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

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  • Old version docs tend to offer you a redirect to more recent docs

    Sadly, the docs, I’ve worked with (openstack and ansible) frequently, don’t do this. They have a button to go to the latest version of the docs, but not to the equivalent page on the latest version. This means I have to find the equivalent page again, from the integrated search usually.

    And yes, a lot can change between versions. New features can get added that solve your problems or older stuff can get removed.






  • I used to spend a ton of time helping people on reddit with linux and related things, and the “why” matters immensely in that case.

    XY problem was extremely common, where someone was trying to achieve a goal through “incorrect” means.

    I also saw many, many people’s issues where they wanted something, but were referring to it by a different name, ending up confused and lost. All I had to do was say “you actually want Y” and point them on their way, and they would be happy.

    And then of course, sometimes people try to do something that’s simply not possible (or more usually, not implemented in software.).

    But in general, it’s very difficult to help people who don’t make it easy for you to help them, and part of that is explaining the “why”, in addition to their issue.


  • I usually use nix to manage my development environments.

    At the root of the git repo for my blog, there is a shell.nix file. This file, shell.nix, declares an entire shell environment, giving me tools, environment variables, and other things I need. I just run nix-shell while in the same directory as the shell.nix file, and it creates that shell environment.

    There are other options, like VSCode has support for developing in a docker container (only docker, not podman or lxc).

    I think lxc/incus (same thing) containers are kinda excessive for this case, because those containers are a full linux system, complete with an init system and whatnot. Such a thing is going to use more resources (ram, cpu, and storage space), and it’s also going to be more to manage compared to application containers (docker, podman), which are typically very stripped down and come with only what is needed to run the application.

    I used to use anaconda, but switched away because it doesn’t have all the packages I wanted, and couldn’t control the versions of packages installed very well, whereas nix does these both very well. Anaconda is very similar in usage though, especially once you start setting up multiple virtual anaconda environments for separate projects. However, I don’t know if anaconda is as portable as nix is, able to create an entire environment from a single file of code.