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I thought about posting notes on Syncthing but then I’d have to tangentially talk about NixOS. NixOS is my main Linux distribution atm but Nix/NixOS/Flakes are too hard to write about and I fear they’ve ventured too far into the realm of over–engineering.

What do I mean by over–engineering? An over–engineered tool is one where even the simplest use cases are non–obvious (to most people) and this can happen when it tries to do too many things with “specificity”. The overall concept is elegant though (explainable in lay terms) and can be applied in other contexts.

Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, Harbin, China (© STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Earth as seen from the International Space Station (© JSC/NASA)

Sandhill cranes, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico (© Jay Goodrich/Tandem Stills + Motion)

Hohenzollern Castle, Germany (© Sahara Prince/Shutterstock)

nikitonsky: Ultimately, it all comes down do a simple question: are you writing for your readers, or are your readers here to fulfill your marketing needs? What comes first?

Here’s a final muse for current year. This probably counts as wise posting. On local news there’s sentiment that the world is now “post–truth”… but historically; since when has the world not been post–truth? Truth (verifiability/provability) is ultra rare and trust abundant :-)

The Internet/Blockchain/whatever is not a truth machine and could never be a truth machine. Inside events/stories/happenings everyone’s just as clueless as in past eras and technological differences become “functionally equivalent” — meaning you either waste time separating signal from noise in “fast” and “fake” information infinitum or waiting for “slow” and “official” carrier pigeons to arrive.

Polar bear in Svalbard, Norway (© Dennis Stogsdill/Getty Images)

Lake Powell water levels, using an Internet data source.