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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • i gave up on gentoo when the updates started making my laptop so hot that i had to point my bedroom fan at it in college. i was thinking of doing LFS but by that point gentoo was turning into such a headache and i wanted something simpler. i switched to arch afterwards, but now i mainly just use macos and let tim handle all that stuff for me. although i’m tempted to try arch again when im done with grad school and have more time








  • it is possible to rigorously say that 1/0 = ∞. this is commonly occurs in complex analysis when you look at things as being defined on the Riemann sphere instead of the complex plane. thinking of things as taking place on a sphere also helps to avoid the “positive”/“negative” problem: as |x| shrinks, 1 / |x| increases, so you eventually reach the top of the sphere, which is the point at infinity.





  • i would like to give it another try at some point because it seems like it will probably feel really nice to use once i get the hang of it. but the lack of documentation is pretty rough.

    i also think that for nixos, a lack of documentation is a much more difficult thing to overcome. other distros can piggyback off the arch documentation for most things, but that doesn’t work as well for nixos.


  • i think i would’ve probably had to package the specific kind of vim that i needed, because i wanted neovim and a gui too or something. this was also like 3-4 years ago so its possible the documentation for this kind of stuff has considerably improved since i tried, or that there are now packages that make this sort of thing easier. and it’s definitely possible everything existed at the time and i just couldn’t figure it out.

    but i ended up with a similar feeling to the one you described: stuff is easy when you do it their way, using their tools; but things are very hard to do if you deviate from the path.

    i know this is just sort of an inevitable part of the design paradigm they use, and that everything probably works very nicely if you learn their language and the various ins and outs of the operating system, but i just wasn’t willing to commit that much to it.


  • not to mention how many things they want to go through their system. getting vim set up “their way” while also trying to install python3 support, vimtex, and plug-vim was almost impossible. not to mention finding a way to store the vim configs separately from the rest of nixos. (i use vim on multiple operating systems so switching everything to the nixos wasn’t a viable option.)

    maybe there was a better way to do it that i didn’t know about, but boy did i try to find it.