pinging @fzakaria in case of responses
What’s the ping? O.o
If you want to watch me give the talk:
To me the promoting single-user nix part seems a bit at odds with the targeting/optimizing for a single platform part (it would certainly be cool to be able to rely on all kind of Linux features).
I’ve found that when running as single user you can hit limitations due to the lack of permissions, which can also differ between distributions (like differences in the sandboxing). It’s also easier for the user to e.g. accidentally corrupt the store.
I guess this qualifies as an official and intentional troll post, right?
Maybe I am the weird but there is nothing in here that I think is even close to controversial aside maybe geopolitical generalisations?
I don’t know about troll.
Some are exaggerated and some are exactly as I view them. The fun part is deciding which is which!
Personally, what I find regrettable is that major (and remarkable, smart) contributors like @fzakaria, when discussing the utility of AI, fail to mention the associated problems—to name just two: the environmental impact and the negative effects on the education of young people. In the long run, if nothing is done, it’s going to be collectively catastrophic…
I think an underrated part of this article is the American aspect. I think one thing that gets lost in an internet with majorly an Anglosphere based discourse is that most of the world is very different about certain issues, most notably the military.
That’s not to say that everyone are aggressively pacifist outside of America, hardly, specially looking at current day Europe!
And while it may have been the case that in the past, that the Western world largely viewed the US as the global superpower that would protect them and be “the worlds police” (a view I remember e.g. hearing often as a child in Denmark), in the modern day, that has dissipated completely.
I think the problem ISN’T’t that Americans are proud of their military, their veterans, the institutions around it, or the innovations their strong military spend has helped to fund for the world.
The problem is they assume that their national pride at THEIR military is one that everyone in the world shares. And that given how you can live most of your life in America and think the rest of the world thinks like you, how surprised and even frustrated they can be that the rest of the world doesn’t share in the same national pride towards a foreign military as they do.
To be clear: I’m NOT saying that fzakaria’s posts is of this view, hardly!
But it is one I’m seeing very often online from Americans, and one I’ve often seen in NixOS when interacting with Americans.
And I am willing to be a bit opinionated here and say that this type of Americentrism is a negative habit that should be unlearned as an American participating in a global project.
The thing I often ask Americans is this: “Would you be comfortable if I expected you to support the Iranian military? Or the Chinese military?”.
The point isn’t your actual opinion on any of these, your own, or “the military” as a concept in general. It’s the cultural humility to understand that your world view is not “the world view”, and that at times, when it clashes, it may just be the case it’s your own worldview that is narrow and unwilling to compromise, whereas most others consider this obvious table stakes when talking to foreigners.
A non-democratic model works especially well in open-source because you are free to fork the software and try your hand at your own ideas if you disagree – the same cannot be said for our shared geography.
Easy to say, I thought forking nixpkgs has been attempted multiple times but failed, putting it exactly under the “shared geography” (whatever that means)?
And, is there any evidence on the claim?
Aren’t there great projects with foundations? Python, Django, to the point that they are boring, and we never hear of them.
And at the same time, projects with a BDFL that are full of controversy, putting the community at risk (ruby on rails)?
My unsolicited opinion is that, it doesn’t matter if it’s a BDFL or foundation, at the end of the day the people involved are what matters and how we treat each other. The same way you can have dis-functional democracies and functional autocracies, you can end up with good or bad foundations/BDFL.
The question I ask myself is: what happens, in the long run, if you don’t split the power? can a foundation/democracy recover? what about a DFL?
Well, if we do bring this post up on Discourse, we might as well review in public too.
Seems like it’s all too easy to get people in Nix flustered, angry and out with their pitchforks. All it takes…
All it takes is a wee bit of healthy post-irony for people to lose their minds and disregard all of the subsequent or preceding discourse as “personal attacks” against the marginalized and vulnerable group of LLM enthusiasts:)
Nix is […] deeply flawed. […] You should be free to say all of this and yet still believe Nix […]
Nix is incredibly, disgustingly bad, and I have yet to see a maintainer shy away from expressing this very uncontroversial opinion.
Europeans are different from Americans
…but they share at least one thing in common: they are both of them essentially made up. Idk what to reference at this point, we’re so surface-level here. Could start with Snyder, could start with Spooner.
AI is useful
“AI”[1] was useful, and then OpenAI and HuggingFace came along:)
We’ll get there again, but it’s going to take time and effort to recover.
Unfortunately there’s a loud contingent that…
…so much craves removing human communication out of the loop, and is so excited the LLMs might finally free them from having to tolerate people and find compromises, that they won’t hear any of the actual critique[2] and rather invent their own imaginary opposition?
…treats AI output at best as technically unsound
Damn. I wanted to maintain the ironic tone, but, OK, this one maybe does actually happen :shrug:.
…Eelco created Nix in 2003 as part of his PhD research. The NixOS foundation didn’t exist until 2015
And, arguably, neither has played any notable role in the project (meaning Nixpkgs and NixOS) at least in the past decade.
A non-democratic model works especially well in open-source
Good news is: Nixpkgs is not a democracy! We merely have one Team that, since very recently, advocates the democratic model.
…say yes or no and is not simply stonewalled by design-by-committee
Ah yeah we definitely do obsess with transparency in a few places where it actually does more harm than good.
DHH had said it poignantly well:
“…praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition, it’s time we shoot us down some wolf!”
Every hour spent making Nix pleasant on macOS is an hour not spent making Nix extraordinary on Linux
Every hour spent on making Nix extraordinary on Linux is an hour not spent on preparing Nix for the next big thing: systemd-free BSD!
Are you pissed off? Let us still be friends!
This word again… ↩︎
Man, like there isn’t even one reference to pick out and use here. Like, all that stuff that was already mentioned a thousand times about: pricing signals, information asymmetry, privacy, authorship, education, epistemology (“belief v. knowledge”, “outcome v. proof”), community-building, et c, et c. ↩︎
I find it quite baffling how the picture attached under the “AI is useful” section essentially mocks people who are consistent with their beliefs.
I don’t deny, given the right task, LLMs can serve as a useful tool. But given just how much baggage these tools come with, I don’t want to entertain the notion of myself using them, and acting ignorant to real-world issues they and the people behind them cause.
Truth be told, the entire ordeal has strongly weakened both my confidence in the current landscape of open-source, and my pride in much of the software I use and support.
From south in Chile to north in Canada, America is the heart of the world, despite the USA thinking they uniquely are “America”.
I’d love to move this conversation somewhere else 
Not to advocate specifically either side:
The only thing I might want to add is the difference of the scale of investment by the US government between it and other governments. If it was merely #1 maybe we can ignore it but it’s a large outlier.
You cannot avoid it in the US and it’s led to quite a lot of technological advancement that have been made public (public being key distinction).
(I’ll avoid doing the copy-paste Google search for DOE and DOD)
I think a lot of the people skeptical of the US military industrial complex are not against governments funding technical advancements.
The question is whether those “handouts”, as government spending tends to be called by US conservatives, need to take the circuitous and inefficient route through the military before contributing somewhat to society.
If all the money is in defense, yeah, hopefully some good is gonna come off that for the rest of us (apart from all the “safety” the world gets, of course, nobody doubts the safety bit. I feel suffocatingly, painfully safe, really, especially lately).
Why actively and enthusiastically work towards maintaining and even strengthening this system though?
Silicon valley and the LLM companies who’s work you advertise are not an oppressed group of simple workers just trying to get by, forced to do work of questionable ethical justifiability because they’d be out on the street otherwise.
It feels like you’re trying to deflect from those companies, their leaders and from what I can tell their employees here in the community, who are happily working for your current regime and I assume well paid for it.
Instead, the focus should be on the more palatable, vaguely defined people whose useful and honorable work is - yes - somewhat funded by the US military, but that is in the end beneficial to (US) society or even the whole world. Unfairly maligned victims of ignorant EU biases as they are.
I think this oppressed minority of US (ex-)military LLM enthusiasts is more than adequately represented and has enough protection already (and if not, they can just build more, or ask their LLM to build more), but who knows.
One day we’ll all be USers.
Europeans are different from Americans. We hold different cultural values and priorities.
This is the most “American”[1] way of putting it: all Europeans sharing the same values are opposed to the other part of the ocean. We are all the same to you, from here in Spain to Finland, from Denmark to Italy, etc.
[1]: Just the US.
(Just wanted to make fun of this point, don’t take this seriously…)
