Eh… Not really. Qemu does a really good job with VM virtualizarion.

I believe I could easily build containers instead of VMs from the nix config, but I actually do like having a full VM: since it’s running a full OS instead of an app, all the usual nix tooling just works on it.

Also: In my day job, I actually have to deal quite a bit with containers (and kubernetes), and I just… don’t like it.

I’ll DM you… Not sire I want to link those two accounts publicly 😄

Zero.

About 35 NixOS VMs though, each running either a single service (e.g. Paperless) or a suite (Sonarr and so on plus NZBGet, VPN,…).

There’s additionally a couple of client VMs. All of those distribute over 3 Proxmox hosts accessing the same iSCSI target for VM storage.

SSL and WireGuard are terminated at a physical firewall box running OpnSense, so with very few exceptions, the VMs do not handle any complicated network setup.

A lot of those VMs have zero state, those that do have backup of just that state automated to the NAS (simply via rsync) and from there everything is backed up again through borg to an external storage box.

In the stateless case, deploying a new VM is a single command; in the stateful case, same command, wait for it to come up, SSH in (keys are part of the VM images), run restore-<whatever>.

On an average day, I spend 0 minutes managing the homelab.

You (sadly) need to group all quality profiles into a single one, and then handle quality through a custom format. Example from my setup:

NixOS for the win! Define your system and services, run a single command, get a reproducible, Proxmox-compatible VM out of it. Nixpkgs has basically every service you’d ever want to selfhost.

Lost me at LLMs. My Nix config is over 20k lines long at this point, neatly split into more than a hundred modules and managing 8 physical machines and 30+ VMs. I love it.

But every time I’ve tried to use an LLM for nix, it has failed spectacularly.

You can, without root even! Take a look at uad-ng (universal android debloater). Comes with a community-curated list which sorts APKs into 5 tiers from “recommended to uninstall” to “yeah don’t, your phone needs this to boot”. Apps disabled through this do not come back after updates.

Removed 140+ apps from my Xiaomi, 120+ from my GFs Samsung S24, and 90+ from my brothers Motorola Edge something.

Called their support. They were super nice, and then told me that if I still had access to my 2fa, I could simply add a second mail in my account without needing access to the first one.

Made total sense when stopping to think about it for a second 😄

Oh, yeah. Wasn’t actually worried of the mails themselves (multiple devices which have all of them, plus a daily borgbackup offsite), it was just knowing that I NEED to fix this, now, because email is unfortunately kinda important.

Fun conundrum: had my personal mail as the only contact at my server provider. Requested a KVM for rescue. “Thank you for your request! We’ll email you the link to your KVM access!” Gahhh.

Lmao. Lmfao, even.

Here, I’m gonna save you some time and summarize the article for you:

• everyone is talking about how good LLMs are [citation missing], but they’re missing the point!
• because really, we’re already so much further ahead! There be magic tools out there!
• wait, you want to know which ones? Uuuuh sorry, the people building then are keeping them a secret…
• …because they are just THAT FRIGHTENINGLY GOOD! [citation missing]
• seriously, I used one of them to build a 30k/month product in 2 hours with zero coding!
• I mean… A subset at least. Oh I also did not do any review, so no idea just how badly fucked it is. Ah, and I guess the price tag comes from the existing reputation and legal guarantees provided by the original tool, which obviously I also couldn’t replicate.
• but worry not! I’m sure I’d be able to build the full tool in DAYS!
• I won’t though. Even though it could TOTALLY make me 30k per month per user. Totally.
• instead, I’ll PROVE to you JUST HOW GOOD these SECRET TOOLS are! Checkout this GitHub repo!
• …ah, no, sorry, I misspoke. I’ll obviously NOT be using the secret, but TOTALLY REAL [citation missing] tools that this entire article is about. For some reason. They’re totally real though bro. Trust me bro. I’m sure one more data-center will fix it bro. Just need to prompt right bro. Like bro, people don’t realize how gooooooood LLMs are bro. I swear bro. My prompts are so good I need to keep them secret because it’s SCARY bro. Bro.

Ahem. Maybe I editorialized a tiny bit. Not much though, trust me bro.

Same. But also, I’ll never forget the adrenaline when I actually legitimately fucked up once. Was a sweaty 2 hours of recovery.

Yeah no thanks. Linting, formatting, LSP integration, Treesitter,… are just kind of essential for programming work. And the advantage of nvim/emacs/… is that you can bend them to your will and preferences.

If you just want to edit some config files, sure, use literally anything. But I need something proper for work, and if I already set all of that up, might as well use it for the config files, too.

Sorry, unfortunately can’t help you there. My matrix server is not federated, I remember back then I created an account on matrix.org specifically to read these. But maybe they got deleted in the meantime?

Anyways, I have been really happy with continuwuity, to the point that up until now, I haven’t even looked at tuwunel again. The maintainers of continuwuity seem really nice and engaged, and both from a usage and stability point of view, as well as for the actually surprisingly fast release cycle, I have no complaints. I found and fixed a bug a couple weeks ago, and the dev process was also very friendly and relaxed.

In short: while I don’t know how things are on the tuwunel side, I’m very happy to have gone with continuwuity and have high hopes for the future of the project.

Let’s hope the same thing will happen if/when the US tries to take Greenland; but honestly, I’m not optimistic. At least here in Germany, politicians and businesses are so used to licking the US’ boot that I have a hard time imagining a seismic shift. Not to mention that thanks to our dependence on US software, we’re incredibly vulnerable.

Still. One can hope.

Universal Android Debloater.

It’s a community-rating systems for apps, and you can remove/permanently (even through os updates) disable them through ADB, without actually needing to know anything about ADB because uad comes in a nice GUI package.

I think I removed ~200 apps (most of them invisible, background ads stuff) from my phone. Much better experience.

FWIW, I’ve been using Music Assistant with my Sonos speakers without issue.

HOWEVER, I’m using MA as part of Home Assistant, and have the speakers configured through HA, not MA. MA just sees the speakers as HA Media Players. That works really well.

Tails I think

Almost 9k lunes of python in a bash script. Lmao. No.

nixpkgs is the largest repo, period.

Don’t forget the almighty:

journalctl -fu <servicename>

And yes, I am always reading that as “fuck you, service”.