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John Lam's Blog

2021-11-29

This is a new post for tomorrow. Placeholder to remind me to fix the timezone bug that let me create this on 11/28 😄 Update: fixed. #

While learning about Jack Twitter's retirement on HN today, I learned about Fenix which looks like a TweetDeck clone with better aesthetics. It's available for iOS iPadOS and MacOS. #

To implement the permalink feature in vscode-zola, I'll need to implement a stateful tera template as described by the docs. It looks pretty straightforward. Done! 😄 #

Nix looks like an interesting tool. I just heard about it from HN in this post by repl.it folks talking about Docker vs. Nix. HN comments are pretty critical and damning of the technology. I did not know that it predated Docker by a decade(!)

The claim is that Nix does a better job at reproducible builds. Crucially, Nix does not use containers, rather it does everything by isolating using environment variables. This might be an interesting way to avoid the whole "must install Docker" thing that holds people back from reproducible environments. The repl.it team seems focused on moving from Docker to Nix, and providing packages via Nix.

Here's an early post from the repl.it team describing how they've been migrating away from a single massive Docker image to using Nix. They make 30,000 packages available in a single 1TB share that is mounted into every container. Users define a shell.nix file that declares dependencies that are then satisfied by the nix-shell tool.

A quick look at this thing though and it appears to be another package system with packages (over 60K) provided by various maintainers. Not sure what the value would be, say, over the official Nvidia pytorch containers, for example. It seems like the risk is not worth it. #