> NixOS is quickly becomming the biggest and best tool there is. It will guarantee that your code will run exactly the same way, even 100 years in the future. Docker, Conda, and similar tools are better, but NixOS gives more comprehensive guarantees.
I like how this is dropped as a fact. Dare to explain why though? Especially vs Docker. NixOS is not even standardized. No guarantees it will not be superseded by some descedant or eg. Guix in a near decade.
Regarding the biggest: nixpkgs sits at around 140k packages, way more than others.
Best: I still argue that Docker and Conda are more accessible, but my point was to go for reproducible, declarative science. Nix environments are exactly that. They're not perfect and are, as you point out, not standardized. But they cover much more ground that Docker. If you trust the upstream nix repo, you can get bit-level equality at every single build you (or anyone else) does. Docker relies on huge binary blobs that you can't inspect and that can be pretty much arbitrarily swapped around.
I'm totally fine if Guix takes over. Or the next big thing. As long as it's declarative and reproducible.
In my work (scientific or otherwise), I try to avoid dependencies if possible. That's not always possible, so a solution like Docker or NixOS is needed, but the problem can be improved a lot without a technical solution. Either feels like fighting an uphill battle though as most researchers think short term and just pick whatever is convenient in the moment.
I think such comment are the exact reason why "the speaker" has quit HN. This is literally some AI transcription from the video + "I find this interesting". Why is this even in the top?
Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall).
Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement on a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit is thought to be possible.
Do you find it so unbelievable that Andrew is genuinely unhappy with the direction that HN has been taken? You can't deny that there is a real problem with AI generated submissions and comments.
I can’t imagine the head of LLVM Foundation to have similar blog post on Zig’s decision to move to their own compiler backend. And yet Andrew regularly mentions that this is because the bugs which LLVM brings. Here seems to be the similar situation.
I wouldn’t want to live in a world where each time a maintainer of project A removes problematic (as per his view) dependency on project B, the shit show starts. This is a typical pitfall and typical solution for that - again as per Andrew’s words on interview with JetBrains.
The default garbage collection tunables are also from 30 years ago. Adding the GCMH (Garbage Collector Magic Hack) package resolves much of the slowdown, and native compilation covers the remaining gap quite nicely.
Virtual Desktop is the only app which makes Quest 3 usable for work. And it is bad thing because it is available only on Win and Mac. Unfortunately, Linux alternatives' video encoding/postprocessing is inferior. Judging by my WiVRn experience. Hopefully that changes
I like how this is dropped as a fact. Dare to explain why though? Especially vs Docker. NixOS is not even standardized. No guarantees it will not be superseded by some descedant or eg. Guix in a near decade.
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