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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Software engineering is usually distinct from programming in that it isn’t about the logic behind programming, but about the project management that all software projects typically have in common.

    Besides agile methodology, a lot of software engineering involves creating reproducible environments. While NixOS doesn’t provide anything that much different from tools like Ansible,

    NixOS follows a functional/declarative design paradigm, functional/declarative design paradigms communicate similar logic for solving the same problem. It’s a restrictive paradigm. Consider how javascript is not restrictive, as in, you can code with any design paradigm in javascript, and how it’s ugly for that.

    I also think functional paradigms mirror the natural language closer than imperative paradigms. That’s subjective, but I would still argue Math is a logical language that is a subset of the natural language, and since functions in programming represent a process of doing something, functions make for natural verbs. Meaning, understanding the naming convention for the functions, is a natural naming convention for when I communicate with other software engineers, even when I’m not asking about making configurable/reproducible systems in NixOS

    Or when I look at how to config things like firewall, ssh, vpn servers, user group permissions… it’s a minimalist description that I could communicate to other people configuring even on a debian server

    So, it’s hard because it’s restrictive, but if you’re willing to put up with a learning curve, you get a language agnostic framework for describing computing environments, more or less. Then there’s more advanced stuff with nix flakes, which still doesn’t make sense to me functionally/linguistically, but I’m starting to see the value in parallel package management and the precision in reproducibility they provide by requiring sha256 git commits











  • Exactly, like ansible.

    Unused packages aren’t typically a problem unless you imperatively change your systems state. Otherwise, If you remove it from your configuration.nix, it’s removed when you switch to your next build. Previous builds/generations keep those versions of those packages, which wastes space, but you can specify garbage collection to remove generations older than a month

    My only complaint so far is the best way to properly make a development shell for a python project is either with a still somewhat experimental feature called flakes, or a 3rd party solution poetry2nix. Im probably going to switch to using docker/podman for python projects.

    On the other hand, pip is the worst package manager, so being incentivized away from it is kind of a plus


  • Man I still suck at NixOS and it has it’s kinks/learning curve, but if you’re tired of tweaking things constantly the nice thing about NixOS is all your little tweaks get recorded into a single file which builds your base OS into your particular configuration. So after you tweak it and get it right, you’ll never have to tweak it again even if you change computers






  • Look Im a socialist leaning centrist but anyone who critiques just capitalism doesn’t realize communists are authoritarian state capitalists. I agree there are serious economic flaws in our system, but saying capitalism explains everything just doesn’t make sense.

    As bad as things are here, the cost of living and costs of energy grew much more outside of America. Additionally, look at China’s housing economic crash and demographic issues. Those are decisions made by State Capitalists, and their people are suffering from it.

    Again, America has several reasons to fuck off, and I want some socialism, but for the sake of argument, saying “capitalism” doesn’t amount to much you can critique about America’s response to COVID versus any other country’s strategy


  • So, before I say “capitalism” like everyone else id like to argue many of the monetary/economic policy can be used by either authoritarian state capitalists or free capitalists alike.

    https://42macro.com/education Edit: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjqe6xtZYTfvA4pHs0HgJsQ

    This can be useful^ it’s a brief read. Also I love Adam Taggart, he’s a really good person to follow on YouTube for economics.

    Things were getting bad for a while, and we kick the can down the road until an exponentially worse problem arrives, then repeat. Let’s look at COVID for now tho instead of going back decades

    COVID happens, society has to adapt, and now there’s growth issues with the economy (growth domestic product or gross domestic income)

    First, government gives a shit ton of stimulus checks to the consumer market. A market is a collection of buyers and sellers. The consumer market is a collection of buyers and sellers who spend their money on one thing and don’t retain that value. So most of the stimmy money went from consumers to corporations. To give you an idea, over the last 3 years we’ve seen 35% of inflation that is never going away, it will forever weigh on the consumer market (and that’s the market that needs to be well off for an economy to be anything more than the stock/financial market)

    Second, Fed sees an incoming recession so they lower interest rates to make banking loans cheaper to encourage investment to increase growth again. This means people who are not suffering from the economy can easily afford another house since they’re basically not paying any interest on it, then rent it out to Airbnb or whatever.

    All these things cause growth in the short term, while making inflation a much worse problem in the long term.

    FED starts raising interest rates slowly over the last year or 2. Now they’re about to lower them again which is a sign we’re in for another recession, but let’s look at what raising interest rates did:

    Banks operate on a very tight margin and raising interest rates hurts banks in the short term and takes a while for markets to react to (which is part of the reason why we saw so many bank closures like silicon valley bank)

    But raising interest rates also makes it more expensive for people to afford mortgage payments.

    H.O.P.E: housing , orders, profits, employment

    When mortgage payments got more expensive housing got expensive. When housing gets expensive orders go down and/or credit card usage goes up (which is another separate problem / indicator). When orders go down profits go down, and when profits go down employment goes down.

    It should be worth noting the one thing J Powell did right was creating slack in job openings to prevent a complete crash in the labor market, but that’s the last thing to crash in a recession so we’re still just kicking the can down the road.

    That’s the best analysis I can do with respect to COVID, but some other interesting things:

    The average boomer is 2 years into retirement. The labor force is going to continue shrinking for the next 7 years. It won’t be this bad in America, but in south east asian countries, there’s going to reach a point where there are more old people than young people, and when that happens there’s not enough people to care for the elderly and support the rest of the economy, so both tend to suffer. America will feel this pain as well, but our population “pyramid” is more of an hourglass, where south east asian is an upside down pyramid

    Also, geopolitical tensions are likely going to get worse over the next few years. China manufactures everything consumers like that don’t have to do with defense, so things like smartphones are going to get much more expensive , and tech stocks are likely to suffer. Edit: not to mention food and gas prices increasing from Ukraine war (which isn’t in the Feds basket of goods for inflation which is HILARIOUSLY STUPID considering that’s their excuse for inflation)

    Also, there’s tons of shadow banks with stealth liquidity where there’s no information how much money they have. So however bad inflation was the last few years and will continue to get with the Fed cutting rates, it can get MUCH worse once those banks start releasing their liquidity.

    So, things are bad and they’re going to get worse before there’s a chance things get better. I really recommend listening to Adam Taggart and the people he interviews to help form your decision making