The medium is the message.

• tab completion works in more places than you might expect
• ctrl-a/ctrl-e for start/end of line
• ctrl-u to clear the command you’ve typed so far but store it into a temporary pastebuffer
• ctrl-y to paste the ctrl-u’d command
• ctrl-w to delete by word (I prefer binding to alt-backspace though)
• ctrl-r to search your command history
• alt-b/alt-f to move cursor back/forwards by word
• !! is shorthand for the previous run command; handy for sudo !!
• !$ is the last argument of the previous command; useful more often than you’d think
• which foo tells you where the foo program is located
• ls -la
• cd without any args takes you to your home dir
• cd - takes you to your previous dir
• ~ is a shorthand for your home dir

Well, Nix is a programming language, so there’s no getting around having to learn basic principles of coding.

That said, I feel like coming into Nix with a lot of programming experience actually worked against me at first, because I made a lot of assumptions that weren’t true and basically had to “unlearn” certain things.

The main things being:

• Lazy evaluation is trippy as hell sometimes
• The language truly does not allow for side-effects. Everything you might think is a side-effect is really executed from outside the language runtime itself
• It might be more accurate to think of Nix as a database, where the keys are the parameters of what to build and the values are directories full of the built artifacts

What really made it click for me was seeing how a derivation object is basically equivalent to a path. So if I do ”${pkgs.foo}/bar”, that’s the exact absolute path (plus /bar) where Nix will end up storing the output of the pkgs.foo derivation. Even without actually building the derivation, you can know where it will end up.

Anyway, the documentation is pretty shitty, so you basically have to scour every community resource you can find and read way more of it than it seems like you should have to. Discord/Matrix servers help a lot too. And learning to navigate the source code for nixpkgs.

Also: Don’t start with NixOS, imo. Start with dumb throwaway stuff where you make a derivation that downloads a file and unzips it and runs a single command. Once you understand that, do something that requires understanding a bit of nixpkgs, like using overlays. Then you can use NixOS. Otherwise, there’s too much going on all at once.

Edit:

• Nix pills is good
• Vimjoyer is amazing

I hate it more when People do it with just a few Words, arbitrarily.

It’s like they saw a Smart Person do it to Make A Point, and then they decided to just Do It All The Time.

So scylly

It still hides a good amount of the extra cost.

If an importer orders 10,000 units instead of 30,000 in anticipation of fewer sales, the production cost per unit will probably be higher, so they probably also have to increase the retail price beyond the exact tariff cost.

I look at it like tipping a street musician.

The point isn’t to purchase access to the experience. You can get that for free if you want.

The point is to keep their creative outlet going, so I (and everyone around me) get to experience the next cool thing they do.

Trump: “We’re increasing foreign prices because we want consumers to prefer buying American.”

Retailers: “These foreign goods are more expensive than American-made ones.”

Trump: “How dare you tell them that!”

Incredibly hard to source that data from the outside. Even if you can identify the suppliers, different parts of an assembly may be classified differently, even between different importers who may have partial exemptions.

So [does Trump want to] discourage purchasing foreign goods or not?

I was thinking more like:

My toddler insisted on putting pepper on her strawberries the other day.

I laughed and said she was welcome to try, but “start on just a couple slices so you don’t ruin all of them”.

She said it was great, but I didn’t believe her, so I tried it. And then we put pepper on all of them.

Homie’s got a sick aesthetic. I love that phone case.

Oh boy. If you really wanna understand this, there are like 80 episodes of the podcast You Are Not So Smart that look at this from different angles.

There’s not really a single reason. It’s a lot of inter-related ones.

“Yesturday”

Sure, but if you’re specifically trying to go South, Spain is about the same latitude as most Canadian cities.

Time for Mexico?

“Hey bro, nice sign but you forgot the E in rarely”

“Oh good catch, I’ll just squeeze it in”

I look forward to the documentary.

“Mastodon: Victory Through Technical Superiority”, available soon on Laserdisc and Betamax