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Cake day: August 6th, 2025

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  • I have been using Nix for a year now, and I am not looking back.

    All regular package managers have a problem: Sometimes a system won’t work if a specific combination of packages is installed. To prevent this, package managers block those combinations. However, how does the package manager know which combination would break the system? It is tested beforehand, and a list of illegal combinations is maintained. However, this comes with a problem: How do you test every combination of packages? If a package manager tracks just 1000 packages, there are 2^1000 possible combinations to evaluate. This means that when a package manager becomes more popular, and more packages get added, relatively fewer combinations get tested, therefore increasing the chance someone breaks his system by installing a unique combination of packages, that wasn’t evaluated and apparently breaks the system. In other words: Package managers have a flaw that causes your system to break if the package manager becomes too popular. The common solution is to create a new package manager from scratch that does exactly the same thing as the old one, but isn’t popular yet, and therefore works. However, since it works, it becomes more popular, causing it to no longer work.

    Nix is different. It is designed from the bottom up that every combination of packages is possible. It is impossible that one package breaks another. This creates some other advantages as well: there is no evaluation to see whether packages break other packages, allowing maintainers to add more packages to the repository. The result: even though it is not even close to the most used package manager, it is the one with the most packages in its repository.

    Yes, there are problems. The biggest is that there is no easy mode yet. But that can be implemented later. For now I see Nix (or something similar like Guix) to be the future of package managers.




  • If you’re using lighter cheaper materials No, I’m using the same materials. sloped roofs are simply a stronger geometry, allowing roofs to be cheaper and lighter by using less material.

    No, for the same amount of occupiable space the shorter flat roof blocks less light than a standard 10:12 or 12:12 roof Incorrect. While the highest point of a sloped roof is higher than the highest point of a flat roof, the lowest point is lower. This means that for medium high sun angles sloped roofs provide won’t block the sunlight, while flat roofs do, and for low sun angles it is the other way around. However, there is not much sunlight anyway at low angles.

    The greater surface area of a pitched roof means this is absolutely not true. The hypotenuse is always longer than either leg. That’s a basic math fail. The highest volume-to-surface-area-ratio is achieved in a spherical design, A slope roof that has a less than 45 degree angle is closer to a sphere.

    Do you have any real disadvantages of sloped roofs?




  • I have a similar thing with flat roofs. They are terrible. When you are 5 years old, you already learn to draw houses with a pointy roof. The pointy roof has been invented about a 100 times in history, as people were looking for the best shape. The wave shaped roof tile with 2 waves per tile has been invented about 3 times in history as people were looking for the best shape. The advantages of a pointy roof over a flat roof:

    • Rain flows off. Yes, you can give a flat roof a small inclination, but rain will not flow as well, and if your roof tilts a small bit during the decades, it can become horizontal again.
    • Snow falls off, reducing the chance that the roof collapses under the weight of heavy snow.
    • It is lighter and cheaper, as you can use thinner materials. This is because pointy is a stronger shape than flat.
    • It gives more interior space.
    • It allows more sunlight to reach the street.
    • It has a smaller area-to-vloume-ratio through with heat can escape.
    • Solar panels get a higher efficiency.
    • It allows the roof to be made out of wavy roof tiles which provide the following advantages:
    • Roofs designed with wavy roof tiles can be constructed when it rains.
    • When a tile breaks, you can easily replace it, without having to cut it loose from the tiles next to it.
    • Roof tiles do not fracture upon an uneven heat distribution. Meanwhile, the advantages of flat roofs are:
    • If you design an apartment building, you can copy and paste the interior. (Thus less work for the architect.)
    • A horizontal line is one segment less to draw compared to two diagonals. (Thus less work for the architect.)
    • If a city has the same height restrictions for flat roofed buildings as for pointy roofed buildings, and the architect is too lazy to go to the city council to explain to them that that doesn’t make sense, the architect can design a building with more volume by making the roof flat. In other words: the only reason any architect would design a building with a flat roof is because they are either lazy or they have no idea what they are doing.