Sometimes the right way is the hard way (and sometimes it is just hard)
I am already having trouble keeping this site up to date, and now I
think I have just made it harder easier on myself. I decided
to try and move things from ArchLinux to NixOS. NixOS is undoubtedly the right way
to do things: declarative and reproducible, but it is a hard way. Your
file system is not what you are used to anymore, and every simple task
where you relied on habit and muscle memory becomes a conscious,
deliberate struggle. There may be value in forcing a deliberateness on
our actions, but it certainly does not feel good. LLMs do make the task
possible, but it isn't fair to say that they make it easier. For a niche
system there are not that many users, so not that much text. For a young
system that is rapidly changing, and occassionally breaking, the text
the LLM assembles will often not be correct. Of course neither is the
NixOS documentation. So, there you go. That's life. I have had the LLMs
give me a few lines that seemed like miracles, and then lost 1/2 a day
to stuff where I should have just done an old school web search to find
a blog post that walks me through it. How can you tell, at the start,
which sort of question you have? One positive is that this is making me
acutely aware of how my new usage of LLMs can deprive me of knowledge
even as it augments function. It forces to me to ask myself explicitly
when I find that trade-off acceptable.
Now that this new blog structure is working it should be very hard for me to break it. That seems useful. But in getting here I am now too tired to write anything substansive. Just take this as evidence that the lab is alive, and I am working on sharing its activity some day. But now I need a nap.