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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I often stumble on this example of nix usage - a one-off shell with a a specific package. This is such a niche and seemingly unimportant use case, that it’s really strange to have it mentioned so often.

    Like literally what’s the point of having a shell with ffmpeg? Why not simply install it? Even if you need something just once, just install it and then uninstall it, takes like 10 seconds.

    The other use case that is often brought up is for managing dev environments, but for a lot of popular languages (Python, Node, Java, Rust, etc. ) there are proven environment management options already (pyenv and poetry, nvm, jenv, rustup). Not to mention Docker. In the corporate setting I haven’t seen nix replacing any of these.

    From my limited experience using home manager under Linux and macOS:

    • GUI app shortcuts work in neither of the OSs
    • error messages are about as readable as the ones you get for C++ templates
    • a lot of troubleshooting searches to unsolved GitHub issues

    All in all nix seems like a pretty concept but not too practical at the moment.





  • I keep seeing this comment and I think people are confused about private companies.

    Private company is one that’s not publicly listed (traded on an exchange). Private companies still have shareholders, they may still have board of directors with shareholders representatives sitting in them. And these shareholders can still demand returns on their investment. There’s a whole industry around this called private equity.

    Now it doesn’t look like Gabe Newell ever took Private Equity funding and according to the internet he owns 50% of the Valve shares but that still means that a large pile of shares is owned by other people who get some say in the company’s direction.

    So saying that Valve makes this or that decision because they are private is wrong. Most companies are private and you don’t see them being all charitable and investing in open source.

    You could argue that Valve is allowed to make certain decisions more freely because he’s a co-founder who still owns the majority stake though. And the company being private means that unless he sells his shares he gets to retain that control.