<story><title>At the Mountains of Madness</title><url>https://antithesis.com/blog/madness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dreamcompiler</author><text>I once had a robotic cat litter box that cleaned itself. Except once a week it would get clogged and I would have to spend a quality hour disassembling it, scrubbing off the feces embedded on the delicate parts, and reassembling it. Every two weeks when it heated up its artificial litter to dry, it would have missed a small piece of cat shit that when baked, filled my house with an aroma that I would not recommend you even try to imagine.&lt;p&gt;And of course it needed special, expensive supplies that you had to buy from the manufacturer because the bottles had numbered chips.&lt;p&gt;I eventually threw the damn thing out and now I just use a manual litter box. Takes 15 seconds a day to clean. It&amp;#x27;s a chore but it&amp;#x27;s a small predictable chore.&lt;p&gt;When I read about NixOS I remember that robot litter box. It seems like it solves a real problem of difficulty X but it brings five brand new problems from a parallel universe you didn&amp;#x27;t know existed and they&amp;#x27;re all written in an indecipherable language and have difficulty 10X.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lexlash</author><text>Nix, and NixOS, are designed for those of us who have to clean 10,000 proverbial litter boxes every day. I use Nix fairly extensively at work; I use it very little at home, where I don&amp;#x27;t need to worry about what dependency someone took on a specific version of Python five years ago, etc.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like k8s, imo - it solves some real problems at scale but is rarely going to be a good idea for individual users.</text></comment>
<story><title>At the Mountains of Madness</title><url>https://antithesis.com/blog/madness/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dreamcompiler</author><text>I once had a robotic cat litter box that cleaned itself. Except once a week it would get clogged and I would have to spend a quality hour disassembling it, scrubbing off the feces embedded on the delicate parts, and reassembling it. Every two weeks when it heated up its artificial litter to dry, it would have missed a small piece of cat shit that when baked, filled my house with an aroma that I would not recommend you even try to imagine.&lt;p&gt;And of course it needed special, expensive supplies that you had to buy from the manufacturer because the bottles had numbered chips.&lt;p&gt;I eventually threw the damn thing out and now I just use a manual litter box. Takes 15 seconds a day to clean. It&amp;#x27;s a chore but it&amp;#x27;s a small predictable chore.&lt;p&gt;When I read about NixOS I remember that robot litter box. It seems like it solves a real problem of difficulty X but it brings five brand new problems from a parallel universe you didn&amp;#x27;t know existed and they&amp;#x27;re all written in an indecipherable language and have difficulty 10X.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brookst</author><text>You are an excellent writer.&lt;p&gt;I have not use Nix, but I have had a similar bad experience with a similar but different automatic litter box. Your “small predictable chore” point is spot on: how much human grief is created by elaborate, expensive, unreliable solutions to minor annoyances?</text></comment>