There’s a point at which logic/reason/wisdom overrides our curiosity, and there are quite literally multi-nation groups that collaborate on matters of global importance.
There are plenty of examples of this, e.g. when we discovered how to harness nuclear energy, we quickly realized that extreme measures needed to be taken to ensure we don’t collectively destroy ourselves.
> There are plenty of examples of this, e.g. when we discovered how to harness nuclear energy, we quickly realized that extreme measures needed to be taken to ensure we don’t collectively destroy ourselves.
You’re speaking of “we” as if the whole world was operating in unison, while there’s a war going on in Iran over nuclear disagreements.
The nuclear situation only reached stability after multiple countries fully developed it. I don’t see the parallels to halting AI.
It's hard for me to understand how the parallels wouldn't be abundantly clear.
The nuclear stabilization that occurred was the result of a collective understanding of the existential risk it posed leading to anti-proliferation agreements and superpowers going to great lengths to prevent nations deemed as unstable from obtaining such technology.
Some portion of the global community may collectively discover/decide that the risk AI presents is worthy of anti-proliferation treaties and wars may be fought over it.
The main gap in the comparison is that we have a much clearer understanding of the risks of unchecked nuclear weapons use than we do about what current and future AI tech might or might not unleash.
The underlying point is that we have historically placed limits on our curiosity when we deem certain paths of exploration existentially dangerous. It has yet to be seen if AI will reach those levels of existential risk, but if they do, there is plenty of precedent for stepping on the brakes.
Yeah, this is exactly why I couldn’t stay on it. I already deal with GAD and OCD, and whatever benefits it had for the depression were directly counteracted by the return of acute anxiety.
It was truly hellish. Feeling like I had this energy that I needed to use, while also feeling so anxious that I didn’t want to leave the apartment.
I know it works really well for some people but I was definitely not one of them.
.env is self sustaining at this point. The functionality described in the post exists to help move people off of it. It’ll have a better chance of dying when fewer people use it and that starts with making it easy to move away from it.
How exactly changing a default that users rely on is going to make it easy to move away from it?
Instead of migrating to dotenv-ng, these users could be putting effort into migrating away from .env files entirely.
edit: I understand SecretSpec needs to parse .env files exactly like Node.js’s dotenv library, which doesn’t support interpolation, to make it easier for these projects to use SecretSpec.
I’m saying making this a standalone library is bad. Rust projects will pick this up and use it instead of SecretSpec, and users of the unmaintained Rust crate will migrate to it.
About halfway through my career, I spent about 10 years working in the enterprise SaaS/PaaS space. 6 as a developer, ~4 as a product manager. Both sides of that coin are difficult. Trying to create a product strategy that meets the needs of hundreds of large companies is a special kind of hell. And on the dev side, even "simple" things are not simple when they have to be implemented at scale, software updates cannot break existing customer code/configurations, and customers must have a hundreds knobs and dials and scripted escape hatches to implement their own business logic.
Even when code was not the hardest problem, it was still a hard problem.
Not OP, I’m not really sure what your specific complaints are based on the original comment. They seemed more like general/nonspecific concerns, which left the comment pretty open to interpretation.
I’m here in the thread and I can answer questions or elaborate on things, so if you want to know what I meant you can just ask me and there’s a good chance I’ll respond.
I’ve been running a NixOS based homelab for awhile now with 5 physical hosts and about 30 NixOS containers/VMs in an Incus cluster and I can’t imagine moving away from my central Nix repo and ability to rebuild/upgrade the entire fleet in one command and feel confident that things will work.
While I’m concerned about the disbanding, it would take quite a lot to make me look elsewhere, and there’s enough critical mass that I feel confident others will step up.
YMMV, I don’t run a home lab, I just have a NAS and run a personal website. I definitely don’t have a “fleet”. I have two servers running Debian and I can bring them back up from zero in <30 minutes.
“Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with changes and it’s possible that things break. My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.
Regarding Nix complaints:
Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe you find something that is actively updated, maybe not. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off because the maintainer didn’t bother. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons. What I want is just to know what level of distro-level maintenance the package has, including its transitive dependencies.
Docs are just kinda bad. Fragmented across different sites. Docs teaching you Nix forwards or backwards, or teaching old Nix, or teaching Nix with flakes, or teaching you Nix for end-users or developers or package maintainers, or Nix on Mac or NixOS. A surprising number of broken links. What I want is one site, with a little drop-down menu to select the version I am using. What I have is hours spent on the NixOS Discord trying to figure out how to do basic stuff.
Yeah. I fixed AI/GPU stack consisting of 6 existing packages to run CLI on Mac. Fixed all comments during several weeks. And then silence. No approve no nothing for few months. Closed PR and will never come back.
> “Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway.
I'm not using "rebuild" to describe recreating an instance from scratch, but in the "nixos-rebuild" sense, i.e. I can deploy a fleet-wide configuration shared by all hosts, or apply package updates across the fleet, etc.
As for the skepticism, all I can offer is my experience which is that it does indeed work, and I've been running this way for awhile.
> Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with changes and it’s possible that things break.
The only time I've had breaking changes that required manual intervention was on a major release update. The issue amounted to "You're using abc configuration option but should be using xyz instead". This message was clearly logged, and fixing it was a matter of a few minutes of reading why a particular property name had changed.
Those updates happen twice/year, and in the last ~3 years I think two packages have forced me to make a change. Unless you're running unstable, you won't encounter this for ongoing package updates within a release.
On the topic of rebuilding from scratch, that's not a single command, but it's only a few. VMs/containers mount incus volumes (zfs-backed) for data storage, and a fresh rebuild is a matter of spawning a new instance from my homelab base image (I use OpenTofu to orchestrate this), running a nixos-rebuild targeting the new instance from my workstation, and things are back up and running. But I'm less focused on full rebuilds since I'm already doing Incus backups and can restore on any of the nodes in my Incus cluster.
> My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.
My goals are similar. I can completely understand sticking with Debian for two hosts. I had experimented with NixOS for years but never really went all-in until I started expanding my homelab environment. At that point, NixOS just clicked and I'm far more productive with 30+ hosts than I used to be with 1-2.
> Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe...
Which channel were you running on? And do you have any examples of specific packages? What you're describing just sounds foreign to me. I currently default to the latest stable release but if there's something that isn't in stable I'll override that specific package to use unstable. Much of the community just runs everything on unstable, but I prefer a slightly slower pace of updates.
Nixpkgs is the largest package repository across distros by volume, and as much as I love Debian, it's far more common to find things missing there.
> Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons
This sounds like you're branching into territory that can no longer be reasonably framed as NixOS vs. Debian (or other distro of choice).
> Docs are just kinda bad.
This is by far the project's greatest weakness. LLMs have been the saving grace. The frontier models are excellent at NixOS and I've switched to mostly having a conversation in my NixOS Claude project when I need info. This is in no way a defense of the docs, but for anyone motivated to use NixOS, there is at least a good option beyond the docs themselves.
I moved my homelab to Kubernetes. I just don’t see the use of single VPS’es. But I use the cluster as a training platform, so if I didn’t need Kubernetes in other parts of my life, I probably would have stuck with my NixOS VPS’es that all share config.
I use kubenix to manage the cluster, of course. ;-)
The two aren't mutually exclusive! I just finished porting my personal kubernetes cluster from running on Debian to running on NixOS. Now whenever I want to update the host OS on my kubernetes nodes, I just build a new bootable ISO from my Nix configs and upload it to my servers, swapping out the whole OS atomically. If anything goes wrong, I can swap back to my previous build. No more anxiety running `sudo apt-get upgrade` and hoping for the best.
But as the host OS I use Talos Linux, which itself is declarative and minimal. For small Kubernetes version upgrades, I upgrade the kubelet with an API command. When that isn't possible, I upload a new Talos image and swap them.
Since the nodes are cloud VMs, I will use a spare VM to add as a new node, and remove an old node. So I never run with fewer nodes. For my on-prem cluster, I will do the same with a spare hypervisor VM. It really helps ensure my nodes are ephemeral.
So NixOS, for now, has become a desktop/laptop operating system for me, and whenever I need an execution environment, e.g. a CI runner or a remote shell, I choose "something Nix-like" which is `nix` in a container without systemd.
True. I tried a few more times. There is just so much wrong with the design. First 90 words super easy and then super hard? Why not random? Why is the longest description the correct one? Why so many? Why 3 clicks?
If there's any reason to take seriously the idea that AI is conscious, we must then take seriously the idea that many other non-living things are conscious.
Unless the argument is that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity or information density, why would AI be any more or less conscious than my toaster?
It seems to me that it's far more likely that everything is conscious than it is that AI is somehow uniquely more conscious than other things.
What makes us conscious anyway? As I write this sentence, my brain generates words and contracts specific muscles in my hands to type, but I don't really understand how. I'm just aware that it happens. Apparently I'm no aware of every single neuronal activity, so what I am aware of?
Could be! I think the broader thought experiment is about examining why we think LLMs specifically might be conscious vs other complex systems, even if it is a spectrum.
For example, there’s a case to be made that the ecosystem we collectively exist in is far more complex than the largest LLM, but it’s currently less popular to debate “is the earth conscious?” or “is the universe conscious”, presumable because we can’t speak to those systems in human language.
I’m trying to tease out what I think is the likelihood that we tend to ascribe consciousness to AI for the same reasons we see faces in clouds. We’re biologically conditioned to recognize patterns that indicate “like us”, but I think a number of thought experiments point to either a) there’s no reason to believe AI is “conscious” or b) the conversation has to to be expanded beyond AI.
> the conversation has to to be expanded beyond AI.
Unlikely. I think the same mental machinery that runs tribalism is why humans like to categorize rather than consider things as continuous. And, worse, I think the actual purpose of tribalism is to turn off higher level though, so you, an otherwise social creature, can rationalize the need to kill your fellow man in harsh times. I think "don't go outside the categorical box" is deeply hard wired.
I'm not arguing against the idea that consciousness is a spectrum. If anything, I'm agreeing. I'm just pointing out that if AI is somewhere on that spectrum, there is almost certainly a lot more on that spectrum than we're currently discussing as a species.
I have to point out the irony of the categorical nature of your claim about categorical thinking ;)
But what kind of complexity is that? And why would we conclude that AI has it while other incredibly complex systems (e.g. earth’s habitats, the universe itself) does not?
I’m far more open to the idea that many systems are conscious than the idea that this current generation of LLMs is somehow special.
I'd say that AI is too poorly understood at this point to conclude whether it does or does not possess some form of consciousness. It has a few features that privilege it over other systems like the ones you've described (though I think it's entirely possible that those too are conscious): the networks underpinning modern AI are largely inspired by those we've observed in brains, and the apparently intelligent behaviours exhibited by AI have historically only been exhibited by entities which we accept to be conscious.
>If there's any reason to take seriously the idea that AI is conscious, we must then take seriously the idea that many other non-living things are conscious.
That, I believe is why the objection to AI exists, that conclusion is unacceptable.
It seems like we are experiencing "Vindication of the Rights of Brutes" all over again.
I understand what you're getting at, but I think you may be misinterpreting me slightly.
I'm not outright dismissing the possibility that AI could be conscious; I'm saying that if we take the possibility that it is seriously, the conversation has to expand beyond AI. I'm not using this argument to conclude that it must therefore be absurd that AI could be conscious, just pointing out that the implications of AI being conscious would reach far beyond just AI. I'm mostly curious if people who find themselves comfortable with the idea that AI might be conscious also find themselves comfortable with the idea that other sufficiently complex systems might be.
Taylor's work was based on the premise that he found it absurd that women deserve the same rights as men. If my conclusion was: "I find it absurd that other things might be conscious, so it is also absurd that AI might be conscious", I think the comparison would be fair. But that's not what I'm getting at.
There are plenty of examples of this, e.g. when we discovered how to harness nuclear energy, we quickly realized that extreme measures needed to be taken to ensure we don’t collectively destroy ourselves.
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