> The flakes were the main UX/DX improvement for me. Before them I honestly could not do anything.
Agreed. I think flakes are far more intuitive than channels. In a flake everything is declared in the repo it's used in. I still don't understand channels.
For someone who's used to thinking in channels, I suppose flakes would be jarring. For someone (like me) who came from the world of Project.toml and package.json, flakes make a lot of sense.
I think a lot of people come to Nix and NixOS from Linux and similar environments, where having "repositories" or "registries" is fairly common as a way for distributing indexes of software in their distributions. So it's quite naturally moving in that way.
But for someone coming from OSX/macOS or Windows where there basically is just one index (provided by the companies maintaining the OSes) and you can't really add/remove others, it's a completely new concept, makes sense there is at least a bit of friction as those people wrap their head around it.
I'm not sure I understand your point. You're saying that channels are like apt/sources.list or yum.repos.d, and flakes are like the Apple App Store? Or the other way around?
One thing that probably didn't help my understanding of channels was that I run Nix on non-NixOS systems (primarily MacOS and Fedora). If I'd stuck to NixOS, then thinking of a channel in the same terms as apt/sources.list or yum.repos.d would have been an easier mental model.
Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the mean annual wage of "Automotive Technicians and Repairers (SOC code 49-3020)" is $55,780 as of May 2025, so yeah, something doesn't add up.
For example, by law in California, auto mechanics make double minimum wage if they don't own their tools (so they can go buy some). That works out to about $68k/yr these days.
$120k/yr is not suuuuuper crazy in some areas for some auto work (think restoration). But generally, yes, Ford is not adding up here
> auto mechanics make double minimum wage if they don't own their tools (so they can go buy some)
I think you have that backwards:
"Typically, in California, if your employer wants you to provide and maintain your own work tools, they must pay you at least double the minimum wage. This means that in 2025, with California’s minimum wage at $16.50 per hour, your employer must pay you at least $33.00 per hour before they can require you to supply your own tools."
Auto mechanics make double minimum wage if the do own their own tools.
I remember hearing about that rumen swap experiment. One of my professors at the time said that more substantial changes could be affected by doing repeat rumen content swaps.
The docs recommend setting up KaTeX CSS (which requires either a CDN link or Node), but by changing output to 'mathml,' you can have the browser render equations with zero dependencies.
No, it's not "normal," but it is fairly common. When I worked in NGS, nearly 1/4 of flow cells were duds. ONT used to have a policy where you could return the cell and get a new one if it failed its self-test.
I think all elected officials plug their ears when they hear this.
I know the governors of Wyoming gave land away to NCAR and Microsoft talking about how they were going to "diversify Wyoming's economy," and then every employee of those data centers was a contractor out of Colorado. The current governor has kept up the hype, now claiming that AI will be good for the local energy companies despite the fact that the proposed centers are going to be connected to out-of-state energy pipelines.
When you look at top campaign contributions and see Google and Microsoft at the top, you understand why the gubernatorial class keeps their ears plugged.
> scientists have uncovered a mechanism that could help explain this connection, finding that bacteria can travel through swallowed saliva into the pancreas
Except, this study didn't do that. It did shotgun sequencing and found a correlation between certain microbial species (some were fungal, not bacterial) and cancer risk. It *did not* demonstrate anything about mechanism.
Based on the way it's phrased, maybe this article is saying that previous studies have found a mechanism, and this study found the microbial culprits. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full study to see if that's the case in its introduction or discussion. Even so, that's an incredibly misleading opening to the article.
Except Apple code signing on MacOS is basically what Google is trying to copy over to Android. I can run arbitrary programs on MacOS, but I have to go and remove the com.apple.quarantine attribute from any application that doesn't have Apple's explicit permission to exist, i.e. most FOSS apps. I suspect that option will go away eventually.
That already happened. ARM Macs require code to either be signed or "ad-hoc signed", which doesn't use a key so it's not really a signature, it's more like a SHA hash whitelist that's local to your machine.
This is the point I keep getting at in the other thread, it's a confusing topic.
It is technically possible, yes. You can turn Gatekeeper off via the command line in various ways, or even via an obscure deliberately non-discoverable set of GUI tricks.
But it isn't reasonable to expect any normal person to do that. So, in practice, any app that isn't some open source widget targeting developers does register them with Apple. In this sense it also isn't possible.
This isn't specific to ARM. It's also been true on Intel Macs for a long time too. The only thing that changed on ARM is some minor detail - the kernel now requires a "signature" for all binaries, but a "signature" is also allowed to be a hash match against a local machine-specific whitelist, so this doesn't make much difference in practice to anyone except toolchain developers. It seems to have mostly been about reducing tech debt in the security stack.
The registration process is however very lightweight. There are no app policies involved beyond "don't distribute malware" and "verify your ID so we can do something about it if you do". It's not like the app store where there are lots of very subjective criteria. To get an identity is nearly automatic, you can do it as an individual with a credit card and approval is automated. Ditto for applications: it's automatic and driven by a simple (albeit undocumented) REST API. You upload a zip containing your signed app to S3, it's processed automatically, the app now works. The notarization API is extremely open - you need an API key, but otherwise anyone can notarize anything, including apps written by other people. So in the early years of this system when lack of notarization just triggered a security warning, lots of people notarized any app they found that was missing it. This made a nice smooth backwards compatible path to transition the ecosystem. Nowadays, there is no bypassable security warning, an unnotarized app is just described as corrupted and won't open without tricks.
So - does macOS "support" sideloading or not? It's very ambiguous. You can argue both yes and no.
They'd have a job doing that one. Speaking as a 30 year laptop user with no interest in ipads. I've never seen the point of ipads - it's like a phone that can't make phone calls.
I'm with you but it's not up to us. Computing has been moving more and more away from desktops and laptops in new (human) generations. iPadOS is slowly becoming Mac-like where you can have a cursor, dock, and have apps open as windows. The Pro models already use the same silicon as some Macs. They could start by eliminating the lower spec Macs because the iPad is basically the same but with a touch screen. You'll just need to get all your apps on the App Store so Apple gets their cut.
Agreed. I think flakes are far more intuitive than channels. In a flake everything is declared in the repo it's used in. I still don't understand channels.
For someone who's used to thinking in channels, I suppose flakes would be jarring. For someone (like me) who came from the world of Project.toml and package.json, flakes make a lot of sense.
reply