Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583476

Points: 13

# Comments: 2

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.

Even when code was not the hardest problem, it was still a hard problem.

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’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.

Un-constrained frontier models can also generate all sorts of creative stories. At what point should we start ascribing agency/intent to the output? I think the "I want to live" statement is so deeply human that we find it hard to ignore, but what makes the text generated in those moments any more attributable to a conscious entity than the text generated when it is confabulating its love for someone it has no ability to see/feel/understand?

A chess engine sacrificing pieces to avoid checkmate isn't afraid of losing in any meaningful sense. I guess the question is: is there a point where complexity somehow becomes experience?

I think we're playing with questions we don't have a framework to answer in any meaningful way until we make progress on understanding what consciousness actually is. I don't necessarily think that an LLM exhibiting preservation behaviors that can be directly traced to their goal-oriented programming can be interpreted as evidence of consciousness necessarily. Or if it can be, we then have to explain how this is different from the many other things these LLMs "say".

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Isn't this a bit like saying "So, if we had proof that god exists, how long would it take for you to accept that to be true?".

When we have evidence that AI is demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, I'll be interested. Until then, I don't see a good reason to take the idea seriously.

When a car runs out of gas, it's out of gas. It's not "tired". When your phone battery is low, your phone is not "tired". These states are far closer to the human meaning of tired than an LLM operating at the edges of its usable context, and we still don't use the word tired to describe them.