It’s more insidious than that. It takes over all the tedium of the cognitive process, but it can’t actually accomplish the task (unless the task is basically boilerplate of the English or programming variety). So, unless you have pretty firm discipline to do for yourself what it “could do if you just give it a couple tries,” you’re stuck unable to really get your focus going but also unable to have the thing do the work for you.

I’m pretty sure that, now that I look at it, I am often slower working with the LLM depending on the task. I still think it can help enormously but you definitely have to be watchful of how much you’re having it do and whether or not it is really helping. That’s not even addressing the issue of technical debt (someone writing code that “works” but hasn’t been well thought through in terms of ramifications is the whole reason software sucks… LLMs are not helping that problem, at all.)

I can definitely say that I feel substantially stupider trying to do programming tasks any time that I’m forced to do it without AI assistance, than I used to be.

Hold up, nix added containerization? How did I miss that? I will have another look now!

Nix is containerization. Here is firing up a temporary little container with a new python version and then throwing it away once I’m done with it (although you can also do this with more complicated setups, this is just showing doing it with one thing only):

[hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ python --version
Python 3.12.8

[hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ nix-shell -p python39
this path will be fetched (27.46 MiB download, 80.28 MiB unpacked):
  /nix/store/jrq27pp6plnpx0iyvr04f4apghwc57sz-python3-3.9.21
copying path '/nix/store/jrq27pp6plnpx0iyvr04f4apghwc57sz-python3-3.9.21' from 'https://cache.nixos.org/'...

[nix-shell:~]$ python --version
Python 3.9.21

[nix-shell:~]$ exit
exit

[hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ python --version
Python 3.12.8

The whole “system” you get when moving from Nix to NixOS is basically just a composition of a whole bunch of individual packages like python39 was, in one big container that is “the system.” But you can also fire up temporary containers trivially for particular things. I have a couple of tools with source in ~/src which, whenever I change the source, nix-os rebuild will automatically fire up a little container to rebuild them in (with their build dependencies which don’t have to be around cluttering up my main system). If it works, it’ll deploy the completed product into my main system image for me, but if it doesn’t then nothing will have changed (and either way it throws away the container it used to attempt the build in).

Each config change spawns a new container for the main system OS image (“generation”), but you can roll back to one of the earlier generations (which are, from a functional perspective, still around) if you want or if you broke something.

And so on. It’s very nice.

I mean if it makes you happy, I won’t tell you to do anything different. I think a certain amount of it is just prejudice against Docker on my part. Just in my experience NixOS is the best of both worlds: You can have a single coherent system if everything in that system can play nice with each other, and if not, then things can be containerized completely that way still works too. And then on top it has a couple of other nice features like rolling back configs easily, or source builds that get slotted in in-place as if they were standard packages (which is generally where I abandon Docker installs of things, because making changes to the source seems like it’s going to be a big hassle).

I’m not trying to evangelize though, you should in all seriousness just do what you find to be effective.

Yeah, I can agree with that, I’m just saying at the moment of shutdown isn’t the time to do that and often the programs that are holding up my shutdown are doing it for reasons of their own, not because they’re trying to help me by saving my work. Just do autosave and let me shut my stuff down.

Huh.

IDK man, my experience is that Nix solves the problem you originally talked about and a bunch of others, pretty effectively. Among other things if things “just… don’t work” you can trivially roll back to an earlier working config, and see what changed between working and not-working, and so what would be a pretty grueling debugging process in some other environment becomes pretty easy to sort out.

But whatever. If for some reason Docker makes you more happy and not less, you’re welcome to it and best of luck.

What didn’t you like about it? I am just curious; I finally stepped out of using Debian for everything which I have been doing for approximately 200 years, and tried NixOS, and to me it is incredibly nice the way it solves a lot of these issues.

venv or nix

These are 2014 problems

My laptop will send a signal to all programs telling them to shut down, which includes cleaning up their stuff, and then it unmounts the drives, and then it shuts down. It just doesn’t wait forever and make me fix the problem if some program is having trouble shutting down. That is the correct behavior.

I do get that it’s nice to be protected against having your work blown away. As a first step, the idea of checking with every program to make sure it’s okay to turn off was a good progress, back in the past when it was first invented. The solution in the present day to that is autosave. The solution is definitely not to leave all the user’s work unsaved for a potentially unlimited amount of time, and then refuse to shut down if there is any terminal that still has an ssh session open, any settings window still open, or any GIMP session with files exported but not saved as .xcf.

Literally 2/3 of those obstacles happen pretty much every time I shut down my Mac, and I have to wander through the programs resolving programs’ problems that have nothing to do with saving my work. It’s annoying. I do understand that, with the other way, you have to go around checking that you have no work unsaved before shutting down. But, if you are mature enough to do that, then the “init 0” way is objectively better.

2025 no autosave skill issue

I just flip through all the workspaces, make sure there’s nothing going on I care about, and then hit the button.

Computers that teach you not to do that, but instead to just blindly pick “shut down” and then assume that the computer will protect you against having anything unsaved, but also refuse to shut down if there’s some app this is not cooperating, have 0 upside compared to the other way.

2. When I hit the power button, it turns off. It still does its shutdown and all, but it’s not an extended negotiation where I find a bunch of programs that are refusing to “let me” do what I want the computer to do, and have to try to make each of them happy. It just turns off.

Next you’re going to tell me people aren’t signing on to “Arabian Gulf”

Everyone knows people on the internet always closely read the notifications they get about what is the nature of the interaction they’re having and what the risks are, and they take it seriously. They never just poke at buttons blindly like a cat with a jar on its head and start stream-of-consciousness typing, and doing random shit.

Going through brutal things will destroy your empathy. I am fine with this guy standing trial for his crime but I don’t think it was really “his fault” at the end of the day after how he grew up.

Some people have strong character and they can turn out fine no matter how you treat them. Some people, you can give every opportunity in the world to, and they’re still going to turn towards the dark. For most people, it’s down to circumstances.

That’s why it is important to create good circumstances. The schools, the police, the meeting places where people hang out, the shops and the structure of the economy. It all has to serve the good, it has to be alive with life. Because the people who are in it will be molded.

Click the image title, the preview that gets served along with the comments is downsampled to save bandwidth and basically unreadable for things like this. It’s Lemmy, it’s not OP.

You walk forward boldly with your lady into a more rewarding future

I was once on a farm, laughing at something, and a horsefly came up and bit me on the tongue.

I had no idea why it happened, still don’t, but it was one of the worst things that had ever happened to me at that point in my life.

South pole

They did this in Ukraine right before the shit hit the fan for real, too.

The pro-Russian ruling party at the time was cracking peaceful protestors’ skulls, so they started wearing helmets. And then, the helmets became proof that they were up to something violent somehow, and they tried to make helmets illegal. Within about a month it was street battles, fireworks and small arms and bow and arrows.