hallettj

I think you can mount an ISO image under your running system and make changes. I found a couple of guides that might be helpful:

How to Mount an ISO File on Linux

Edit and repack .iso bootable image

I haven’t done this before, but I think you can chroot into the mount directory, and run package manager commands in the mounted image to install another package.

Or I have an alternative suggestion that might or might not be easier. I’ve been hearing a lot about immutable/atomic distros, and people designing their own images. You could make your own ublue image, for example, with whatever you want on it.

A promising looking starting point is github:ublue-os/startingpoint. Ignore the “Installation” instructions, and follow the “ISO” instructions instead.

Or I saw recently an announcement of a new way to build atomic images that is supposed to be easier than ever, BlueBuild

LEDs should last for tens of thousands of hours. There may have been a manufacturing defect in OP’s case.

AFAIK the best thing you can do to improve your coffee-freezing process is to prevent moisture from getting into the beans when you thaw. If you let it, moisture from the air will condense on the cold beans. So keep the beans in a closed, airtight container until they come to room temperature. (Airtight because water vapor is air.) So yeah, jars are good for this. Or sealed freezer bags should work too.

Well ok, they both use symlinks but in different ways. I think what I was trying to say is that in NixOS it’s symlinks all the way down.

IIUC on Fedora Atomic you have an ostree image, and some directories in the image are actually symlinks to the mutable filesystem on /var. Files that are not symlinks to /var (and that are not inside those symlinked directories), are hard links to files in the ostree object store. (Basically like checked-out files in a git repository?)

On NixOS this is what happens if examine what’s in my path:

$ which curl
/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl

$ ls -l /run | grep current-system
/run/current-system -> /nix/store/p92xzjwwykjj1ak0q6lcq7pr9psjzf6w-nixos-system-yu-23.11.20231231.32f6357

$ ls -l /run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl -> /nix/store/r304lglsa9i2jy5hpbdz48z3j3x2n4a6-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl

If I select a previous configuration when I boot I would get a different symlink target for /run/current-system. And what makes updates atomic is the last step is to switch the /run/current-system symlink which switches over all installed packages at once.

I can temporarily load up the version of curl from NixOS Unstable in a shell and see a different result,

$ nix shell nixpkgs-unstable#curl  # this works because I added nixpkgs-unstable to my flake registry
$ which curl
/nix/store/0mjq6w6cx1k9907vxm0k5pk7pm1ifib3-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl  # note the hash is different

I could have a different version curl installed in my user profile than the one installed system-wide. In that case I’d see this:

$ which curl
/home/jesse/.nix-profile/bin/curl

$ ls -la /home/jesse | grep .nix-profile
.nix-profile -> /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse/profile

$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse
profile -> profile-133-link
profile-130-link -> /nix/store/ylysfs90018zc9k0p0dg7x6wvzqcq68j-user-environment
profile-131-link -> /nix/store/9hjiznbaii7a8aa36i8zah4c0xcd8w6d-user-environment
profile-132-link -> /nix/store/h4kkw1m5q6zdhr6mlwr26n638vdbbm2c-user-environment
profile-133-link -> /nix/store/jgxhrhqiagvhd6g42d17h4jhfpgxsk3n-user-environment

Basically symlinks upon symlinks everywhere you look. (And environment variables.)

So I guess at the end everything is symlinks on NixOS, and everything is hard links plus a set of mount paths on Fedora Atomic.

When science kills the mystery, semantics keeps the debate alive!

To answer your other question, yes there are still single-cell organisms evolving into new species all the time, in the ocean and elsewhere. That includes new multi-cellular species evolving from single cells all the time. But it takes a long time to develop from cell, to clump of slime, to something with legs. So you might not notice the changes if you aren’t super patient.

Or were those separate questions? Are you asking if chickens descended from single-cell organisms? Yes they did. With a lot of steps in between.

“Atomic” is a catchy descriptor! Atomic distros for the Atomic Age! It could be an umbrella term since NixOS and Guix are atomic, but instead of images and partitions they use symlinks, and patch binaries to use full paths for libraries and programs that they reference. So there are image-based distros, and I guess expression-derived distros which are both atomic.

I haven’t tried image-based distros. This post fills in some gaps for me. Thanks for the write-up!

Here is a source with lots of detail on how carbon emissions compare: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/23/do-electric-cars-really-produce-fewer-carbon-emissions-than-petrol-or-diesel-vehicles

The tl;dr is that EVs have lower lifetime emissions. If the relevant grids use low-carbon sources then emissions are far lower. (But not as low as bicycles.)

Oh this is just the thing for playing bard, and casting “vicious mockery” several times per combat

Everything gets done so mind-bogglingly slowly! There’s always someone you have to talk, who has to talk to someone else. Bureaucratic processes often end up taking hours or days!! I knew to expect this - but experiencing it firsthand is a shock. How do people get anything done? They’ve computerized some things which helps. But every interface and every database schema has to be designed by a human which I’m told is expensive and takes even longer.

I like to use Obsidian for this kind of thing. It has tagging, and you can link notes and see the network of links in a visualizer. There’s also a “canvas” feature that lets you lay out notes spatially in whatever way makes sense to you. I assume there is a web clipping plugin which could make it easy to grab the comment content and link at the same time.

The first computer I used was (I think) a CP/M system that could run BASIC, and I used to use it to play Castle in the early '90s.

The first computer of my own was a Gateway laptop for college in 2002. It was the first Wi-Fi device I laid hands on. I immediately set it up to play music to wake me up in the morning, and I listened to the fans running all night.

I’ve been reading about increasing unionization and strike activity, leading to better deals for large groups of workers. The industry-level negotiations we’re already seeing are helpful in isolation; but that’s also the kind of energy that can lead to economic reforms that have a real impact on quality of life. Workers seem like the little guys, until a lot of them are pulling in the same direction, and then suddenly their demands become existentially important.

About a century-ish ago Americans were worse off than they are now. That led to desire for change, which led to decades of trust-busting, unionization, and regulation. We got things like weekends off, and a livable minimum wage. And not entirely unrelated, we also got national parks, the EPA, and endangered species preservation. We’ve back-slid a lot since those advances. But we can get them back, and push the needle even further next time. We did it before, we can do it again.

Allow me to share, Federated Wiki. I don’t think it uses ActivityPub, but otherwise I think it’s close to what you described. Instead of letting anyone edit articles it uses more of a fork & pull request model.

I was curious if this was real, and it is! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7966641.stm

This comment really speaks to how I feel.

In addition to flattening the wealth curve on the high end, I think the first change I would want is to increase the federal minimum wage. For decades wages have been stagnant while cost-of-living has grown which has led to mass economic insecurity. I think a lot of current political tension is a direct result. That makes it difficult to cooperate to implement policies that would help people.

I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively.

I don’t quite agree with this. In NixOS you can write custom expressions that fetch software from any source, and stitch them into your configuration as first-class packages. So you do get access to all Linux-capable software natively, but not necessarily easily. (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)

I use this process to bring nightly releases of neovim and nushell into my reproducible config. Ok, I do use flakes that other people published for building those projects, which is a bit like installing from a community PPA. But when I wanted to install Niri, a very new window manager I wrote the package and NixOS module expressions all by myself!

This points to an interesting feature that appears in English: phrasal verbs. This is where a verb is made up of a verb word used in combination with one or more prepositions or “particles”. For example in the phrase “put cheese on the pizza” the verb word “put” combines with the preposition “on”. (There is no particle in this example.) Even though the words “put” and “on” are not consecutive, and even though “on” has its own function as a preposition, “put on” together form a verb that is lexically distinct (has different meaning and rules) from “put” used with a different preposition or particle.

IIUC you even get a different meaning if you use the same words with a different function. With “on” as a preposition you get, “put cheese on the pizza”. But with the particle form of “on” you get a different verb with a different meaning: “put on a coat”.

The use you posted, “put cheese”, looks like a transitive form of “put” which would be distinct from both of the phrasal verbs I described. My guess is that this is dialect-specific: maybe some English speakers perceive transitive “put” as valid, while others only use “put” as part of a phrasal verb.

Language is messy, and there is no authoritative set of rules for English so you’ll find lots of cases where people disagree about correct grammar. One of the classics is whether “where” substitutes for a prepositional or a noun phrase. Lots of people feel it is correct to say, “Where is that at?” while others think that sounds wrong, like saying, “It’s at by the corner.” (I think this might be the basis for the made-up rule, “don’t end sentences with a preposition”.)

Maybe a better case study would be figs since people actually eat those. From what I’m seeing in search results there is some difference of opinion, but maybe the prevailing opinion is that figs are fine for vegans because they are not intentionally exploitative or cruel to animals.

Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants.

I bring this up too. What my kid asks, “what is vegan?”, and my wife says, “someone who eats plants”, then I shout from across the room, “and fungi!” Tbh no one is amused but me.

There’s nothing hypocritical about eating fungi! I just want recognition for the fungal contribution.