• 24 Posts
  • 133 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • I really want to like Nix. The idea of declaratively defining my entire system sounds great. I can manage it with Git and even have multiple machines all look the same. I can define my partititioning once and magically get a btrfs disk working. Wow!

    But I find the language confusing no matter how many times people say it’s easy. I have a lot of experience with other programming languages so maybe it just doesn’t mesh. It also gives terrible error messages that are hard for me to understand. And Nixpkgs is unpredictable for what version I’m going to get. One of the services I installed ended up being a release candidate version which was a surprise. What if I don’t want the latest version of Docker? How do I pin it? Do I have to duplicate part of Nixpkgs? It just feels like a monorepo where everybody has to be on the same versions. Why on earth do the Nix language docs start by introducing math expressions instead of here is a simple self contained thing that installs one program. Here’s how you configure it. Here’s how you expand. Why does the dependency graph seem to pull in so many unnecessary dependencies? For example, I tried to build a minimal Docker image (which Nix looks to be a very good fit for), but I couldn’t figure out how to strip out dependencies that likely were only used during build for a dependency.

    I still like the idea and have managed to get my server defined entirely with NixOS which is very cool, but I can’t recommend this to my tech friends because if I’m confused they will be more so.





  • Fascinating. Just based on your comment and nothing else, sounds like it could be something like a CPU Enclave like Intel SGX. Basically a remote client can validate that an application runs in a secure part of a remote cloud computer. The stated goal of SGX is that you only have to trust Intel and if you trust Intel and say run program X in the enclave, then only that part of the CPU can access the data, not the applications running in the non-secure enclave.

    Now that brushes over some things like you still need to trust the client and IIRC in a WhatsApp situation, you don’t really know what enclave does, but the communications between the enclave and the host OS are heavily restricted. LLMs also require lots of CPU and are usually run on GPUs, so not sure how that works yet.












  • I’ve used Brultech in a house before. It’s not very user friendly to setup having to download some different firmware flashing tools and configure everything in a brittle web UI that only allows one browser tab at once. But it does have Ethernet, comes with a variety of different CT clamps. The donut style CT clamps are very compact making it easy to fit them into a electrical box. Don’t use the built-in one, use the HACS integration. The different sizes make me think that the Brultech is probably more accurate than the Emporia with only a single size.

    I ended up going with Emporia Vue2 for my own house given the complexity and my house layout not really permitting the Brultech’s install.