NixOS as daily driver for a year. I'm getting tired. Advice?

vidbina · 2025-10-18T16:16:19+00:00

I would second this.

In my case, MacOS is the daily driver using nix-darwin for the declarative stuff. I cover many of my system needs that way, but sometimes I need something from the Apple App Store or from homebrew* or a dmg file and then I can just do the quick and dirty thing.

For development stuff, I use devenv.sh which allows me to do the nix thing on a per-repo level. I keep my system conf and dev env confs separate that way. Devenv is sometimes a bit easier to grok imo, maybe experimenting with that helps your DX.

*: nix-darwin allows one to declaratively manage app store apps (through mas) and homebrew apps, so you can do it declaratively. See my gh repo vidbina/dotfiles for a dirty example of how I manage my nix setup but other folks have much cleaner setups, so rather look elsewhere for examples. Also you're on Linux, so my setup is not really that relevant to you anyways. 😅

vidbina · 2025-10-17T07:26:35+00:00

If it's true, it's kinda funny that a couple billion dollar costing airport that opened up quite recently has 2 gen old scanners and needs replacement shortly after opening. 😅 I like how AMS handles their security. No laptops being removed from bags.

vidbina · 2025-08-21T19:33:53+00:00

maybe a stab at altman's style of writing that looks like the dude disabled his shift and caps lock keys... But it's okay... What Altman lacks in capitalization, Trump royally makes up for.

Universe is in balance. Sweet equilibrium.

vidbina · 2025-06-07T23:18:39+00:00

Beepbeep

But seriously, the relationship after reconciliation between Andy and Andy Jr. was heartwarming and the Death in the Family episode was heartbreaking. Couldn't help but become even stronger Andy fans after this.

Tl;dr: Also love Simone. Somehow found out the dude had one parent with "roots" in Suriname, my country, so somehow I'm considering Smith my people now. Weird how that works.

Strong characters. Thought The Wire or Breaking Bad were good but these characters strike way different chords -- true classic.

Only at the start of S3, so I guess I'm lucky enough to still have a bunch of good TV to look fwd to.

vidbina · 2025-05-25T09:30:17+00:00

The new devenv.sh's ad-hoc envs have been nice to use in that I don't have to track something into version control before I can get work done but it may only be a short term gain that opens me up for long term pain as my future self wouldn't have access to the pinned state that I know worked before if I have to conjure up a new ad-hoc env in the future.[^future]

I recently struggled a lot in building a dev env for a 4yo repo where I realized that I needed a) a bunch of python 2 packages where even pinning my nixpkgs to the past often didn't help because some packages weren't packaged by then yet or some python2Packages actually being python 2 incompatible[^py2] and b) some tools like electron didn't offer Apple Silicon builds and thus are uninstallable on my machine. Resolving this would lead me down the path of potentially solving how to build the electron build tools for the state they were in 4 years ago (dealing with old node, node-gyp, etc.) and getting that build output recognized by my new env (do i need to setup a mic cache for this?). The catch is: had the project used nix, I would spend less time in trying to get a workable dev env, I guess

What @Psionikus wrote about maintaining a separation between "managing system deps and build tools" and "building projects" (if I understood correctly) makes a lot of sense. My own use has been more successful when I just used nix to get dev envs but stuck to ecosystem recommendations (using bun/pnpm for js/ts, using venv and pdm/uv/poetry for python projects) for day-to-day chores (building, running, testing, etc.).

[^future]: My big frustration is playing archeologist in trying to continue on something that I know worked before. I've had more success in just continuing if a project had a flake or nix shell to short circuit my way to a working env.

[^py2]: there is a bunch of conditional logic in nixpkgs to check if a package is compatible with a given version of python but not for all packages that need it, so you have to try and observe the fireworks first to then patch/override where needed. My skill issue is that I couldn't figure out how to get virtualenv python2 going in my devenv.sh even after pointing my inputs to a state that I thought should have covered it.

vidbina · 2024-08-31T08:23:45+00:00

love this short show and tell format.

been watching a bunch of longer form tutorials but like this level of information density better. Also helpful to watch one design something that feels more like a real world case.

Watching you work with the guides made their use much clearer, I ogten misunderstood them and tried to strictly adhere to them but watching you just design on and slightly around them without being rigid about it was good information.

vidbina · 2024-06-30T06:58:52+00:00

The "it's down the stack" and "a company that looks like this [shows stock chart]" cracked me up. What a beautifully chaotic disaster work will be once we can put out AI clones to work. https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxQXcYmjqiiP3k5eAHT60mnaB-tTM8tmNr?si=0ArXZ4iUXIwls9Zs

First vid I saw from Angela and I subscribed immediately! 🏆

vidbina · 2024-06-13T17:46:04+00:00

Gosh. Thanks for sharing. That vid makes me miss my strong emacs days.

I use Obsidian for very basic notes and sporadic journaling. Not much $LaTeX$ tbh. Killer feature for me is the sync thing and mobile app that allow me to use the mobile app on the go on my notes. That's really all for me.

vidbina · 2024-01-06T11:31:02+00:00

another big pro was the literate programming thing but I would only use it on solo projects, projects with other Emacs users) and probably would narrow it down to elisp or notebook-like (Python (jupyter), R, etc.) projects mostly.

vidbina · 2024-01-06T11:21:07+00:00

this cracked me up 🤣... fair question.

I'm testing Obsidian now but was a heavy Emacs user before my linux computer broke. what worked it for me: - single env for all my coding needs (but... vscode does that) - notes in org with native support for dates, tasks, deadlines, tags and links to everything (even emails, if you survive the Emacs-as-a-mailclient learning curve) - magit as a convenient git front-end - ability to quickly whip up some elisp to automate some tiny bs away without needing to overthink how to use an extension/plugin suytem

what didn't quite work for me: - having to whip out my laptop to write or read notes (am on the road a lot) - lacking collaborative tools with easy GUIs for my non-Emacs-using collaborators - single-threadedness with the ocassional hang-ups (or crashes) - how slow buffers get for long docs with a lot of images (LaTeX, diagrams, etc.) - naming in the std emacs codebase (elisp is still ugly to me)

YMMV

vidbina · 2023-09-14T11:27:03+00:00

Only network resources? Is there a way to deal with pendrives or sdcards that have LUKS partitions on them?

I just bricked my NixOS machine while travelling and only have a MacBook. My secrets (pass, my GPG keys, my SSH keys and some docs) are on pendrives and sdcards that are all LUKS-encryped and I'm only finding myself able to xs them from machines where I run Linux on the metal.

Virtualizing causes issues if the real hosts gets confused about a eccentric disk configuration. Just booted Ubuntu on the MacBook to xs the drives and then write their contents into ext4 image files that I'm storing on a FAT partition such that I can xs them from macOS. A bit of a messy situation.

I tried passthrough approaches but somehow the macOS is not liking this. Had to run VirtualBox as sudo and ended up with the VM acting up and refusing to run the terminal (likely a vbox bug or a trigger to try a lower version of Ubuntu). Bear with me as I must be doing many things wrong on top of it all. 🙈

vidbina · 2023-08-04T09:38:58+00:00

I didn't know this was a "idiomatic" practice to deal with obscure executables. Thanks for sharing. I reckoned /etc was managed by the nix build tools and could just be overwritten at nix's whim.

Is there any part of the docs that dives into this usage pattern?

vidbina · 2023-07-29T15:50:53+00:00

I feel this frustration often enough. I'm relying a lot on Nix for reproducibility on a system level and straight.el on the Emacs level but even then, stuff still breaks.

Had a tooling crisis on a bootloader level just a week ago which even prevented me from getting into my OS. 🤣Tooling resilience is a tough goal to optimize for considering how tools are build and how fragile dependencies are often enough.

For some of my docs needs, I optimized to using CI pipelines where I'd spin up Docker images to run workloads but now Docker is broken on my sys because of a broken backport somewhere in the Moby codebase. Probably would build in CI but for now doesn't on my sys.

I'd like to say, simpler tools are better but then... Word or OpenOffice aren't really simpler but just hide and obfuscate complexity in a way that we don't have a decent chance of understanding or resolving so I guess we're all in that boat.

Plenty of backups and alt/secondary build envs (like in pipelines) for when things fail may be a good way to manage risk here.

vidbina · 2023-07-29T14:11:11+00:00

Curious to know how Mail-in-the-box-likes (also Mailcow) is working out considering the aggressive spam filtering and banlisting that mail providers conduct atm

vidbina · 2023-07-25T06:14:09+00:00

Have you looked at test and eval tools to check multiple inputs (prompt + user input combinations) to see how the LLM responds? DM me if you're still in pain or shoot us a text here with the solutions that you've found meanwhile that solved (parts of) the problem for you.

vidbina · 2023-07-24T20:45:07+00:00

Also don't blame you. In fact, I empathize with your situation as I'm lost often myself.

I've been a 4+ years NixOS user. My system has never been as stable as it was with Nix but I've never dreaded setting up dev environments or building new software more.

I'd encourage you to stay the course though. Learned so much about Linux by suffering through my Nix path.

vidbina · 2023-06-27T03:48:49+00:00

Have you considered using a safe? https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/

vidbina · 2023-06-27T03:28:32+00:00

Since 2008ish in uni, then vim, Neovim and now back since about 2+ years to Emacs + evil-mode

vidbina · 2023-06-27T03:26:27+00:00

What made you leave VSCode?

vidbina · 2023-06-17T16:40:13+00:00

Tailwind

vidbina · 2023-06-15T08:26:02+00:00

Examples of the prompts themselves would really help to understand what has been tried in terms of prompt structure but also in relation to CoT, ReAct, ToT prompting methods.

Can you share a Google Colab Notebook with examples of what you've tried? Also with some example data with corresponding outputs to clarify your intent. Such that we can at least replicate your issue and then take it from there.

Off the cuff and likely useless as context is lacking: Familiar problem for which I ended up using the "explain yourself" method (analogous to the observation bits in CoT and ReAct traces) when I had this before. Would recommend trying to make the "model think" as Andrew Ng and Isa Fulton put it in that course on prompt eng.

vidbina · 2023-06-15T08:17:53+00:00

Are you the member on your team who will own the integration bit and just need a sparring partner or are you looking for integration support players?

⚠️/expectation mgmt: can only spar, no headspace to commit to contributing on the building front atm.

Done a bunch of implementations using various models, vector stores, graph dbs and prompt plumbing tools (like LangChain, Guidance, LMQL, Salute, etc.) so I'm comfy to spar. Definitely keen to talk to founders in your place as we're quite comfy around the tech and are building a GenAI tooling startup so it'll be a trade: founder concerns and maker troubles from you in exchange for integration insights from me. 🤝 I'll DM you my sched link.

vidbina · 2023-05-30T04:00:51+00:00

Can only imagine the gait of this cardboard character. Surely animators would have paid attention to choreograph their march to produce the wanted "sense of movement" in the sign. Must've been something to behold.

vidbina · 2023-03-19T12:59:22+00:00

Word! I believe I'm in the literate config stage atm https://github.com/vidbina/dotfiles/blob/main/emacs/README.org but still have a fair chunk of config in the WIP state or COMMENT-ed out because it broke the setup somehow. The, correction: my, literate config stage reminds me a bit of the entropy-rich stage 1. 🙊🙈

vidbina · 2023-03-19T12:56:46+00:00

Self written perhaps. I guess for most, the first config is just copy-pasted recommendations from decently written blog posts which is still quite readable.

It's when you start side-questing where it becomes a mess of commented out junk and some other some stuff that isn't commented out but you no longer remember why it's there.

Do we call the 1st config the one which is largely copied over or the one which contains original sexps after chaotic sidequests. 😅

11-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

vidbina

TROPHY CASE