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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • I wish.

    It was a bcachefs array with data replicas being a mix of 1,2 & 4 depending on what was most important, but thankfully I had the foresight to set metadata to be mirrored for all 4 drives.

    I didn’t get the good fortune of only having to do a resilver, but all I really had to do was fsck to remove references to non-existent nodes until the system would mount read-only, then back it up and rebuild it.

    NixOS did save my bacon re: being able to get back to work on the same system by morning.







  • A wealth fund on its own doesn’t create wealth; like any other tax, it’s a redistribution mechanism. it’s the implementation details that matter.

    Take three revenue sources:

    1. Tariffs & VAT: extract wealth on a per purchase basis, so the primary payer is somebody who spends most of their revenue on stuff; normal people & businesses with relatively high OPEX (small business that make physical stuff rather than services) or have overseas suppliers.

    2. Land value tax: a rent on owning land based on its value, primary payer are people and companies who own lots of expensive land; often rent-seekers themselves.

    3. Resource revenue tax: typically large companies as they’re the only ones that can afford the scale to profitably extract resources.

    And some potential expenses:

    1. Retirement pension fund: tends to benefit pensioners (duh). Can also benefit workers, whos taxes tend to pay for the pensions of their (gran)parents. whether that actually will translate into less taxes, or those taxes just go elsewhere is another matter.

    2. Government CAPEX: benefits are spread pretty evenly over everyone who uses govt services (depending on the purchase; a school is more useful than a cop shop). A lesser-known beneficiary are politicians; periodic infrastructure projects get more consistent positive press than e.g. a well funded pension system.

    3. Recurring helicopter money: I won’t call it a UBI, because that would require a truly massive fund; but a stipend for every resident human would primarily benefit parents who’s wealth doesn’t normally grow when they have kids. Other than that, it’s hard to say how this would play out; will it put less pressure on low wage workers? Will it just be gobbled up by rent-seekers? A flat tax is considered a burden on the poor, so it makes some sense that what is basically a negative flat tax would have the primary beneficiary be the poorest among us. It may harm the transient, undocumented or otherwise unregistered workers by omission though.

    4. Musk’s pocketbook: if it gets full enough surely some will trickle down, right?

    One thing that it will definitely do is swell up rich people’s yacht money the stock market since that’s where it’s stored. This directly benefits capital as a means of wealth creation over labour but considering how many yachts are already there the impact wouldn’t be substantial.




  • ~/.config is probably a poor comparison on my part; it’s management is actually done by home-manager rather than Nixos proper, and I can’t think of another OS that fills this same role.

    Nixos generates (for example) /etc/systemd/network to a path in /nix/store and symlinks it to it’s appropriate locations. After the files are generated the appropriate /nix/store paths are (re-mounted? Over-mounted? I’m not sure the implementation) made read-only (by default), but anything that isn’t generated is absolutely both mutable and untracked, and that “not tracking everything in /etc” is more what I’m going on about.

    If you use Nixos as intended (when you find that a package is lacking a config option you want, create your own nix option internally) the distro is effectively immutable, but if you use Nixos for anything moderately complex that changes frequently e.g. a desktop os, you eventually run into the choice: become competent enough to basically be a nixpkgs contributor, or abandon absolute immutability.

    I think the first option is worth it, and did go down that route, but it is unreasonable to expect the average Linux consumer to do so, and so something like fedora atomic is going to remain more “immutable” for them than nixos.

    This need to git gud is thankfully lessening with every commit to nixpkgs, and most people can already get to most places without writing their own set of nix options or learning how to parse //random markup language// into nix, but you’ll eventually run into the barrier.


  • I’d argue it’s closer to a mutable distro than an immutable one.

    Nixos tends to lean on the term reproducible instead of immutable, because you can have settings (e.g files in /etc & ~/.config) changed outside of nix’s purview, it just won’t be reproducible and may be overwritten by nix.

    You can build an ‘immutable’ environment on nix, but rather than storing changes as transactions like rpm-ostree, it’ll modify path in /nix/store and symlink it. Sure, you can store the internal representation of those changes in a git repo, but that is not the same thing as the changes themselves; if the nixpkgs implementation of a config option changes, the translation on your machine does too.






  • I used ZFS with Arch for a while, the volume manager was what I’d call the largest benefit; in my opinion nothing else comes close to being as useful and well integrated.

    I stopped because ZFS incompatibility with recent kernels (which I needed for GPU reasons) made me have to rescue my system more often than was ideal.

    Some other minor downsides:

    • boot can take ages due to ZFS using udev-settle.
    • deduplication status is… Complicated.
    • you’re kind-of stuck with the performance of your slowest vdev; L2ARC & a metadata device don’t really compensate well for a zpool that is predominantly a raid-z2 of spinning rust.

  • In addition to the downsides mentioned here about privacy regarding Google, there is a major upside to using this service: it offloads all of the authentication logic to google, so in theory it reduces your risk surface area, or it may be more accurate to say it concentrates your risk to your Google account.

    You’d like to hope most websites use using common security best practices and keep on top of things but the amount of websites I had accounts on (on websites I had long forgotten) which have been pwned over the years tells me otherwise. Using google auth sets your account security to be exactly as secure as your Google account.


  • What you’re after, transparent wifi roaming, is actually mostly handled by the client; what you need is wifi access points that don’t get in the way.

    I don’t have much experience with new OpenWRT supporting products, but the kicker is you only need one of them. If you have multiple routers, they will require some setup to play nice with each other. An “Access point” is just the wifi provider, can be hooked up to provide whatever the one router manages, and are generally cheaper than a router.

    To that end, I’d suggest a single router, and multiple access points. I do this with Ubiquiti access points in my home, their PoE has been nice and they have been pretty “setup once and forget” for a few years now. I’m sure there are some other brands that’ll do well; Ruckus and Mikrotik come to mind.


    1. Get kicked from freedesktop for fostering a toxic community.
    2. Ditch wlroots for your own compositor.
    3. Shit on other compositors in your spare time.
    4. Tell people they should just be plugging into Hyprland instead of rolling their own compositor.

    Man if I was concerned about sinking the time to make a configuration for the compositor with a bus factor of 1 man-child, and a toxic community; I can’t imagine anybody investing the time to make a compositor is going to want to hitch themselves to that cart.

    The compositor is really solid and makes for a great user experience but I’ll be fucked if every word vaxry writes doesn’t make me want to move to sway or niri.