rasmus-kirk

You can create two Google accounts and parental control yourself. You can also use ublock or other browser addons, and of course, NewPipe. Youtube should have more settings for this, it's clearly going down the drain, but it's not like you can do nothing.

Honestly, it's one of the reasons I don't want to pay for Youtube Red, why would I pay for "no ads", when I still feel like I'm the product, because of my complete lack of control over the algorithm and user experience.

I completely agree, I found it very funny that I have been transitioning from an "LLM sceptic" to a "LLM advocate", without changing my viewpoint. I have long said that LLM's won't be replacing swathes of the workforce any time soon and that LLM's are of course useful for specific tasks, especially prototyping and drafting.

I have gone from being challenged on the first point, to the second. The hype is not what it has been.

https://rasmuskirk.com/

My personal blog and resume. I have written a couple of blog-posts:

- 2025-06-18: Lasso Transactions as an alternative to Copyright

  A Solution to Fund Creativity and Combat the Free-Rider Problem in a World Without Copyright.

  https://rasmuskirk.com/articles/2025-06-18_lasso-transactions-as-an-alternative-to-copyright

- 2024-12-23: Why Nix Is the Perfect Package Manager for Your Steam Deck

  An article exploring the benefits of using Nix on the Steam Deck, with a step-by-step guide to installation and configuration using Home Manager.

  https://rasmuskirk.com/articles/2024-12-23_why-nix-is-the-perfect-package-manager-for-your-steam-deck

- 2024-07-24: You Don’t Need NixOS

  Why you should consider Nix Devshells and Home-Manager rather than NixOS if you want to get into Nix

  https://rasmuskirk.com/articles/2024-07-24_dont-use-nixos

The blog is custom-made, built using Nix and pandoc. The website builder is its own Nix flake:

https://github.com/rasmus-kirk/website-builder

Spot on! I think LLM's can help greatly in quickly putting that knowledge in writing, including using it to review written materials for hidden prerequisite assumptions that readers might not be aware of that. It can also help newer hires in how to write and more clearly. LLM's are clearly useful in increasing productivity, but management that think that they even close to ready to replace large sections of practically any workforce are delusional.

I think we should consider stricter restrictions on harmful advertising way before we rush to lock down the internet in order to "save the children". I don't understand why we have accepted that it's companies' God-given-right to blast propaganda which only functions to drain the working class of their money (gambling) and their health (endless ads for poor dietary choices). Why not limit advertisements to at least just products that makes people's lives easier? I especially would love to see more advertisement for rehab centers for example.

But they can't legally purchase/access it without the involvement of an adult, unlike social media. You could argue that the parents sanction social media use by giving their kids a phone/computer without any sort of parental controls, but most parents probably have neither the resources nor proper knowledge of how to sufficiently provide a safe platform for their children.

I think this is a good point. What differentiates alcohol and social media? Well, social media is not physically addictive, but it's pretty clearly psychologically addictive. Along those lines it would be hard to argue that children should have unfettered access to social media. Social media is also _not_ like TV in that there's psychologists and algorithmic engineers working hard to make these types of apps as addictive as possible. Not to mention the fact that children obviously can't consent to having their data harvested, most ADULTS don't understand the ramifications of that, much less children.

All of this also applies to adults, I don't like how corporate profit-seeeking algorithms dictate public discourse and I think it's perfectly reasonable to combat this. The great question is how to do so without trampling on people's right to freedom. The EU tends to combat "misinformation", but this has loads of problems, and I think it misses the mark of what the problem truly is. In my opinions it's the algorithms that maximize fear responses and lead people down rabbit holes that's the true problem.

I think the best way to combat it is by supporting federation and decentralization of the internet and attacking the advertising industry that maximizes eyeballs and time spent on the platform, rather than providing service to paying users. It also has the beneficial side-effect of increasing freedom of thought and speech rather than limiting it.

I know some people see the fragmentation of communities as the leading cause of echo-chambers, but this is not my impression. Actually, the smaller internet communities are often less extreme than algorithmically dominated central-hubs. Pseudonymous small communities function more like the local village that tends to mitigate extremism as the loudest, more extremist, community members can be challenged, without those challengers drowning in potential oppressive moderation and hive-mind mentality.

I like it because it's based on Ubuntu, so there's almost always a working guide/solution targeting it. It also ships with Nvidia drivers which saves a lot of headaches for some users. To me the game-changer is the fact that it supports tiling window management with minimal configuration.

It also looks and feels pretty sleek.

Not really, Linux evangelists are a thing because Linux is primarily held back by lack of adoption. A lot of common issues can be attributed to either:

1. The hardware manufacturer has never tested Linux support for drivers. 2. Some application that you need doesn't target Linux due to lack of users

This isn't everything, sure. But I think it's a majority of the headaches. Thus, Linux-users really want other people to also use Linux, so that companies actually give a shit about supporting it.

There's also the whole ideology involved. A lot of companies are increasingly pushing that you are not allowed to control the computer/phone/device you buy and Linux is at the forefront of combating this.

Microsoft invested heavily in cloud, when LLM's came it was an obvious way to increase profits if they made everyone use their cloud for "AI". I don't think they realize just how much of the current LLM hype is just that, hype. I think they will be severely burned.

Yes, LLM's are useful and valuable, but no, they won't be replacing major sections of the workforce any time soon. I don't need an LLM in every facet of my operating system, just like I didn't need Cortana integrated everywhere in Windows 8. And LLM's are obviously not worth the billions upon billions that are being invested currently.

I feel like this is where LLM's/agents could actually help a lot. I don't like all the hype, and think that long-term projects would be better off without heavily written LLM code in any form, but stitching together stuff for a client seems like the perfect use-case, as long as they understand it's not the final product.

+1 for Home Manager, as someone who uses Nix extensively (NixOS for server, Nix devshells, Home Manager on my dev machine) it's by far the most versatile tool the Nix ecosystem has to offer!

Thank God you did. I hear of seniors who still do this shit with no real sense of style because they just assume that over-abstracting everything is always the correct thing to do. You're learning, not unlearning!

Yeah, and any of these philosophies are always terrible when you take them to their limit. The ideas are always good in principle and built on a nugget of truth, it's when people take it as gospel I have a problem. If they just read the book and drew inspiration for alternative, possibly better, coding styles and could argue their case that's unequivocally good.

I think it's a leftover before proper LSP's, if you had to type/paste everything, that would be fairly tedious, but now-a-days everyone uses LSP's with autocomplete that have all the variables in scope.

I do think very long names can hurt readability though so it's still a balancing act, but variables like "t" (often used in Haskell, ugh) is awful in my opinion.

This is also one of the primary reasons I'll buy the Steam Machine. Sure I could build whatever myself, but I actually want proper hardware support. I also don't mind that the profit margin that I pay to make my life easier goes to Valve and their Linux Gaming pursuits.

A lot of scripts and binaries don't work properly if not installed through Nix. This can really affect your workflow if you depend on random niche software not packaged by Nix.

When I started my first job I couldn't build their TypeScript project because it depended on GRPC on NPM. That NPM package is literally just a binary...

This isn't really the fault of NixOS, but it's wildly impractical as long as the world is stuck where it is. I've recently considered going back into NixOS and spinning up Podman Ubuntu containers for stateful dev environments (with my home-manager programs included, of course). It's sort of the reverse approach, instead of Nix being a second-class citizen on Ubuntu, I want Ubuntu to be a second-class Citizen on Nix.

I thought you used NixOS? Is it just your gaming system that's Fedora? Do you still use Nix?

I buy games for my steam deck, only stopping to read up if they're "unsupported". Surprisingly, they seem to often STILL work in that case, this happened with Ghosts of Tsushima, which was unsupported because their online play didn't work (good riddance lol).

Never had an issue with any game running through proton. Only issue was Stardew Valley that couldn't play online. Turns out the Linux version (was default) had an unfixed bug, and choosing the Windows version with proton "Just Worked". Hilariously, "Win32 is the most stable Linux ABI"...

Keep an eye out for PopOS Cosmic. I have daily drived it since alpha with admittedly some issues, but I see the improvement! Unlike a lot of other "Just Works" distros, it actually has proper tiling, and unlike the specialized tiling WM's I don't have to configure a bunch of stuff!

I do heavily configure applications, but all of these are terminal based now-a-days.

Hey, I remember seeing this like two years ago when researching Nixarr. Glad to see others focusing on NixOS for self-hosting stuff. I need to look into it again properly when I have time.

Not the guy you're replying to but Home manager:

https://rasmuskirk.com/articles/2024-07-24_dont-use-nixos/

I use Nix (the package manager), works on pretty much any distro and has the largest package set of any package manager.

I would honestly just use an Apple TV. But the killer feature for me (I currently use a Steam Deck/Steam Controller) is just Youtube without ads reliably. Also total control, if Youtube jacked up the prices for Youtube Red, I always have Ublock.

I'd rather download music and buy LP's, especially from smaller artists, than having a Spotify subscription. They get a much bigger cut and I get something tangible, if unpractical. The only ironic part is that a lot of small artists only print an extremely limited number of LP's, I don't understand why they don't let people purchase their stuff? Like maybe it's for the "limited feeling", but that just feels dumb as fuck.

I like this, but it also leaves the door wide open to censorship. Also this would include Youtube which would be a marked detirioration in learning.

I use podman since I can simply enable it using home-manager:

`services.podman.enable`

This also means that it's in the reproducible part of my setup which is a bonus.

I'm currently writing my Master's Thesis, where I'm implementing Plonk with Recursive Proofs in Rust. This allows for Succinct Blockchains, that only store the current balance of all accounts, rather than all previous transactions since the blockchain was created.

There is not a lot of free content out there comparatively. As for ripping yourself, that's fine, but usually it's:

1. Takes a lot more time. 2. Costs _a lot_ more money than streaming services. 3. Is _often_ illegal.

You could say price shouldn't be an issue here, if we're talking about morals, but a single season on BLU-RAY of shows can easily cost ~70 USD (at least here in Denmark), compared to a ~10 USD streaming service. The idea is, of course that the largest fans and collectors are willing to purchase these, but it's not doable for replacing a streaming flow. So practically, it's a large consideration.

And principally I really can't blame pirates when they get their stuff, cheaper, better, faster and more easily. Again, Steam represents a nice counter-balance, Steam is much easier, while still being very affordable, than pirating. I haven't pirated a game in 10 years, even for studios who I would rather not have my money (Disco Elysium), I still purchased the game on sale, just for the convenience.

> As an aside, for me the most challenging part of learning Danish is the pronunciation. It's beautiful...

As a Dane, all I have to say is; lol