silasdavis

I feel much more satisfaction pouring hours into NixOS over doing the same on Gentoo and Arch. The hours on nix are in a source file I can carry around. The hours on Gentoo and Arch I'm doomed to forget and have to repeat.

I do miss the AUR though. I haven't been able to package a rust program that has a build with a transitive dependency that expects internet access (https://github.com/foundry-rs/foundry). Something something sandbox, crate2nix. But a frivolous install of a little binary that isn't packaged is not necessarily an easy endeavour.

Overall I'm very happy. Nix unstable feels equivalent to Arch more or less. You can pull in master with flakes easily enough too.

Gives you a Typescript API for generating resources. The difference is that these templates are semantic (via the type system) not just syntactic as in text templates. Relatedly, they also factor and compose better because functions and imports.

At least acknowledge the difference between ICO funds, NFTs, native tokens, inflationary or deflationary assets, liquidity pools, slush funds with voting and governance attached.

Even getting some nuance on the different ways in which one thinks different crypto assets are a scam would be nice. But here I see no engagement or interest in the particular assets in question or the details of the story. Why?

Incidentally I was coming from i3 (xmonad before but wanted something I could switch over to wayland where I could watch video like its 1995). Never in love with configuring all my own task bar, power management, disk mounting, screenshot program, rubbish task launcher with no icons, etc. but did it anyway for the sake of beautiful ceramic tiles... I've been playing with pop shell gnome extension for creature comforts, which via dconf plugin of home manager actually seems text configurable. Not that I've done it yet.

See you are using sway, ever considered going IKEA with gnome?

So far I feel like I'm making progress. Having started from the masochism of Gentoo followed by the relatively lesser masochism of Arch my feeling is at least these hours of configurating are not being poured into the void but will have a substantially longer payback period. Reinstalling Arch or Gentoo always inevitably involved a large amount of remembering long forgotten config incantations which despite a certain number of git configuration repos for system and home and some scripted installation tended not to avoid a significant amount of tedious unfulfilling grunt work at the bootstrapping console.

Mind you I'm interested in views from those who are further along and feeling the pain. I can well believe that that getting to the first '80% how I want things' configuration might be much easier than the next 10% on the same path.

I'm using unstable, flakes, and home manager as a module in the main configuration.nix.

The language doesn't feel particularly arcane or difficult though so I don't relate to that complaint yet. As others have mentioned. A few fairly standard functional features (recursion, destructuring, first class functions) plus JSON sounds about right.

Given the context assuming smart contracts you may have a point. Often consensus will be much slower and a limiting factor in execution. Solana may be a bit different here in their efforts to parallelise independent transactions.

High level provable languages always seemed like a good idea to me for smart contracts. As you say Rust doesn't necessarily seem like the sweetspot for this.

The Ethereum EVM assmebly is wildly unsafe but regularly used for the sake of gas and other things that would be impossible (most hilariously string manipulation). Solidity is unsafe with respect to things like overflow. It doesn't have memory unsafety in the traditional sense. Partly because it is allocate only and you don't have to deal with bounds checking yourself.

> The ETC fork would have been successful at any non-zero support level from people with the ability to mine.

It would be economically irrational for people to send transactions to a fork with a single miner since that miner could unilaterally rewrite any transactions as they see fit. This is why I think miners have the ability to control forking.

> A hard fork is determined by the users, who have to upgrade their software.

Who are 'the users' here? Light clients? Users of wallets? None of these have the power to adopt a fork, soft or hard. The collective action of the miners (or validators) defines which chains still retain liveness. For example in the hard fork between Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ethereum (ETH) ETC was able to exist only because miners chose to to mine it. This in turn did give non-mining users the choice of how to distribute their demand and create extrinsic value for the ETC token. I wouldn't say this gives non-mining users any control over a hard fork since it happens after-the-fact.

> If the software updates automatically, then the power of hard forking lies with the developers

I don't know of a node distribution for Ethereum that works this way.

The core developers have power as in knowledge and power as in authority, the later being the traditional form of political power.

I also question whether miners are really providing the labour power, as you might expect the working class to do. They build the roads and keep the lights on but the means of production of value is (or ought to be) the services provided by those writing functionality that makes the network useful, i.e. the smart contract writers. Whether one thinks smart contracts on Ethereum have any value is another question but that was at least the vision.

A move to proof-of-stake does not remove the role of miners/validators. Validators will still earn a reward from validating blocks. So it's not as if this 'class' is being disenfranchised totally.

Finally the social class analogy entails disjointness of classes, this is certainly not the case for miners, many of whom are major token holders, and some of whom are involved in governance (of course by miners we are taking about the humans controlling the mining rigs not the computers themselves)

It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.

Alternatives seem to be Owncloud and Nextcloud, which have hosted options. I don't really want to self host but nice to have the option. Does anyone have experience with their android apps for photo storage as compared to Google photos? In particular autobackup and image scaling/compression would be nice.

I use ProtonMail and have started fiddling with their new calendar offering, I was half hoping they might have some encrypted storage service in the offing...