> bubbles are notoriously unpredictable and generally don't happen when they are loudly and widely proclaimed to happen any minute now.
Is that true? It seemed to me that the most common opinion before the recent Chinese real estate crash was that it was a bubble; architect friends of mine who worked in China said the government had no doubt prices were unreasonably high; the thing they remained hopeful about is whether a soft landing was possible. Similarly it seems like it was by no means an uncommon opinion in the Japanese asset bubble, NFTs, beanie babies, and even the dotcom boom that this is (to use Greenspan’s phrase leading up to the dotcom bubble) “irrational exuberance”.
Thomas Aquinas believed cruelty to animals was wrong not because animals have souls (and with that all the standard moral rights), but because it can teach us cruelty to other humans.
It’s still helpful to eg fold different phases in Nix, and different derivation output.
I work on garnix.io, which is exactly a Nix-based CI alternative for GitHub, and we had to build a lot of these small things to make the experience better.
We also do something similar at garnix, but when enabling incremental builds. Instead of just skipping the build stage, we also “normalize” the eval into just the store path, and skipping it the second time around.
Mentioned in passing in https://garnix.io/blog/incremental-builds. This is even more significant because in this case you might otherwise be eval-ing several layers of flakes.
You might be too deeply scarred to come close to it, but we just wrote a blog post about deploying NixOS servers without installing nix locally or provisioning work here that feels relevant: https://garnix.io/blog/hosting-nixos
It’s to allow interpolation of packages and environments. But in practice we don’t use it that often, so we were thinking of switching the main function to using just a second string argument. (In other words, I agree.)