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are pretty stark llmisms. also the random emojis in front of the duplicate and triplicate "Browse Music" links, the corny tagline in the footer, yeah nah. if this was made by human hands, it could only have been as elaborate satire. bad/inexperienced human code does not look like this.
the formality slider (play with it at the google fonts page linked in the article[0]) is genuinely one of the coolest uses of a variable font axis i've seen in recent memory. it feels like we're witnessing the slow and steady vindication of metafont.
nixos is already, from a certain perspective, an exotic take on gentoo. take away cache.nixos.org and it becomes a source-based distro. it's not even too out-of-the-question to do traditionally gentoo stuff like globally set -funroll-loops -O3 and rebuild your whole system, but the operational benefit of staying standard is getting to use binary caches since reproducibility lets them substitute transparently for local builds in the standard environment with the standard settings. one thing nixos lacks is an elegant analogue to gentoo USE flags; "tell package A to use optional package B" has like two different conventions in nixpkgs for individual packages, alongside bespoke things like configuring everything to use cuda or not. furthermore, pkgsrc, gentoo prefix, and nix are three of a kind in terms of "third-party package manager on a non-native OS"
personally, i used gentoo throughout most of my teenage years, and now use nixos viewing it as a successor, since you can screw around using the thing as a meta-distribution, but roll back when you hose your system.
gentoo freebsd existed for a while for funsies but nobody cared and now it's dead, same with gentoo openbsd. each was portage integrated a little more intentionally on top of a respective bsd than just "bung it in /usr/local/bin and call it a day". practically speaking, they were implementations of gnu/k*bsd.
nixbsd similarly exists (nix deeply integrated into freebsd), with heroic efforts made to transfer nixos's abstraction over init systems for system-wide configuration; last commit was two months ago so i guess not dead yet?
you can run nix on gentoo, or gentoo prefix on nixos with nix-ld turned on if you feel like it
void's claim to fame with xbps is a bunch of sandboxing and bind mounts for build environments. nix already has to sandbox just to get off the ground wrt reproducibility.
void, gentoo, and nixos all offer some degree of libc freedom. on void it's first-class, on gentoo it nearly is, and on nixos it's here be dragons. libc freedom doesnt really jive with using a bsd as a base; vertical integration is kind of one of the contemporary selling points.
so to answer your question, the result would be nixbsd in an alternate timeline where nixpkgs's analogues to USE flags/eselect/profiles are not hot garbage (i say this with love as a user), and void would fail to exert a phenotype.
the consequentialist "may as well" or "for all intents and purposes" is implicit. of course you can't ascribe literal teleology to something like a megacorp; diffusion of accountability is a defining trait of any sufficiently large organisation. but, "misaligned incentives" and hatred look the same from the sole of the boot. in both cases, you probably want to get your head off the curb before it comes down.
finding it increasingly difficult to summon any optimism with respect to this stuff. opposing policy, proponents of which can fall back on "think of the children", is an uphill battle with both hands tied behind your back. the way things are going, someone born today, by the time they reach my age, simply won't have been able to get in touch with 90% of interests i value and give my life meaning.
back in my time as an (inadvisably) precociously online kid, the only real age barrier was having a credit card, so i had to beg/borrow/steal my way to someone on irc giving me a shell to a vps, and pay some other rando with a steam gift card to buy a domain then transfer it to my registrar account. and like that, i could start developing a presence in whatever online communities i insinuated myself into by acting mature enough nobody gave my age a second thought. physical realities like divorce and school troubles came and went, but moving and shaking online gave me my most steadfast friends and s/o to this day.
shift the timeframe a couple decades and i would have instead been gated by an id upload. bleak.
inkscape has had a long and quiet ascent from quintessentially janky foss creative software to genuinely pleasant to use. i still wish it were a little easier to edit the individual portions of deeply nested clip/mask operations, but if you need to crank out some icons, you can use inkscape and not hate your life, which is something i'd have called someone insane for telling me a decade ago.
genuinely remarkable, the altogether perhaps even productive mischief you can get up to, especially with `__VA_OPT__` becoming a proper standard in both C and C++ so you don't have to feel dirty about using it.
i recently made use of plenty of ugly tricks in this vein to take a single authoritative table of macro invocations that defined a bunch of pixel formats, and make them graduate from defining bitfield structs to classes with accessors that performed good old fashioned shifts and masks, all without ever specifying the individual bit offsets of channels, just their individual widths, and macro magic did the rest. no templates, no actual c++, could just as feasibly produce pure c bindings down the line by just changing a few names.
getting really into this stuff makes you stop thinking of c function-like macros as functions of their arguments as such, but rather unary functions of argument lists, where arity roughly becomes the one notion vaguely akin to typing in the whole enterprise, or at least the one place where the compiler exhibits behaviour resembling that of a type checker. this was especially true considering the entries in the table i wound up with were variadic, terminating in variably many (name, width) parenthesised tuples. and i just... had the means to "uncons" them so to speak. fun stuff.
this is worth it, imo, in precisely one context, which is: you want a single source of truth that defines fiddly but formulaic implementations spread across multiple files that must remain coordinated, and this is something you do infrequently enough that you don't consider it worthwhile introducing "real" "big boy" code gen into your build process. mind, you usually do end up having to commit to a little utility header that defines convenient macros (_Ex and such in the article), but hey. c'est la vie. basically x macros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_macro) on heart attack quantities of steroids.
multiple services depending on different outputs of a single acme client can be expressed, right now, in 2025, within systemd unit definitions, without deeply integrating a systemd-certd-or-whatever-as-such.
which is basically ideal, no? for all the buy-in that the systemd stapling-svchost.exe-onto-cgroups approach asks of us, at the very least we have sufficiently expressive system to do that sort of thing. where something on the machine has a notion of what wants what from what, and you can issue a command to see whether that dependency is satisfied. like. we are there. good. nice. hopefully ops guys are content to let sleeping dogs lie, right?
i remember looking through these during a deep dive on type selection -- naturally radon, krypton, and arguably xenon come across as a bit gimmicky, argon has stiff competition in its genre as it's the rough style of most “modern” monospace faces, but neon is actually kind of spicy. this is the closest to the “mona” in “monaspace”, being similarly derived from helvetica and its ilk, and sits at just that right level of regularity that it's easy on the eyes after a long day in a way that i previously thought was only the purview of sf mono.
the tragedy of both argon and fragment mono, though, is that the latter comes in one width, and the former inexplicably supports obscenely wide proportions without letting you condense it down from the bog-standard 1x2ish. most condensed options out there are these pill-shaped straight-walled monstrosities that blur together (the iosevkas and pragmatas of the world), with a few notable exceptions (the old osdn releases of mplus).
i wonder what would happen if you went in and extrapolated the width scaling for monaspace backwards into super narrow range.
are pretty stark llmisms. also the random emojis in front of the duplicate and triplicate "Browse Music" links, the corny tagline in the footer, yeah nah. if this was made by human hands, it could only have been as elaborate satire. bad/inexperienced human code does not look like this.