hgl

It’s fascinating to think about what true GUI for LLM could be like.

It immediately makes me think a LLM that can generate a customized GUI for the topic at hand where you can interact with in a non-linear way.

Thanks for bringing the disko command to my attention.

However, since we are talking about installing NixOS declaratively, and it's done through nixos-anywhere, which will install it[0] to the ram unfortunately.

[0] https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere/blob/abb0d72...

That's fair, having a remote shell environment that you feel comfortable to poke around is pretty great.

For git, you commented "for checking out github.com/stapelberg/configfiles". I wonder if you sometimes install NixOS locally from the installer? If so, I can understand having those packages around can be very useful.

Not to criticize the article, which is very well written, just some extra info:

It seems for the author, the custom installer is mainly used for accepting user SSH public key, terminfo, and maybe also locale.

Almost none of the packages the author listed get used, including zsh. Since NixOS is installed via nixos-anywhere, it runs a bash script to do everything, and all the script's dependencies will be pulled by nix.

For people who don't want to build a custom installer, or their cloud environment doesn't allow one, you can simply host a script somewhere and download and run it on the remote machine to add your SSH public key and other customizations, including partitioning the disk.

Note that the author used disko to partition the disk declaratively. Disko won't work for a machine with very limited ram, because disko runs in the installer, and needs to install tools to the ram to do the partition.

I wrote a nix configuration library[1] that also does NixOS installation (uses nixes-anywhere under the hood), where you can choose between using disko, a default script[2] that handles 90% of the use cases (using only the default tools available on a vanilla NixOS installer, so nothing gets installed to the ram), or your own script.

[1] https://github.com/hgl/nixverse

[2] https://github.com/hgl/nixverse/blob/main/load/partitionScri...

Do you happen to have links to such discussions and analyses?

It seems Reddit also punishes ban avoiding. If they find a way to associate my banned accounts with a preprovisioned account, that account can also get banned?

I don't know how they do it, but I have tried using a completely new IP and private browsing, getting a new account, and posting in r/CatAdvice that r/NewToReddit says is newcomer friendly, but still got shadow banned.

... teenager asks why they need to learn calculus

But if we avoid hard things

I don't see how you can justify the former by arguing the latter. These two are orthogonal. If I were that teenager, I think what I really would want to ask is that why it has to be calculus instead of some other things that is also hard but with obvious real world application like writing a small 3D game engine.

And my answer to that question is you probably shouldn't if your were in an ideal education system. You would be taught what interesting interactions you could have with the physical world, and be induced to discover calculus or some other math tools that helps you understand how the interactions really work and demonstrates you really need such tools. You're more likely to grasp them when you're driven by curiosity.

I wonder if Google is Xerox of our era, developing promising technologies only to be made practical and commercialized by other entities? Transformer is one example. Not sure if recent advancement in quantum computing is another.

This seems to be another iPhone moment, but I wonder what’s its killer feature? iPhone had the killer feature of phone calls, so everyone has a reason to buy one, I can’t come up with any for AR.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually incredibly excited about AR, I just can’t imagine how it becomes mainstream. It can of course be mainstream if it’s just like glasses and has all day battery, but it still seems pretty far away.

Many people seem to be unenthusiastic about it because the limitation on query strings are usually large enough.

I personally like this addition, because it no longer requires all queries be shoehorned into query strings. You can use any syntax you like, be it SQL or GraphQL etc.

This is akin to 2D beings saying time is the third dimension and being satisfied with the conclusion and happily living in their 2D world.

This seems like a pretty comprehensive book. Will check out. Thanks.

Thanks, but as mentioned in the post, without a good understanding it's really difficult to choose tools.

I'm looking for materials that put these tools into context & perspective so we can make a more informed judgement call.

Is it a good opportunity to make it work in deno since everything is self-contained?

Even if someone does copy you, it grows the market, at least for startups.

Thanks for showing me a totalizing view. This is another thing I should keep in mind.

No. If it were easy, lots of people have already done it earlier. I've never seen a pure copycat do well. Unless yours is a trillion dollar industry, it probably won't be tackled by someone competent.

When I saw the first the argument, I was gonna say Apple is one, and it beat Xerox spectacularly (I'd hazard it was a pure copycat, the whole selling point of Mac was the GUI), but the second told me I wouldn't have such a mighty competitor since I certainly don't have an original idea like that and is definitely not in the trillion dollar industry. But I think a competitor as at much lower level of competence can still make me nervous.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say I anticipate IPv6 support will be a highly requested feature, yet I don't really understand it well to implement related features. Should I make myself well-versed in IPv6 before release a MVP (could take a long time)? Or release it first but then spending a lot of time learning it and make users wait, giving competitors opportunities to implement it first (I think many many developers/teams are well-versed in IPv6).

Making users wait is itself another concern I mentioned in the earlier reply.

Going from 50% chance of making something useless to 25% - by seeing how users react to your product - is worth increasing the chances of a copycat from, say, 1% to 2%

This is a very good argument for not worrying about copycats during MVP. I'll keep that in mind.

But what about users? You talk with users, and tweak the product accordingly, they like it, and then they want a new feature, and it's also on the feature list, but very difficult to implement. What do you do? Just make them wait as long as it needs or should I make sure that before releasing a MVP, I at least have the technical capacity to implement all the features that are challenging (at the cost of delaying shipping, probably significantly)?

I forgot to mention my averse to making users wait is also part of what worries me. I wonder if such concern is warranted?

I wonder if there exists a sci-fiction that talks about how human beings detect something disastrous happened to Sgr A* and realize that happened 26,000 years ago then try to leave the Milky Way in panic.

Glad to see updated packages. I wonder if they should be favored over those offered by official Docker images when used in Docker?

For example, what are the pros and cons between using official Docker go image vs creating a custom image from an alpine image with apk add go?

I’m trying to not rely on GOPATH too, but how do you import sub packages? Are you supposed to put them in vendor too?

You can work around the GOPATH issue by using Docker. If you build go within a Docker container, you can structure the folder however you like and it won't affect the host.

The only downside is that your text editor might stop offering some features when editing a go file, since the import paths might not point to the actual location.

I'm a stutter too. My condition is a bit special I think. When I'm alone, I don't stutter at all if I think out loud or just read something on the screen, every scary word turns into a piece of cake. But as soon as I realize someone can hear me (even if it's remote like video chat), I start to stutter, pretty badly. I wonder if other people are in the same camp.

I didn't stutter when I was kid until I played with a neighbor kid who did, and it frightened me that I might stutter like him whenever I need to talk. As time progresses, the frightening reinforced, and I never grew out of it. I wonder if it qualifies as classical conditioning?

I also speak other languages, and the severity is different in different languages.