still defining the errenous app as part of my system. Flakes are supposed to be more reproducible as well, since they require sha256 git commits, whereas other package managers only ask for a subjective version number

    There’s a lot to learn with nix but even if I don’t stick with it long term I feel like It’s making me a smarter software engineer since a declarative/functional paradigm tends to match the natural language more. It also is the most restrictive design paradigm, which means it’s brief but so simple it can be hard to understand as a consequence. Since it’s so restrictive, it’s also a subset of all other paradigms. You declare what you want, ideally, you don’t have to set anything up. I never had an easier time getting cuda drivers for ML Training setup than on NixOS because of this

    Something I enjoyed doing, was setting up my user profile to let me ssh in only with whitelisted ssh keys, as well as setting up a systemd script to handle some start up routines on my OS. I think that can be a gentle introduction to how you can configure other parts of your operating system. I’m going to try and set up a CI/CD/CT pipeline with it next I believe

    Edit: The next thing I need to do as well, is consolidate my user configs with the home manager functionality. I use a KVantum Theme engine on top of plasma, and while those apps are installed in my system, the configuration of which theme to automatically load should be integrated with the text config aspects of nixos. Currently, I “Imperatively” configured those by “Opening the app and clicking”, which will get erased/not be reproducible if I ever rebuild my nixos on a new computer

    Another funny thing with functional programming… sometimes the fix is as simple as

    sound.enable = true;
    

    Even though I had pipewire enabled as a service and everything, that one line needed to be there haha




  • I’m using NixOS partly as a dev machine, but mostly for consumer OS stuff like gaming, YouTube, social media…

    What are you trying to use it for? From the consumer perspective, I feel like modifying configuration.nix would be the majority of what I need. It’s like ninite if you’ve used that to setup a Windows machine, but it can be preloaded on your OS and you can configure everything, not just which programs are installed

    If you’re trying to setup dev environments, I think what gets weird is how many ways there are to do similar things, like nix develop, nix build, nix shell…