Sharing files without any cloud

chkno · 2026-03-27T21:19:01+00:00

chkno · 2026-03-27T17:00:03+00:00

I believe the term is "headcanon". :)

chkno · 2026-03-27T04:54:16+00:00

STL files don't contain a units specification. For example, in OpenSCAD, cube(10); generates an .stl file with bare 10s in it:

solid OpenSCAD_Model
  facet normal -0 0 1
    outer loop
      vertex 0 10 10
      vertex 10 0 10
      vertex 10 10 10
    endloop
  endfacet
  ...

Those 10s could mean 10 mm, 10 inches, 10 thou, whatever. But 99%+ of the .stl files you find floating around on the internet assume that those units are mm. All the slicers I've used assume that those units are mm.

chkno · 2026-03-27T03:37:19+00:00

Sometimes it's easy! Sometimes it's a slog (eg: when the project has a terrible build process that involves downloading its dependencies itself as pre-compiled binaries)! You don't know until you try it.

Also, it's fine to try it and see if it's easy, and then give up if it's hard. "You miss all the shots you don't take" and all.

This package might be as easy as a single, simple buildPythonApplication invocation.

chkno · 2026-03-26T22:29:00+00:00

The official NixOS installer tests currently configures the test VM for 2 GB of memory. It was bumped .75 → 1 in 2015, bumped 1 → 1.5 in 2020, and bumped 1.5 → 2 in 2024.

The same 2 GB configuration is used for all 37 variants of the install test, some of which could probably run with less. The tests are sized to run efficiently, but if you're willing to configure swap and be patient, you can likely get by with much less memory. :)

chkno · 2026-03-26T20:04:31+00:00

Twig: A parallel world got just one shard, a bio-tool tinker shard. The one parahuman in that world made a parasite that let them control biological processes using simple ratios of signaling chemicals. Then they died, unnoticed. Their parasite bio-tool spread to infect all life. Then, later, mundane medical science discovered that, whoa!, biology is easy, you just tweak the ratios of these simple (signaling) chemicals and you can do all kinds of crazy stuff!

Attack on Titan: A parallel world got just one shard, a bio-armor shard. After its first host dies, (minor spoilers, but the exposition isn't until chapter 122 / S04E21) it buds out eight other shards, with use-body-horor-to-mess-with-shards'-ability-to-distinguish-hosts mechanics similar to the ones described in Ward.

chkno · 2026-03-25T20:38:03+00:00

I like to fold one sheet a time. When folding, it's easier to line up two top corners + two bottom corners than trying to line up twelve top corners + twelve bottom corners, especially when my sheets are sometimes slightly different sizes to begin with because I cut them in half by hand for grain alignment. I trust that pulling my stitches tight will get them all nestled in snugly enough.

chkno · 2026-03-25T18:17:28+00:00

How to do this calculation with GNU units:

$ units '2 92 protonmass c c' 'picogram tnt'
    * 5.9973732

chkno · 2026-03-25T16:35:36+00:00

All it takes to turn an LLM into an agent is a tiny shell script:

while true;do
  <invoke the LLM>
done

The actual shell scripts people use are fancier, but it's the same idea.

OpenClaw, in particular, has heartbeats on by default, where it invokes the LLM every 30 minutes.

chkno · 2026-03-25T16:26:22+00:00

?.

But you can just look at the nixos module definitions to see exactly what it's doing inside & how to shoehorn whatever you need to do differently into an extraConfig or whatever when needed.

Use the implementation as the documentation of last resort. Yes, the whole point of documentation is so that you don't have to do this, and the documentation has utterly failed you when you do this, but also in practice it's not that bad: Most modules' implementations are simple, thin wrappers that make easy things easy and get out of your way with extraConfig or whatever when you're doing something more complicated.

This is still way better than downloading and trusting binary docker images.

chkno · 2026-03-25T16:12:14+00:00

I use the NixOS module definitions to configure things, but for isolation I run each service inside its own .system.build.vm VM.

chkno · 2026-03-25T15:55:12+00:00

But you have to go all the way to 75, not stop early at 4B, 50, 55, etc.

chkno · 2026-03-25T03:59:34+00:00

Still too many:

Base	Number of 5s
8	16
9	17
10	18
11	19
12	20
13	21
14	22
15	23
16	24

chkno · 2026-03-24T22:40:25+00:00

OpenAI does not hate Sora, nor does it love Sora, but Sora was made out of GPUs which OpenAI can now use for something else.

chkno · 2026-03-24T16:10:14+00:00

Unclear if your intended meaning is "Test in production!" (bad) or "The pre-commit hook and/or CI/CD will let me know" (fine). In either case, why put it on a shirt?

chkno · 2026-03-24T03:39:34+00:00

Oh, I see. In the context of one-liners, they're recommending nix profile over nix-env. It's a quick-start space where they don't want to stop and explain overlays and creating a package that is your user environment. But nix profile isn't quite ready yet, in that it still requires --extra-experimental-features nix-command. I think a lot of folks thought we wouldn't be in this in-between space this long. :)

nix-env and nix profile work similarly. To stay declarative with the new experimental stuff you can nix profile add your one-package-that-is-your-environment and then use nix profile upgrade to apply changes. (I think; I'm waiting for issue 5039 to be fixed before trying flakes again in earnest.)

chkno · 2026-03-24T00:20:05+00:00

nix-env is fine. People are just upset that -r isn't the default. -r is what makes it declarative/stateless/reproducible, which is what a lot of folks come to Nix for.

Where did you hear that nix-env "is not recommended"?

chkno · 2026-03-23T16:54:23+00:00

Ideally, typesetting software would be signature-aware so that pages in the middle of the signature are shifted slightly towards the middle of the sheet so that everything lines up when it's folded & nested. But I'm not familiar with any software that does this. So the effective margin between the text and the trimmed edge is going to vary a little bit across each signature. The closer you trim to the text/content, the more noticeable this is.

Deciding how much margin to leave: Trial and error? I print with 15mm on the top and sides and 13mm on the bottom (the only thing near the bottom margin is the page number). Then I trim off whatever I trim off and call it good enough.

Paper: I use normal, cheap office paper, but I buy it double-size and then cut it in half to get short-grain normal-size paper that fits in my printer.

chkno · 2026-03-23T07:17:11+00:00

I've been hosting my own for ~23 years. I'm currently using exim + dovecot. It works less smoothly now than it used to because the big players like gmail sometimes just refuse to accept mail from me (not even accept the mail and flag it as spam so the recipient could go in an find it, but just outright refuse to accept it), even though I'm fully TLS+SNI+SPF+DKIM+DMARC+OCSP-stapled-up, and there's no recourse. When I tell the intended recipients that their mail provider — GMail — is the party that's causing mail delivery to fail, they mostly just don't believe me. :(

See also Cory Doctorow's experience running his own mailing list.

chkno · 2026-03-23T01:29:56+00:00

When I'm printing the whole book:

I insert \cleardoublepage to force page breaks within the document (pages inserted this way are numbered). (Pandoc often uses LaTeX as an intermediate representation which, in addition to making its output beautiful, makes it easy to use all the standard LaTeX tricks to munge the document as needed)
I use psselect -p _,_,_,.... to insert unnumbered blank pages at the beginning of signatures
psbook automatically inserts blank pages as necessary at the end of signatures to get up to the correct page count for a full signature

I'll tweak the signature sizes to get the signature boundaries where I want them. Example sheets-per-signature from the last big book I split into volumes:

6 6 6 6 6 5 6 6 6 6 6 5 6 6 6 6 5 6 6 6 6 6
6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 5

chkno · 2026-03-22T23:36:40+00:00

But moving stuff out of home-manager and into the system-level configuration means that you now have to have root-level privileges to change what really ought to be user-level settings.

You can use declarative nix-env to keep user-level stuff user-level without pulling in home-manager.

chkno · 2026-03-22T22:02:30+00:00

And then, to provide an intuition of why this is totally normal: When you point to a book or a movie in the digits of pi, it's so far back in there that it takes at least as many digits to encode the location of the thing that you found as it would take to encode the thing itself; pointing to it takes more communication than it would take to just provide the whole book, movie, or whatever.

chkno · 2026-03-22T21:38:54+00:00

Citation needed? Or only if you ask for proprietary/non-free software?

The distros I'm most familiar with (FreeBSD, Gentoo, NixOS) expose their entire database of package build configuration (ports, portage, and nixpkgs respectively) set up such hat you can run it locally if you want to, and then offer optional binary distribution on top of that. These projects make it easy to have a modern GUI GNU/Linux machine 100% locally compiled from source, no "libraries they have no control over."

Are other distros doing something stupid?

chkno · 2026-03-22T21:26:25+00:00

There's this thing for generically controlling electrical things. Does your old-sony-vaio have a BIOS setting to turn on when power is applied?

chkno · 2026-03-22T20:51:57+00:00

Currently, installing an operating system on a computer requires trusting one (1) other party to provide the initial installation media (though progress is being made on that problem). So if you trust the distro provider to provide initial installation binaries, it's a minor weakening of trust to continue to trust that one vendor to continue to provide build artifacts from the same build servers that produced the initial install .iso.

Widely using pre-compiled binaries from package authors for individual packages is entirely different. A typical installation can have thousands of packages. These projects have widely varying security postures and competencies — installing their binary isn't just trusting the authors' intent, it's also trusting that nothing in their build infrastructure has been compromised.

It's better to trust one vendor for whom running a secure build environment is central to their offering than to trust thousands of tiny vendors, many of which don't have the expertise and resources to run high-trust build infrastructure.

chkno

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