Heck i used Claude when it sucked just to ask it questions. It was wrong on 50% of the questions back then but it still was easier than randomly searching for the solutions. Claude helped unblock me when i got stuck on obtuse nix errors, foreign compilation issues, etc.

These days it's magical, but it was even a huge boon when it was barely functional. Nix just had a way of leaving me super confused and stranded.

I tried using various configurations tools and to this day, unless it’s needed for a project, my strategy is “don’t bother”. When I use a program for a while, I backup the config somewhere and perhaps write a few notes, but my daily setup vary enough and last enough that I wouldn’t replicate it.

My mac setup hasn’t been replaced since 2021 or something, and it was copied from my old mac. I have a dotfiles git repo, which I drag around and have multiple branches for my daily driver. For temp setup, I just copy files and edit.

Is mainly the language. Is not just weird like APL , that insanely make sense. is weird.

And I understand because it took me TEN YEARS to come around.

I worked with a very forward-thinking functional programmer around 2012 and even back then she was raving about it. And of course, people thought she was a raving lunatic.

I give her credit to this day. It took me having one too many problems caused by NOT using Nix, to cause me to finally dive in.

And there's no going back. Which is what happens with the best technologies.

Me too. I’ve known about Nix for a long time but resisted the idea of learning a new language just to manage my system. In retrospect, it would have been worth it, but now I don’t have to.

It's not so strange.

Pre-LLM: Nix is "high effort, moderate reward". The cost is: you have to learn a tool which does things apparently completely different to how other tools do things.. you have to put up with a lot of friction, pay all the pain upfront, and the benefit is that may be later it's easier to get the package again.

It's just not a practical trade-off for most developers.

With LLMs, the cost-benefit trade-off changes.

You can use this cloud provider's LLM to get you a good result. You get the benefits, and the cost is 'just' "ask the LLM to do it".

Similarly: it's easier to assess whether produced code does the right thing, than to come up with that code from scratch.

Without LLMs? The inaccessibility also comes from being a niche tool. Not many use it, so not many software projects accommodate it or consider it, and you might have to come up with workarounds yourself.

Flakes are not less confusing to me. Why do you have to git stage a flake.nix for it to apply? I ran into that footgun so many times.

Yes, this just confirms nämy view that Nix, as it is right now, is bad.

And yet, it matches reality.

Flake stabilisation probably hasn't gotten any easier/more likely by LLMs, but it does make it quicker for people to pickup technology.

Technology sometimes has that odd effect. (And it will apply to different technologies in different contexts at different rates.)

It really depends on the person, for me I have my own setup script that works on both Mac and Linux, installing all of my core software using whichever method is best for each system, I basically have a csv with columns of “program” “install command Linux” and “install command Mac” and it just works.

Then all of my dotfiles are backed up, with any important other config, in a big gig repo. And all of my documents/photos/etc live on a separate hard drive which gets backed up to the cloud.

All of that to say, with the right setup nix is mostly unnecessary, and honestly the benefit of not using it is that I can wipe my system anytime and restart it with just my usual important programs ready to go. Any mess made along the way gets purged automatically in every fresh install

I promise you that it will be worth it. Try again.

Also being able to use wsl on my windows based work laptop added a lot to nixos affordance : https://nix-community.github.io/NixOS-WSL/install.html

No.

it's more like, it definitively solves a problem forever, like nothing else.

It's like when you have immutable data and it permanently solves a class of problems that can result from mutable data.

It's sort of like that.

Plus if it messes up, you can just roll back.

I was just reading Michael Lynch's posts about Sia[0] and I came across this.

Its a very curious project, but don't you end up pinning repligraph usability on model weights? Since you take indeterminism out of the equation, a repligraph's notability is as significant as the producing model's weights, and since there is no dice rolls to be made, the eyeball problem:

> Our blind spots, while not perfectly correlated, have substantial overlap

is entirely replicated. Models that are diffused from one another can have the same blind spots, the same loose statistical reality that exists with humans. This is partially addressed in steering:

> A repligraph proves that a model generated some artifact. It does not prove that the model did a good job, or that the artifact is safe.

but I think the "Peer Review" solution is inadequate, and with some jailbreaking prompts' innocuous looks considered, "the attacker just needs to find one prompt" might be much easier than it appears.

Batching seems to be a huge economic turn off for proprietary model determinism, but I think its entirely viable for consumer models. Trustless evals are brilliant and should've been our reality. Nice project, good luck on your endeavor.

[0]: https://mtlynch.io/tags/sia/

If those systems are changing the semantics, they are buggy. If an LLM is changing the semantics, it's a tuesday.

Nix daily driver for years here. I don't know what they did to screw up their system like that, but it's unusual IME. Normally you can just reboot and load the previous profile. Even in the absolute worst case, as long as you have your config, you could boot the installer and then load your config and your system comes back exactly as it was. It's definitely not beta software.

FWIW, I used Debian more than anything over decades, and also have little patience when it comes to unstable computers. NixOS is a breath of fresh air and has reinvigorated my love of Linux. I haven't found it less stable than Debian, and also have a higher degree of confidence when making changes. It has its quirks, but ultimately I've found it a joy to use, and I'm never going back to a distro that doesn't have similar capabilities.

If you boot default Debian and apt install a handful of packages from the primary channel, it probably doesn't matter much, but if you enjoy even a modest amount of customizing, NixOS really shines. From one Linux user to another, I encourage you to try it! I have no affiliation, just an old head stoked on Nix.

I used nix years ago on a Mac just as a sort of alternative to what I’d otherwise use homebrew for and I really liked it, so I decided a few times that i would try nixos for my laptop. Each time I was stopped by the awful documentation and the weird “flakes are experimental but kinda required” state of the project and I gave up.

This year I decided to give it another try and set it up on an ancient laptop using Claude to factor the config and it’s gone so well that I now use the same nix config to manage three different machines and it’s insanely liberating to know how easy it is to screw everything up and roll it back trivially. I now regularly make edits on one machine and then just routinely commit them and go apply on the other machines with zero friction. It’s kind of amazing.

I believe the default at least changed so it should be better now!

As far as I can tell, that is only one piece of the puzzle. I think the bulk of the work is on the hypervisor side (KVM) to eliminate/stub out sources of randomness in HW, patch out RDRAND, etc

>There could be great ideas in Rewind VM, but the page is littered with Claude-ish which is immediately off-putting.

Then don't use it.

Wow, that looks like a lazy and disrespectful attack.

Rewind VM appears to be made solely by fzakaria, the author of the submitted article. I don't see any connection to peter_d_sherman, who is clearly not a sock puppet account. It took 10 seconds to check that info.

God forbid people on HN get excited about a technology.

You, on the other hand, clearly have an axe to grind against LLM usage. Which is fine and all as a personal preference, but not a reason to post such a comment.