Hetare King

Not every software company is a game developer, and even at home, not every programmer plays games on their PC that require a powerful GPU. If everyone working on, for example, business software all of a sudden needs a gaming PC that will be constantly running an AI model, that will greatly increase costs, both in terms of procurement of equipment and electricity. An increase in demand for powerful GPUs in fields that traditionally had no need for them isn’t exactly going to improve the hardware cost situation either.

Whether you run the model locally or you leave it to a company, someone is going to have to pay the cost.

Omarchy is basically where someone takes Arch Linux and says “I want it to have this window manager, this terminal emulator, these programs installed by default and to have this configuration” and shares it with other people. Since Arch by itself is pretty bare-bones, this sort of thing can be useful for people who want to use Arch but don’t want to spend the time making a functional system. Since you’re using NixOS, I’m sure you’ve seen other people’s .nix files being shared. This is similar to that, but more formal and because Arch doesn’t make it as easy as Nix, it’s shared as its own distribution instead.

Because the goal of Omarchy is just to make something bare-bones into something immediately usable, it’s more meaningful to compare NixOS to Arch Linux directly. The most fundamental difference between the two is the package manager, so the way software installations are managed. All package managers have to (usually) download a package and, if needed, its dependencies, extract it to somewhere on the file system where it can find it, run an initial setup script, make it so that you can run the executable by name instead of needing the whole path, and do some bookkeeping so that it knows what is installed, and so, what needs to be kept up to date, what can be removed etc. But there are different approaches you can take to achieve this.

Nix, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a declarative system where you write a program (even if it doesn’t always look like one) in a functional language, and when you update the system it runs that program, which outputs what is basically a list of packages (among other things) and then it compares that list to the installed packages and installs/uninstalls/updates packages so that it matches the list.

On the other hand, Pacman, the Arch Linux package manager, is a more traditional imperative system, where you explicitly tell it to install/uninstall/update packages.

There are other differences, like how Nix can have multiple versions of the same package installed, but Pacman only supports one, and there are differences in philosophy between package repositories on when packages should be updated, whether to allow proprietary software etc.

In order to be able to get information on the web, people need to put it on the web first. And for that to happen, there needs to be something to motivate them to do so. What those motivations are is going to differ between people and situations, could be a pure desire to contribute to the commons, could be part of how they make their income, could be any other number of things. But if putting something on the web means accepting that you’re going to be helping vile companies achieve their goals and the way most people may see this information is in a perverse form, riddled with falsehoods and with no attribution (or maybe worse, mostly falsehoods attributed to you), and there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s going to put a damper on a lot of those motivations, and the ones that aren’t tend to be the less desirable ones.

And it’s not just information that’s on the web, it’s also collaborative efforts like open source software. Why do people release source code under licenses like the GPL? Because they believe those constraints lead to a better outcome than if they had just put it in the public domain. That their contributions to the commons lead to more contributions to the commons, even from people who may not be inclined or incentivised to do so. If it becomes trivial to undermine those licenses (and for the record, those licenses do get enforced and there have been companies that had to release the source code of their products because they violated the license), that may undermine the reasons for many to contribute to the project.

You can be all cool and cynical about how social contracts are made up and whatnot, but let’s be honest here; if someone beats you to a pulp because they didn’t like the way you looked at them, you’re not going to just coolly accept your broken nose and displaced ribs as just the way things work.

Unfortunately, all I can say is that the link in the post works for me and it doesn’t appear to be forwarding to anything. Somewhat ironically, it’s on the Internet Archive, though, so maybe that works for you.

There’s no need to pave a road to hell if you’re already in hell because you’ve surrendered to bad intentions and now they’re all that’s left. The logical conclusion from acceptance is that it’s in nobody’s interest to put anything on the web (or anything equivalent) and have it become even more of a consumption-only medium than it already has.

Also, what’s happening right now is, in fact, the flow of information being controlled; to primarily flow towards a few powerful entities, that is. You’re neglecting to consider the effects of power differentials. Those powerful entities need to be constrained for the flow of information to actually be free.

Granted, the solution proposed in the blog post seems a bit too technical and high-friction to really be feasibly, but at least people are thinking about it.