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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • I was a “ironically” racist as a young teen, it took me till my early adulthood to realise that being ironically racist is just being racist, and the edgy “humour” that is made at others expense isn’t funny or clever, and is incompatible with the kind, empathetic person I wanted to be.

    Cringing at my teen self pushes me further into deprogramming myself from that shit, but I’m encouraged by the adage “if you don’t look at yourself from a decade ago and cringe, you wasted that decade”.




  • Your personal files e.g. ~/Documents are not recreated, you’ll still need backups of those.

    caveats are you’ve got to use:

    • home-manager to generate your dotfiles.
    • something akin to sops to generate and securely store your private keys and secrets.

    But all this can be written in the one flake, so yes nixos-install --flake <GIT URL>#<HOSTNAME> Is sufficient for me to rebuild my desktop, laptop or server from the same repository.

    I’ve never used Gentoo, and I’m sure there are other methods of achieving the same level of reproducibility but I don’t know what they are.

    Nixos can be as modifiable as Gentoo with the caveat being it’s a massive pain in the ass to do some things. I have a flake for making aarch64-musl systems which has been an endeavour, and… It works? I have a running system that works on 2 different SoCs. I do have to compile everything quite often though.

    There are efforts to recreate Nixos without systemd, but that’s a huge effort; because it’s very “infrastructure as code”, you have to change a lot of code where editing a build script would’ve sufficed on arch/Gentoo.

    As for nix vs guix, guix was described to me as “if you only ever want to write in scheme”, whereas nix feels much more like a means to an end with practical compromises spattered throughout.








  • 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.