Software guy (mainly focusing on Elixir, and... Bash?? and now LuaJIT?? Perhaps Lean 4 next?), gamer (board/card/PC/console), philosopher, technologist, former Psych major @ Cornell, sailor, swimmer, biker, scuba diver, music lover (electronica, funk, classical, metal), sometime-partier, philogynist, USAF veteran, and fan of Apple, Tesla, NixOS, open-source, and startups. And that's sort of just the beginning... my mind is fairly voracious. I lean liberal and libertarian, although I love debating anything controversial. Not particularly religious, and on the free will question I am a "metaphysical libertarian incompatibilist."
Physical location: NYC environs
I decided to switch to this more public account from my old alias here, which as of today (2/3/2016) is 2000 days old with 1369 karma.
I am @pmarreck on X/Twitter, https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermarreck/ on linkedin, github.com/pmarreck, [email protected], you can pattern-match the rest... my first and last names are basically a natural primary key
Related: I have a variable integer length encoding scheme that beats out LEB128, Protobuf, varint and ASN.1 while also encoding/declaring endianness (but notably, leaving signage information up to the application): https://github.com/pmarreck/BLIP
I've heard of Odin for years now. Maybe because I like knowing about new/nascent languages. For example, have you heard of roc-lang? You've likely heard of Zig.
It's possible I'm in a bubble, but it would be a fairly notable bubble.
Things that are perhaps niche but growing should be an argument for keeping them.
Isn't Wikipedia a compendium of facts? Odin's existence is one of those facts. /shrug
Skills atrophying in terms of what? Remembering specific API's that you always had to look up anyway? You don't lose developer intuition, analytical thinking or technical inclination, and those are the things that matter, anyway.
I recently did a fleetwide upgrade to Zig 0.16. Do I remember every single change from 0.15? No. Do I have to? Also no. Both because I can look it up if I need to, but also because the LLM already does.
If I don't look at a codebase that I myself haven't looked at in a year, I will not recognize some things when I return to it. Is this sense of "atrophy" meaningful when this was a problem long before LLMs came on the scene?
The entire system configuration is one file or a small set of files. If you copy it to a different machine, you can "run" it and get pretty much the same machine. If you screw up the config, the system tells you before it even tries to apply it. If something breaks while applying it (which is rare), NOTHING is broken because the entire system still points at the old instance, since cutover is atomic. This is already different from pretty much every other system out there. And if you reboot and things are STILL messed up, you can boot into a previously-known-good instance and repair things from there, without using a bootable USB key.
The builds are deterministic, unlike on any other linux or other OS, because Nix basically captures a closure of all the possible inputs to a build, which means that the build always "sees" the same things, which means it always builds the same way. Once you grok this, doing it any other way will seem insane.
Truth be told I think I only appreciated it more after having used (and bricked) other Linux distros simply by "installing the wrong thing". This is what i mean by "daily driver". You need something reliable AND reconfigurable for that; NixOS (or nix-darwin on Mac) offers both.
> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior
I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality.
In a skilled senior's hands, this is like an expert power tool. In the hands of someone less-skilled, it is likely also... less-skilled. It's a magnifier.
> and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug.
Nope, no it's not. It's being reviewed, measured, and controlled against. Because... you WILL need more controls to take full advantage. Look, I even invented a whole new control methodology around it called MFIC: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/b30aa3ca69cb70a5526f8a63ab8...
> My main issue with Arch was that after installing and trying stuff it left OS dirty even after package removal
Yeah, that's literally a problem with every single OS that is not NixOS (or, shoutout, Guix, or the other Nix-based variants).
That's also why I am sticking with NixOS. Been at least 5 years now- it's wonderful having a reliable LINUX system as my daily driver (or one of them).
And you can reboot into any old configuration! Even more insurance against fuckups!
> I am finally settling on it be the last OS I need
Same here. As soon as I got everything set up just how I like it in a declarative, reproducible fashion, I had this feeling of... "OK, this is great. I can't see a reason to ever leave this."
It generates a config file. You can read it before applying it. While Nix may be nigh intractable to write for some people, it is quite a bit easier to read, and any shenanigans would immediately be noticed.
Physical location: NYC environs
I decided to switch to this more public account from my old alias here, which as of today (2/3/2016) is 2000 days old with 1369 karma.
I am @pmarreck on X/Twitter, https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermarreck/ on linkedin, github.com/pmarreck, [email protected], you can pattern-match the rest... my first and last names are basically a natural primary key