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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • Iain M. Banks’ Culture.

    I’m deathly afraid of the day some big studio manages to buy the rights and produce a Hollywood version of the Culture. Mostly because it is very easy to flip through the Wikipedia entries and then take the superficial aesthetic of the Culture and misunderstand or ignore the rest.

    For an example on how easy it is to do this: I remember vividly when the German translations of the later books came out, and they all had some variation of

    The Culture is the galaxy-spanning empire of mankind. Unbeknownst to its citizens however, their supposedly benevolent machine gods are about to dispense with the needs for humans at all"

    in the blurb. Someone scanned the wiki page until they read something about “superhuman AI” or the like, then went “ah, got it, I’ve seen Terminator”.

    In a similar vein, I cannot imagine that Hollywood would portray the Culture as an unquestionably good Utopia. They’d not be able to resist to paint the luxury gay space communists as “…with a dark secret / actually dystopian /…” tones.



















  • Managing 30+ machines with NixOS in a single unified config, currently sitting at a total of around 17k lines of nix code.

    In other words, I have put a lot of time into this. It was a very steep learning curve, but it’s paid for itself multiple times over by now.

    For “newcomers”, my observations can be boiled down to this: if you only manage one machine, it’s not worth it. Maaaaaybe give home-manager a try and see if you like it.

    Situation is probably different with things like Silverblue (IMO throwing those kinds of distros in with Guix and NixOS is a bit misleading - very different philosophy and user experience), but I can only talk about Nix here.

    With Nix, the real benefit comes once you handle multiple machines. Identical or similar configurations get combined or parametrized. Config values set for Host A can be reused and decisions be made automatically based on it in Host B, for example:

    • all hosts know my SSH pub keys from first boot, without ever having to configure anything in any of them
    • my NAS IP is set once, all hosts requiring NAS access just reuse it implicitly
    • creating new proxmox VMs just means adding, on average, 10 lines of nix config (saying: your ID will be this, you will run that service) and a single command, because the heavy lifting and configuring has already been done, once -…