I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”

As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.

Maybe you should actually try one before sharing your thoughts.

I’d love to link you to their Wikipedia pages, but both of them are redlinked. As far as I can tell, Dr. V. Ronald was an educator who moved from Canada to the USA as part of the whole Xerox PARC thing and probably was valued for mainframe experience; does anybody have a full bio? The current maintainer is Ron Sunk, who did a full run at MIT up through postdoc before going to Red Hat. The names are a coincidence; runk implements what we now call Sunk summation, after Sunk’s thesis. (As you might guess, that’s an instance of Stigler’s law, since clearly Dr. Ronald discovered Sunk summation first!)

Also, as long as we’re here, I want to empathize a little with Sunk. The GUIs that folks have placed on runk, like GNOME’s Gunk or Enlightenment’s enk, look very cool, and there’s rumors of an upcoming unified number-counting protocol that will put them all on equal ground. But @MossyFeathers@pawb.social wasn’t joking; Dr. Arnold’s code literally only reads punch cards, and there’s a façade to make it work on modern Linux and BSD transparently. It predates X11, if that’s any help. The tech debt is real.

Because frankly, Ronald (the current maintainer, not the original author) is very competent. I say this as somebody who has personally been yelled at by Ronald at a kernel summit; I didn’t deserve it, but none of his technical points were wrong. I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?) Not to excuse his conduct, just to explain why he’s not been replaced yet.

You’re not crazy or harsh. This is a very real problem. I have been stuck doing business development at every company I’ve worked for. There’s always some shitty load-bearing Django app whose schema determines what the business is capable of doing, and somebody’s gotta maintain it. It’s gotten to the point where I assume that any interesting things I do will be outside of work and not for pay.

You’re thinking of CPython. PyPy can routinely compete with C and C++, particularly in allocation-heavy or pointer-heavy scenarios.

You may be pleased to know that PyPy’s Python 2.7 branch will be maintained indefinitely, since PyPy is also written in Python 2.7. Also, if you can’t leave CPython yet, ActivePython’s team is publishing CPython 2.7 security patches.

I think they’re saying that e.g. you shouldn’t index a natural key unless you know that you’re going to search/collate by that key as a column. Telling the database that a certain column contains (a component of) the primary key is adding a restriction to that column.

This shit is why I cannot recommend Truffle/Graal. Yes, it’s cool technology. Yes, it works well. Yes, I remember Chris Seaton. Yes, most of it is Free Software. However, Oracle is still the fucking lawnmower, and it’s not safe to build upon anything they can convince a judge they might own.

Alternatives include RPython (my preference) and also GNU Lightning.

Direct rendering infrastructure in Linux predates widespread use of “digital rights management” as a term of art by about two or three years. “We were here first,” as the saying goes. That said, the specific concept of direct rendering managers is a little newer, and probably was a mistake on its own merits, regardless of the name.

Oracle Ruined America’s Cup (Larry Ellison)

Yes, if that’s the only reason one is using fail2ban. Honestly, I won’t miss it.

PyPy exists. (This is news to around 95% of the community.)

At their most general, they are “data processors.” In common parlance, they’re often called “algorithms,” although some folks insist that that is reserved for programs with trivial control flow. For disambiguation and comparison:

• A service is an API surface and a contract promising that the surface has certain behaviors; data processing may be part of how the API is implemented. In practice, a service is e.g. an HTTPS endpoint and an OpenAPI specification.
• A capability is a copyable token which simultaneously authorizes its holder to perform an action and designates the holder as having the authority to perform that action. This won’t be part of your normal curriculum and training; see this post for an introduction, or this story for motivation.
• A controller is a modulator for a (distributed) system. Typically a controller is anything which is actuated by a control loop, although sometimes a controller can sit outside of the system. Common examples include MVC patterns, k8s components, and video-game controllers.

Steps 8, 9, and 11 assume that the filesystem is in a Linux-compatible state and Windows-compatible state simultaneously.

The biggest barrier is writing lots of formatted data to disk without a pre-existing filesystem structure. Look at nixos-anywhere for an example; the first thing it does is ensure that it’s booted into Linux, because otherwise it can’t trust that the disks are laid out properly.

Ah, no worries. There should be an introduction-to-literature course in your native language, covering the classics and important works of your native culture. I still stand by the rest of the recommendations. By “bachelor of arts” and “bachelor of sciences” I mean how your college/university accredits degrees; computer science and engineering are usually “science” degrees but many universities have an alternative “art” version that you can choose.

If you have the time and spare credits (and the cash to pay for tuition, of course) I’d recommend a basic humanities course or two. An intro to English literature is usually straightforward and easy. World history is great; history of the 20th century is also great, for different reasons. Personally, I recommend some sort of into to philosophy or epistemology; another mind-opening one is intro to anthropology or comparative values & beliefs. Ask your course counselor about this.

In general, if possible, I would recommend that you consider what it might be like to have a bachelor of arts instead of a bachelor of sciences. If your school offers it, it would be a much more balanced degree.

You’ll have to trust me from when I worked at Google at the same time as her. In particular, you’ll have to trust me that she called via public petition for an end to democracy and for Eric Schmidt to be installed as CEO of the USA and granted dictatorial powers; this is a flavor of fascism known as corporatism or corporate fascism. (Alternatively, you might trust the Internet Archive’s copy of the Guardian’s story from that time. The original petition isn’t up anymore.)

She’s a well-known well-documented part of the Silicon Valley cryptofascist movement. Her project names, like “cosmopolitan” and “ape”, are dog whistles.