These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.

> pathway to integrating AI into our most challenging and intellectually rigorous fields to the benefit of all humankind.

There's very little insight here though. It seems mostly a retread of conversations we've been having in the academic community for a few years now. In particular, I was hoping to see some discussion of how we might restructure our educational institutions around this technology, when the machines rob students of the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. Right now our best idea seems to be a retreat to oral and written examinations; an idea which doesn't scale and which ignores the supposed benefits of human+AI reasoning. The alternative suggestion I've seen is to teach prompt engineering, which seems (a) hard for foundational subjects and (b) again, seems to outsource much of the thinking to the AI, instead of extending the reach of human thought.

On the one hand, it's great, as so many others here and TFA have attested. Declaratively specifying your system configuration and using snapshots to keep track of everything is a complete game-changer. Similarly great is the absolutely huge universe of installable packages. The coverage here is so much better than what's on offer from Ubuntu or Fedora.

On the other hand, the current implementation is still a bit of a shit-show.

First, there's nix-the-OS and nix-the-package-manager which is pretty confusing. Effectively it means you manage your OS with one declarative system and your local/home config with another. Then there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood, that seem to offer a different modality altogether.

Second, installing packages is nice, but also confusing. Do you install a package or a service? Often both are available and the difference is not always clear. Eventually I learned to choose a service whenever one was available. In either case, the tendency of package maintainers is to install the smallest possible version of whatever you asked for. For example, I wanted KDE but what I got was a bare minimum version with plenty of missing apps and functionality that could only be fixed by adding extra components, one at a time, after debugging whatever was currently breaking.

I appreciated that services and packages can be configured in the configuration file. But the options exposed are usually a partial set of what's available -- without extending the installations scripts yourself. So now my "declarative" config is a mix of what's in my nixOS config file and what's in my manually edited /etc files.

Third, the documentation, mentioned by others, is a mess. There's all kinds of information about old and new versions. The interfaces of the command-line tools seem to have changed between the 25.05 stable that I chose and the then-upcoming 25.11, which made following-along harder than it needed to be.

I eventually gave up because I needed a working machine and not a new hobby. I was left with the impression that NixOS might be a good choice for system admins, but perhaps not yet ready for desktop Linux users.

Why does this change the calculus for management? They don't pay folks to be happy, they pay them to do their jobs. Threaten to take away the labour however and you create a bargaining position. That's how strikes and threats of strikes work. This letter is fundamentally different. For a start, have you considered the veracity of a list of anonymous petitioners? How do you differentiate the real thing from a made up list?

My first inclination is to read letters like this as a threat from employees to the employer. It says hey boss-men, this shite is not on. Signing anonymously undermines that message. I tend to read those signatures as as, I don't like this but it's not worth my job. I have no faith in the efficacy or even existence of "obstruct or delay" tactics from folks like that.

I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.

> What happened in 1989 in Tianeman Square?

> The events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, often referred to as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June Fourth Massacre, were a series of protests and subsequent government crackdown in Beijing, China. Here’s a concise overview:

EDIT:

OK, this is interesting. When I ran the above query I already had a chat history. When I start a new chat I get the results you describe.

wtf Proton?

I think you're saying the same thing as the GP? Ulysses is a book for lit nerds, which I suppose the Modern Library board were.

Looking at the list, there's hardly any books from after mid 20th century. That makes me think that the board comprised primarily old lit nerds, who stopped reading long before voting. The list is also super ethno centric, which makes me more dubious still about the claims for "best" anything.