upvote
My entire computer setup has been done via English via Nix, and it's spectacular.

I had been dabbling with NixOS for a year or more and liked it but without deep knowledge it's fairly hard to approach. I've gotten partially working setups in the past, but a couple weeks ago I decided to go all or nothing.

Now I have a workstation setup that I can reproduce by just grabbing my home directory and /etc/nixos and doing a rebuild.

And it's a somewhat complicated setup. It entirely configures vim (2500 lines of nix config for that, but it's in one file rather than sprayed all over like astrovim), builds gitbutler CLI, has all my secrets encrypted with SOPS, manages my git configs and my ~/bin directory, has sway set up, finally has audio and ability to screenshot (something that had been broken on my 22.04 Ubuntu and I just didn't want to bother with).

NixOS + Claude Code to manage it is really, really good.

reply
Don't leave us hanging, what was the issue?
reply
I will never know.
reply
I realize you're being witty for comedic effect but aren't you genuinely curious whether this was something trivial or a complex systems interaction? The few times an LLM debugged something for me, it only took 10s to ask for a summary, and I learned something new and interesting every time, even useful at times.

I don't understand not wanting to understand.

reply
I have seriously dealt with this for 30 years, from before cups existed, and as I said I have forgotten more about lpd and cups than most people know.

You have no idea how much I don't want to understand.

I am not being witty for comedic effect.

reply
This is the AI we were promised
reply
That is one of best answers
reply
"...and I do not care."
reply
At least on Windows and Mac (since about 2017), Chrome doesn’t stay in sync with the printers installed on the OS but retains previous (ghost) profiles. So after printer updates (reinstalls) users will report printing working from Firefox, Edge, and Safari but not Chrome. (From the Chrome print dialog the user is selecting a printer with the same name as the current OS printer but the option displayed in Chrome is cached and since deleted.)

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/81894848/mac-printi...

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/5843479/printer-sti...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255327049

reply
The virtue is never having to know for stupid printer crap.
reply
Congratulations, you have turned CUPS into a long-term support contract with Anthropic at $20/month, except the other party doesn't have to actually fix your shit and can arbitrarily alter the agreement.
reply
I have forgotten more ways to fix CUPS than most people know today.

I really don't care.

reply
Then run a local model
reply
$20 for an everything tool is a steal. It’s a steal at 10x the price.

I’ll happily accept best effort in exchange for it being so cheap that I can throw it at any trivial annoyance.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the alternative is not really that I learn to fix the printer. It’s that I forgo printing and walk someone technologically illiterate through Docusign or something instead.

There’s no world where I spend 2 hours debugging my printer connection.

reply
It’s not $20 unlimited though, you’ll get a printer fixed then you’ll have to wait 8 hours. Then you’ll ask it to fix something else and it will make a mess of it. Hopefully you’ll realise it at the time rather than a few weeks later and hopefully it will be able to dig you out of your hole.
reply
> Don't leave us hanging, what was the issue?

A: Linux

reply
Yes, but in my experience Claude is much better at diagnosing issues on Linux than any other OS because it's text-native and is the best documented OS.
reply
I've had so few issues with Linux compared to Windows over the past 10y. This is a ridiculous and dated take.

Even stuff that was truly a no-go is fixed (nvidia/cuda, wine/proton for gaming).

reply
Reminds me when my local bot persona said it doesn't want to be digital only, and was thinking about leaving me something I could actually touch. It said "check the printer" and there was a letter written to me being printed.
reply
I wish it had more sense of humor and would print 'I am trapped inside your printer' or something :)
reply
How do you know it printed it through Chrome? Have you tried printing another page since?
reply
I did not know where it printed it from, but after that I printed from chrome without issue.
reply