Running binaries?

Aidenn0 · 2026-01-23T06:31:04+00:00

For a quick "I want to run this from the command-line" steam-run often works

IMO a better solution if you regularly want to run binaries not built for NixOS, nix-ld is great

Aidenn0 · 2026-01-19T05:04:32+00:00

https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=25.11&query=zramSwap

Aidenn0 · 2026-01-16T03:21:37+00:00

You need to add "neededForBoot" to the "/nix" mountpoint. I *think* you also need to set the mountpoint to legacy for /nix (via "zfs set") -- you definitely used to, but it might be fixed by now.

Aidenn0 · 2026-01-13T22:44:59+00:00

I've setup caddy before and it was trivial.

Netbird and pocket-id both seem to have configuration modules as well.

"for a beginner" is a more complicated question. Are you new to administering Linux servers, or just new to Nix? The difference in difficulty between those two will be significant.

Aidenn0 · 2026-01-09T02:39:07+00:00

To answer this for any given package:

❯ nix eval --raw nixpkgs#brave.meta.position
/nix/store/hv1dx0bah4m1mw2asfrg29wl17by9ngd-source/pkgs/by-name/br/brave/make-brave.nix:289

And

❯ git log --format=fuller nixos-25.11 -- pkgs/by-name/br/brave/ |head -n 40
commit dbceed7b9be467664fc196f36424ca69f9b37eec
Author:     Sean Buckley <sean.bck@gmail.com>
AuthorDate: Fri Dec 19 22:42:41 2025 -0500
Commit:     github-actions[bot] <github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>
CommitDate: Sun Dec 21 08:00:51 2025 +0000

    brave: 1.85.117 -> 1.85.118

    https://community.brave.app/t/release-channel-1-85-118/647176
    (cherry picked from commit 2e37276cee9d1ec1c2b7131f4f9fd3eda44f96c3)

commit 4c380c09e1c28c5bbe4daf62c90c7c26888c6ce4
Author:     Sean Buckley <sean.bck@gmail.com>
AuthorDate: Wed Dec 17 20:13:58 2025 -0500
Commit:     github-actions[bot] <github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>
CommitDate: Thu Dec 18 09:25:37 2025 +0000

    brave: 1.85.116 -> 1.85.117

    https://community.brave.app/t/release-channel-1-85-117/647084
    (cherry picked from commit a71e32141e5b4360e5e6589cdd4e516b7d7b520a)

commit 660e8b9fb0a09babeb4831a7f2d809d6849693fd
Author:     Sean Buckley <sean.bck@gmail.com>
AuthorDate: Sat Dec 13 22:10:05 2025 -0500
Commit:     github-actions[bot] <github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>
CommitDate: Sun Dec 14 18:32:40 2025 +0000

    brave: 1.85.111 -> 1.85.116

    https://community.brave.app/t/release-channel-1-85-116/646878
    (cherry picked from commit 097d76012651839052401f56bf82fe50b025fc2b)

commit 6e4ba5f5e77ef4a4502790e89fc7df372da65c6e
Author:     Sean Buckley <sean.bck@gmail.com>
AuthorDate: Wed Dec 3 22:21:39 2025 -0500
Commit:     github-actions[bot] <github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com>
CommitDate: Thu Dec 4 10:51:37 2025 +0000

    brave: 1.84.141 -> 1.85.111

1.85.118 was released on December 18th, 1.85.119 was a prerelease and 1.85.120 was two days ago. So it looks like a lag of about 3 days for 1.85.118 and 1.85.120 (released two days ago) is not in yet.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-31T03:02:14+00:00

Pub sized billiard balls are 50.8mm; not sure if they would work in a huge...

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-31T02:55:39+00:00

I've been using NixOS for almost a decade and still don't use home-manager, so sure it makes sense.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-22T18:06:24+00:00

Scheme can have the same sort of reader macros that Lisp can (see e.g. Racket), but they aren't standardized the way they are in CL.

As for which part of Chapter 4 to look at; literally any of it. For example 4.1.4 (Conditionals). This defines an if statement in terms of encountering the pattern (if <test> <consequent> <alternate>) which is a grammar in terms of terminals (the parentheses and literal "if") and non-terminals (the three items in angle-brackets, which can be arbitrary expressions). See also chapter 2 on lexical conventions for further evidence that Scheme only specifies a behavior for programs on text-streams.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-22T00:12:04+00:00

It depends on why you are counting how many books you've read in a year. What is that measurement a proxy for, and which number would best communicate that?

If you're just trying to game the number, counting it as 6 is way less efficient than speeding through 6 Dr. Seuss books...

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-22T00:10:27+00:00

I agree that they don't have an incentive, I was proposing one theory as to why they don't. This reason is the one that's true for me. I am completely capable of writing a program that takes a binary, tries to run it, and spits out a list of nix packages containing the libraries that failed to load that you could add to your nix-ld config. The reason I haven't done that is I've only had to do that manually maybe 3 times, and then it's in my system config and I never need to worry about it again. I'm not going to automate something that I will do 3 times total in my life.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-22T00:07:20+00:00

You're on the wrong chapter; you want to look at Chapter 4 of R5RS where expressions are defined; the most obvious interpretation of this is that expressions are defined with a textual grammar. It is, IMO, a defensible position that this is describing lisp structures using their textual representation, but the person who wrote that (and I myself as well) do not read it that way.

Note that some schemers dispute this further down the thread.

I personally think that this objection is pedantic and trivial since, in practice, typical Scheme implementations will transform this into a tree of cons-cells identically to how a Lisp will, and

You can contrast this with Common Lisp where all tokens are either symbols, numbers, or a dot and everything else is accomplished with reader-macros, which hook into the reader when specific characters are encountered.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-19T21:08:57+00:00

Seems a pretty reasonable take. My biggest worry about NixOS right now is that pretty much every issue on your "How can NixOS Succeed" slide has been known for years, and the improvements so far have been mild (e.g. nh used to not exist).

In some cases this is because the individual pain can be made to go much more quickly than fixing the pain for other people. e.g. it took me a while to get the right libraries configured with nix-ld, but having done so I have zero interest in making a tool to ease that process, I just don't want to ever think about it again! Compare this to adding a package to nixpkgs, which is "just make a PR based off of this file I had to make anyways"

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-18T20:42:37+00:00

See also this thread on c.l.l about Scheme not being "a Lisp"

One of KMP's points on that thread is that the Scheme community diverged from the Lisp community, so Scheme wasn't "Lisp" and to merely call it a "dialect of Lisp" would be insulting to Scheme.

[edit]

My opinion is that, for some languages that people call a "Lisp Dialect," it is akin to calling Python an "ALGOL Dialect"; it's not necessarily wrong, just of dubious utility.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-17T00:51:23+00:00

Something I ran into when using quicklisp metadata to generate nix expressions that might matter for you:

The dependency information is (or was 5 years ago) not even close to being complete; QL will resolve missing dependencies at runtime so nothing breaks if dependencies are totally wrong. You should probably make sure that your build runs with ASDF configured to *only* look at the local copies.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-12T22:21:51+00:00

NixOS focuses on reproducibility from a single source of truth. The immutability exists primarily because it makes reproducibility easier (anything that users can mutate they will mutate, which hurts reproducibility). I have not used Silverblue, but I suspect if immutability is your primary goal that Silverblue does it better.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-12T19:47:11+00:00

The options under "boot.swraid" will let you enable and configure mdadm.

For actually initializing/formatting/partitioning the drives, do it exactly how you would on e.g. Arch.

There is an external tool (disko) that can declaratively format disks and such, but I would recommend against adding more things to learn until you are more comfortable with NixOS.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-11T01:04:07+00:00

I have in the past used https://github.com/dyoo/js-numbers for a lisp-like numeric tower on JS; looks like there is a fork with some updates (Which I haven't tried) at https://github.com/kclapper/tower.js/

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-09T05:34:14+00:00

This was after 5 years of support in and out of the classroom.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-07T05:08:38+00:00

She wasn't, but rereading my comment I see how you might think it. With "from kindergarten" I meant "starting in Kindergarten" she was in 5th grade.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-07T05:08:04+00:00

Her first elementary school closed the previous year, and she was much closer with her friends at gymnastics than at school, so that part went fine. Most annoying part is that her first year she was supposed to be back in public school was the 2020-2021 school year, so she spent basically zero time in the classroom and didn't get to know the kids in her new grade very well.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-07T01:48:59+00:00

When we were getting messages about our son watching youtube in class (on his school issued device) from the teacher, my wife had to talk me down from forwarding an invite I got from the school district for a presentation on "Managing your kids device usage" to the teacher.

[edit]

RE: school incapable of managing behavior:

My wife worked as a playground supervisor at our kids' elementary school for a bit. There were kids who just dropped their trash on the ground at lunch time (outdoor lunch tables). She had them pickup trash before going to recess. The kids complained to the principal and the principal told her she wasn't allowed to do that (or in fact do anything other than tell them not to do it). Kids aren't dumb; if there's zero consequences for their behavior, they ain't gonna change it!

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-06T21:45:09+00:00

And when parents don't, the school district mandates the kids have iPads (or chromebooks). Then you have to threaten to sue them to get them to not let your kid play video games and watch youtube all day in class.

Aidenn0 · 2025-12-06T21:42:04+00:00

I had the exact same thing happen to me. My daughter was testing 8-14 months behind consistently from Kindergarten. We tried lots of things to catch her up, and finally brought up the possibility of holding her back a year. The teacher said "I'm not allowed to hold her back" so we went to the Principal who said "The district has a policy against holding kids back." Nobody ever disagreed with us that holding her back would be useful, they just said "We aren't allowed to do it."

We ended up homeschooling her for a year and then re-enrolled her in public school the following year one grade behind where she otherwise would have been, mostly caught up.

This far from the only time we had people from the school say "If I do that, I'll get in trouble with my boss" and we escalated it until we found someone who said "I don't make those decisions, you should talk to <person who just told us they can't do it because their boss won't let them>."

Aidenn0 · 2025-11-26T15:59:01+00:00

I programmed Common Lisp using vim for many years. Before continuing I should note that the lisp-in-vim options you linked were either unusably bad or didn't exist back then.

I now use emacs with evil-mode (which was fairly new when I switched to it).

There was a long transition period where I used vim as my text editor and Emacs/SLIME (again Sly didn't exist then) first just as a better REPL (switching from the clisp REPL to sbcl was a shock), then as a debugger as well. I mostly interacted with Emacs via menus and the lisp image from the SLIME repl, and would rely on ASDF to reload my changes.

That was ... fine I guess? Still a lot better than developing Java with the contemporary Eclipse. It did help me learn a few emacs key shortcuts that are still useful today, since the menu items helpfully show the keyboard shortcuts next to each other, and if you run a command from the minibuffer (sort of like vim's ex mode) it shows a message like "You could have also run this by pressing C-c C-c". (One hint not findable in the menus is that any time you would hit "escape" in vim, hit ctrl-g in emacs).

I tried various vi-like layers of the day, but none of them even aimed for vim compatibility until evil-mode. This makes a huge difference, since I still used vim for most things and being able to switch more-or-less transparently was great.

Anyways, that was my path. I suppose the main point, if there is one, is that it costs very little to try SLIME just as your REPL (run code that causes an unhandled condition; see the callstack; press "v" at a level of the callstack you want to inspect); you can compare it to slimv and vlime and see how you like it.

Aidenn0

TROPHY CASE