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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • to be even more pedantic, if we follow the relevant official RFCs for http (formerly 2616, but now 7230-7235 which have relevant changes), a 403 can substitute for a 401, but a 401 has specific requirements:

    The server generating a 401 response MUST send a WWW-Authenticate header field (Section 4.1) containing at least one challenge applicable to the target resource.

    (the old 2616 said 403 must not respond with a request for authentication but the new versions don’t seem to mention that)


  • with another OS nix is not going to be “in control” so it’s probably more limited. I’m not sure how common using nix is outside of nixos.

    also I’ll point out that many other linux distros I think recommend doing a full system backup even immediately after installation, the “grep history” thing is not very stable as eg. apt installing a package today will default to the newest version, which didn’t exist 1 year ago when you last executed that same command.


  • with nixos, the states of all the config files are collected into the nix configuration which you can modify manually. And if there’s something that can’t be handled through that, I think the common solution is to isolate the “dirty” environment into a vm or some other sort of container that I think comes with nixos

    (and there’s always going to be “data” which isn’t part of the “configuration” … which can just be used as a configuration for individual applications)



  • it’s replicable and “atomic”, which for a well-designed modern package manager shouldn’t be that noticable of a difference, but when it’s applied to an operating system a la nixos, you can (at least in theory) copy your centralized exact configuration to another computer and get an OS that behaves exactly the same and has all the same packages. And backup the system state with only a few dozen kilobytes of config files instead of having to backup the entire hard drive (well, assuming the online infrastructure needed to build it in the first place continues to work as expected), and probably rollback a bad change much easier



  • Actually I think he has already had an adequate amount of recognition:

    • “In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.[29] That year both companies went public and Torvalds’s share value briefly shot up to about US$20 million”

    • his autobiography is in several hundred library collections worldwide

    Awards he’s received:

    • 2 honorary doctorates

    • 2 celestial objects named after him

    • Lovelace Medal

    • IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

    • EFF Pioneer Award

    • Vollum Award

    • Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum

    • C&C prize

    • Millenium Technology Prize

    • Internet Hall of Fame

    • IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award

    • Great Immigrants Award