Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?...
honestly, i 100% do not miss GUIs that hopefully do what you want them to do or have options grayed out or don’t include all the available options etc etc
i do get burnout, and i suffer many of the same symptoms. but i have a solution that works for me: NixOS
ok it does sound like i gave you more homework, but hear me out:
with NixOS and flakes you have a commit history for your lab services, all centralized in one place.
this can include as much documentation as you want: inline comments, commit messages, living documents in your repository, whatever
even services that only provide a Docker based solution can be encapsulated and run by Nix, including using an alternate runtime like podman or containerd
(this one will hammer me with downvotes but i genuinely do think that:) you can use an LLM agent like GitHub Copilot to get you started, learn the Nix language and ecosystem, and create Nix modules for things that need to be wrapped. i’ve been a software engineer for 15 years; i’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to making a working system. what i want is a working system.
Does anyone know of any good, reasonably fast software to scan through a load of video files. Hours/weeks of footage to sift out any motion detected reasonably quickly. Preferably with a GUI....
i’d vibe code something in Python for this tbh, but i have some expertise in this area already. you could even get some classification going with a YOLO model to help you narrow down the search. it won’t have a GUI unless you count Jupyter notebooks.
someone was asking for a GUI, so not going to be an ffmpeg expert. likely the LLM would recommend ffmpeg anyway. plus you would run YOLO (or maybe CLIP) locally; it has been running on Android phones since 2020 at least. a Jupyter notebook would also give a quick and dirty GUI to visualize and document the solution. plus “motion detection” is probably not the full story, and any video will probably have artifacting that means you’d have to tune the motion detection algorithm or end up with a bunch of garbage artifacts/false positives in the end. also, sounds like the user isn’t looking for something long-running like Frigate. if the user isn’t familiar with Python and wants to do something downstream like sort the outputs or whatever, an LLM would help with that.
sure, programmatically, it’s not a difficult problem, but like it or not it can be solved by someone without an advanced CS degree with an LLM precisely because the problem is easy. no easily ready solution exists, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. “just use ffmpeg” to someone like my dad who might have the know how to install Linux but isn’t a programmer isn’t exactly the simple advice it sounds like.
I've been reading up on the concept of dotfile management, and I've come across tools such as GNU Stow, chezmoi, and yadm, but before I select a tool, I'd like to understand the workflow a little better....
normally it’s for syncing across machines, but it is convenient for setting up new machines. i use chezmoi and Nix and some other tools to keep things in sync
Some projects keep surprising me with their “solutions,” and this is one of those cases. A proposal under review by developers from GNOME and Mozilla could change how middle-mouse-button paste behaves on Linux and other Unix-like systems....
this feels like a breaking change akin to macOS changing the Command key to bringing up a start menu because it confuses Windows users. platforms have differences, and this one is actually so tiny and inconsequential it feels like any ameliorated confusion will be offset by confusion of people that rely on it and use it. is this really the barrier to adoption?
I wanted to start contributing to an open source software project yesterday evening, and they recommend virtual box to not mess with your default installation of the program and the databases it uses....
other commenters have hinted at this, but the main point of most of the good advice is this: don’t use the system Python install (ie the one from apt) for development. uv is my go to, but the idea behind *conda, pyenv, asdf, etc is the same. the underlying OS shouldn’t be an issue; you should be able to ship the code between OSs and build just fine, ideally.
Hi everyone. It has been a while since I started using Linux, so I got at least a nice amount of knowledge on Linux and shell but I can be considered as new when it comes to Nix. I am learning Nix and I have learned enough to move to flakes and set up a very basic home manager configuration but my setup is probably really weird...
the first issue is familiar to me as my first laptop had this issue, while running Windows XP. the fans were going out and simply couldn’t move enough heat. the solution then that mostly worked was one of those laptop stands with fans built in. it worked most of the time, but a real solution might mean cleaning out the chassis and maybe replacing the fans.
for the second, i didn’t really have trouble setting up the Nvidia drivers just following the docs. sorry if that isn’t helpful; i’m stuck with Nvidia for my ML/CUDA stuff.
hey nerds! i got a lovely email from GitHub this morning that their increasingly vibe-coded, barely-working Actions features are about to get more expensive (charging by the minute for something that notoriously spin-locks is a special flavor of shit sandwich)....
good lead. it’s just the one project for now, and to my surprise it’s actually a dependency for the ollama-rs project, so i feel somewhat obligated to keep it stable.
this is my experience as well. we have a bespoke wrapper around Jenkins, and the more we can test locally the less time we have to spend waiting for the system to fail. it’s one of the reasons i’ve adopted just to script things locally as if it was CI.
Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system....
i switched to Linux in 2013ish to get away from my gaming habit and go all in on programming and computer science. that may not work these days as all the games i play work on Linux ha
An Apple fan who has spent “nearly 30 years as a loyal customer” says they’ve been “permanently” locked out of their Apple Account due to what might be the overzealous actions of Apple’s automated anti-fraud system. It’s left them locked out of “20 years of digital life,” and it all started with the seemingly...
i think it’s easy to make comments like this from the peanut gallery, with the benefit of hindsight and a self-selected group of users who will agree. but Apple should be legally obligated to address this. the solution can’t be “this idiot didn’t spend his nights and weekends doing 3-tier backups and high availability infrastructure diversity!”; that’s not scalable. if we just accept that companies can do this, they will continue to. but this has been on the front page of HackerNews. it’ll probably make it to Tim Apple’s desk eventually, so we’ll see what shakes out.
i guess in these situations i think of my aunt, who is in her 80s. she has an iPhone. should she buy a NAS and host Immich? i don’t think “make backups” is the simple advice it appears to be for the vast majority of people
i think the alternative is to use grep args. but ya know i’m living in the future using nushell’s open command and ripgrep so the argument is just kinda adorable
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]
as someone who used to work on “expert models” i’m excited that not everyone has abandoned them for “what if we just had a model that knows everything (that doesn’t exist) and costs a billion dollars to run”
Hello everyone, I've had an issue with discord on Arch Linux for a long time, but only now had the time to document the error (had to photograph it with phone and transcribe it)....
weird. i’d probably good around for drive checks personally, any test should be pretty definitive. how did you install Discord? the AUR? maybe a reinstall is in order.
i don’t think this is Node specific. if i were writing logs, i’d want to be pretty sure they get written, either by creating the directories necessary, putting them in a place i was pretty dang sure existed, and/or crashing as early as possible if the location didn’t exist, which makes me think it’s a weird Discord config error.
Reading earlier comments in this community made me consider documenting the workings of my homelab to some extent, ie. docker configuration, credentials, ports and links of my services. I've tried to make it consistent and organised but it still feels half baked and insufficient. Everyone suggests documenting everything you do...
as mentioned: Obsidian. i pay for Sync cuz i like the product and want them to succeed and want reliable offsite backups and conflict resolution. use a ton of links and tags. i’ve been into using DataView to make tables of IoT devices, services, todo items, etc based on tags and other YAML frontmatter.
chezmoi. manages my dotfiles so my machines are consistent. i have scripts that are heavily commented that show how to access MQTT, how to read and parse logs from journald, how to inspect my network, etc. i do think of them as code as documentation, even if they’re also just convenient.
NixOS. this has been my code as config as documentation silver bullet. i use it as a replacement for Docker, k8s, Ansible, etc as it contains definitions for my machines and all the services and configuration they run, including any package dependencies and user configurations. no more statting an assortment of files to figure out the state of the system. it’s in flake.nix
honorable mention to git and whatever git hosting provider is not on your network. track your work over time, and you’ll thank yourself when things go wrong.
some things are resistant to documentation and have a lot of stateful components (HomeAssitant is my biggest problem child from an infra perspective), but mainly being in that graph mindset of “how would i find a path here if i forgot where this was” helps a lot
Ethan Sholly, the driving force behind selfh.st, one of the most recognized communities uniting self-hosting enthusiasts, has published the latest results of his annual survey on the community’s preferences, collecting 4,081 responses from self-hosting practitioners worldwide....
in addition to what others have said, i’d say a lot of civil infrastructure—hospitals, clinics, government facilities, etc—are locked in either because of bad politics or weird vendor lock in. my dad ran his own dental clinic, and he had to run a Windows server because it was required by his software vendor that did everything from appointment reminders, to the web portal, to billing, to showing which of your teeth were missing, to integrating with scanners or other equipment. it was shit software that looked like Windows 3.1 well into the 2020s, but it did the job and 24hr support was reliable. just an anecdote, but as a software engineer i was fascinated by it.
So long story short here: I'm using AI to write this Nginx Proxy Manager advanced config for Jellyfin because I've been having lots of issues with videos starting and stopping. Am I stupid? Any advice would be welcome!
it’s not stupid. i have pretty successfully done some NixOS work flying basically blind with an LLM guiding the way.
ask follow up questions. “can you show me in the docs where this is defined”, “why did you add this line here”, etc
you’re going to have to understand this config eventually. the LLM will start to get confused if you’re trying to squash a weird bug and you’re just chastising it. it will always tell you you’re right even when you aren’t.
Back in mid-2024, the Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers teased plans for developing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop. Initially they hoped to have it out by Christmas 2024. That didn't happen and now approaching Christmas 2025 they confirmed they have stopped their plans for shipping a Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop for...
definitely. Qualcomm provides the SoC and drivers for what comes on that package, but you’ll want to add a battery controller, power controls, and other embedded systems onto the motherboard to make it act like a real system. it’s also a way different boot process in my experience than a normal x86 platform. the difference between ARM and x86 isn’t just the instruction set. plus at this level nothing is ever plug and play.
as for how Valve was able to ship an ARM device, they stuck to the normal kinds of IO a mobile device with a SD8gen3 would have and already have a great OS for fast iteration that they have tight controls over.
i’m excited for this XElite line, but i can see how it’s not in Qualcomm’s best interest to spend their engineering labor on porting to desktop Linux, not with Microsoft and Dell etc already having bids on that time. as long as Qualcomm is upstreaming and not actively blocking open source development, i don’t understand the kind of resentment i see for them. because they work with Google? i see them becoming more open as they become more prolific outside of embedded systems and Android. i see it as an exposure problem.
he’s been salty about this for years now and frustrated at companies throwing training and compute scaling at LLMs hoping for another emergent breakthrough like GPT-3. i believe he’s the one that really tried to push the Llama models toward multimodality
Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat....
i don’t understand. don’t they operate in one of the largest Linux platforms around, Android?
if you mean they don’t support your desktop wifi chipset or publish modules for their SoCs, then i guess that’s fair to say. but i think a deeper integration with Linux can only be a good thing.
i guess my perspective on Qualcomm is colored by the fact that i worked with them briefly on an embedded project, have seen their docs, and have booted their dev kits into a full Ubuntu environment.
It was a rainy weekend, and after brewing a mugfull of coffee I sat comfortably and opened my laptop that I powered off yesterday after running an sudo pacman -Syuu yesterday to keep my Arch up to date. I like keeping things nice and up-to-date you know. The first red flags came when my fingerprint recognition wasn’t working...
honestly, where NixOS shines for me is in my homelab. i don’t always have time to fully document what i’m doing, but my NixOS config is code-as-documentation for when work burns all of my memories away and has a git log and conflict management so i can manage multiple systems that share common config.
and once you find out you can have services run on systemd with syntax like services.jellyfin.enabled = true you’ll never want to go back to containers, although it has ways to manage those as well.
it’s overall a great OS for tinkering and deploying small services across small networks. not sure how it scales, but for my use case it’s damn near perfect
what about the neural networks that power the DSP modules in all modern cell phones cameras? does a neural network filter that generates a 3D mesh or rather imposes a 3D projection, eg putting dog ears on yourself or Memojis, count? what if i record a real video and have Gemini/Veo/whatever edit the white balance? i don’t think it’s as cut and dry as most people think
but what are the criteria? just because you think you have a handle on it doesn’t mean everyone else does or even shares your conclusion. and there’s no metric here i can measure, to for example block it from my platform.
my point is that it’s hard to program someone’s subjective, if written in whatever form of legalese, point of view into a detection system, especially when those same detection systems can be used to great effect to train systems to bypass them. any such detection system would likely be an “AI” in the same way the ones they ban are and would be similarly prone to mistakes and to reflecting the values of the company (read: Jack Dorsey) rather than enforcing any objective ethical boundary.
Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller and Steam Frame for release in 2026. There is an image of a Steam Controller, which looks like a hybrid between the original Steam Controller and the layout and trackpads of the Steam Deck.
there are some teams in companies like this where management doesn’t want to account for upstreaming and some engineers are happy to open a bug report, move the ticket to blocked, and move on to something else
Fish shell, a popular user-friendly command-line shell, has announced version 4.2, a new release that builds on the 4.0 series. Among the most visible improvements is an upgrade to history-based autosuggestions, which now properly handle multi-line commands....
it started just dropping in to mess with some data. now it’s my daily driver, and i have a trove of scripts that are my docs as code for systems like systemd or stuff that is specific to work
nah nushell does all that and more. i think fish is a good alt for someone who knows enough bash to know that scripting it sucks. if you want autocomplete and plugins n stuff it’s probably the most ergonomic POSIX-like shell out there.
TL;DR: Stop running a Jellyfin server. MPV can directly play anything from your NAS, stream YouTube ad-free, handle literally every codec, and is infinitely customizable. It's like vim for video....
i mean… sure. some neat tricks in here i wasn’t aware of, but asking my mom to open the terminal… i mean it’s not rocket science but that doesn’t make it accessible. all the scripting and stuff that you’re talking; that stuff comes in the Jellyfin box. honestly, it might be worth it to have both if you have users that aren’t comfortable in the terminal
I promise this isn't a rant or cry for help; I'm just sharing an interesting observation that the Linux community might appreciate. Please know I'm comfortable and knowledgeable enough to be dangerous on any platform, though I generally prefer Unix/Linux and macOS over Windows. I inherited an obsolete, under-powered MacBook Air...
i was able to install Arch on my 2012 Macbook Pro, but the networking was a huge issue. not only did the driver cause terrible screen tearing for some inexplicable reason, but i had the same problem even getting the dang thing installed. luckily i’m an Android developer and was able to share wifi over USB with an Android device.
Getting worn out with all these docker images and CLI hosted apps
Anyone else just sick of trying to follow guides that cover 95% of the process, or maybe slightly miss a step and then spend hours troubleshooting setups just to get it to work?...
Recommended software to scan a load of video files for detected motion
Does anyone know of any good, reasonably fast software to scan through a load of video files. Hours/weeks of footage to sift out any motion detected reasonably quickly. Preferably with a GUI....
Help me understand the workflow for cloning dotfiles after a fresh install without hosting dotfiles in the cloud
I've been reading up on the concept of dotfile management, and I've come across tools such as GNU Stow, chezmoi, and yadm, but before I select a tool, I'd like to understand the workflow a little better....
GNOME and Mozilla Discuss Proposal to Disable Middle Mouse Paste on Linux ( linuxiac.com )
Some projects keep surprising me with their “solutions,” and this is one of those cases. A proposal under review by developers from GNOME and Mozilla could change how middle-mouse-button paste behaves on Linux and other Unix-like systems....
Elon Musk’s AI Grok Goes Rogue with Posts Suggesting Trump Is a Pedophile and Erika Kirk Is JD Vance in Drag ( www.mediaite.com )
Running Python on Debian - is not so easy?
I wanted to start contributing to an open source software project yesterday evening, and they recommend virtual box to not mess with your default installation of the program and the databases it uses....
Overheating issues & drivers on NixOS.
Hi everyone. It has been a while since I started using Linux, so I got at least a nice amount of knowledge on Linux and shell but I can be considered as new when it comes to Nix. I am learning Nix and I have learned enough to move to flakes and set up a very basic home manager configuration but my setup is probably really weird...
what do y'all use for CI/CD?
hey nerds! i got a lovely email from GitHub this morning that their increasingly vibe-coded, barely-working Actions features are about to get more expensive (charging by the minute for something that notoriously spin-locks is a special flavor of shit sandwich)....
Why did you move from Windows to Linux?
Personally, I’m not brand loyal to any particular OS. There are good things about a lot of different operating systems, and I even have good things to say about ChromeOS. It just depends on what a user needs from an operating system....
An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card ( www.techradar.com )
An Apple fan who has spent “nearly 30 years as a loyal customer” says they’ve been “permanently” locked out of their Apple Account due to what might be the overzealous actions of Apple’s automated anti-fraud system. It’s left them locked out of “20 years of digital life,” and it all started with the seemingly...
cat posttitle.txt | grep meme
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]
Discord crashes randomly and kills my polybar, sxhkd, forcing me to hard restart using PC power button
Hello everyone, I've had an issue with discord on Arch Linux for a long time, but only now had the time to document the error (had to photograph it with phone and transcribe it)....
**How** should I properly document my homelab?
Reading earlier comments in this community made me consider documenting the workings of my homelab to some extent, ie. docker configuration, credentials, ports and links of my services. I've tried to make it consistent and organised but it still feels half baked and insufficient. Everyone suggests documenting everything you do...
Self-Hosters Confirm It Again: Linux Dominates the Homelab OS Space ( linuxiac.com )
Ethan Sholly, the driving force behind selfh.st, one of the most recognized communities uniting self-hosting enthusiasts, has published the latest results of his annual survey on the community’s preferences, collecting 4,081 responses from self-hosting practitioners worldwide....
Judge my shitty vibe code please
So long story short here: I'm using AI to write this Nginx Proxy Manager advanced config for Jellyfin because I've been having lots of issues with videos starting and stopping. Am I stupid? Any advice would be welcome!
TUXEDO Computers Drops Snapdragon X1 Elite Linux Laptop Plans ( www.phoronix.com )
Back in mid-2024, the Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers teased plans for developing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop. Initially they hoped to have it out by Christmas 2024. That didn't happen and now approaching Christmas 2025 they confirmed they have stopped their plans for shipping a Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop for...
Meta’s star AI scientist Yann LeCun plans to leave for own startup ( arstechnica.com )
Red Hat Losing Another Longtime & Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer ( www.phoronix.com )
Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat....
Short summary of my experience with NixOS: pain, admirations, concerns ( haykh.github.io )
It was a rainy weekend, and after brewing a mugfull of coffee I sat comfortably and opened my laptop that I powered off yesterday after running an sudo pacman -Syuu yesterday to keep my Arch up to date. I like keeping things nice and up-to-date you know. The first red flags came when my fingerprint recognition wasn’t working...
Jack Dorsey Releases Vine Reboot Where AI Content Is Banned ( futurism.com )
What you do with your windows button on your keyboard?
Personally nothing but when I look at it I wonder if the big bang could actually have been a white hole.
Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame
Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026...
FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs ( thenewstack.io )
ls -a ( kbin.melroy.org )
Fish Shell 4.2 Released with Improved Autosuggestions ( linuxiac.com )
Fish shell, a popular user-friendly command-line shell, has announced version 4.2, a new release that builds on the 4.0 series. Among the most visible improvements is an upgrade to history-based autosuggestions, which now properly handle multi-line commands....
MPV: The Ultimate Self-Hosted Media Solution You're Probably Sleeping On
TL;DR: Stop running a Jellyfin server. MPV can directly play anything from your NAS, stream YouTube ad-free, handle literally every codec, and is infinitely customizable. It's like vim for video....
Linux MacBooks & the cursed Broadcom module
I promise this isn't a rant or cry for help; I'm just sharing an interesting observation that the Linux community might appreciate. Please know I'm comfortable and knowledgeable enough to be dangerous on any platform, though I generally prefer Unix/Linux and macOS over Windows. I inherited an obsolete, under-powered MacBook Air...