• Thought: Perhaps the next browser just be an LLM that cites it’s sources. That’s it. I literally just open the browser and see a chatbox, can switch between LLM backends, and can use my own locally-hosted one if I’d like. For the ones I can’t buy, I just pay a bitcoin lightning invoice to use. That’s it!

• Thought: I wonder how much it would be to build a desktop computer that could run Deepseek 1776? Much cheaper than buying a laptop with equivalent specs, I suppose?

• It would be cool to do an aggregate of the most popular tools rated by experts in each domain in software is. I.e. frontend developers love Svelte, backend developers love Rust, SysAdmins love, I dunno, tmux?, etc. There should be some criteria that we develop for what makes software “high-ranking”, such as it’s survival rate (“vim” and “emacs” are both still around and extremely popular, so they get high scores). Similar to the way in economics we have the measure the quality of a currency by its fungibility, divisibility, portability, durability, scarcity.

• accountless.io or Awesome Accountless: Maintain a repo/website of services which do not require accounts/respect privacy/are free and open source etc., for their use.

• Today I ran and connected to a Minecraft server self hosting on my local NixOS device running over a Wireguard VPN. The server exists in the minecraft-server package, but you have to first do two things in your /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file:

  • Add the lines:

    nixpkgs.config = {
      allowedUnfree = ["minecraft-server"]
    }
    

    By default, NixOS does not include Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS). So for any package that you try to download that doesn’t isn’t FOSS (which includes Minecraft 🥲), you’ll get this error. You can explicitly define which packages you’d like to have as unfree in an array as done above, or you can just generically do nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;. I opted for specificity as I want to include as little unfree software as possible ;)

  • The second issue, which I got tripped up on for awhile, was the firewall. NixOS has configuration options for letting certain ports past the firewall. The minecraft-server port is 25565 (which you can see if you observe the server logs), so we want to allow packets through both (I believe both are necessary, anyway) the UDP and TCP port 25565, like so:

    nixpkgs.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 25565 ];
    nixpkgs.firewall.allowedUDPPorts = [ 25565 ];
    

    After that’s done, remember to run sudo nixos-rebuild switch to rebuild your NixOS configuration, and you should now be able to connect, assuming that server is reachable via your computer.

• I also managed to get Nextcloud running on my NixOS server, using this guide and some help from ppq.ai (Grok 2, in this case). Here is the setup I used:

  environment.etc."nextcloud-admin-pass".text = "PWD";
  services.nextcloud = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.nextcloud30;
    hostName = "10.8.0.2"; # An example of an IP assigned to the device by Wireguard VPN. This way it's accessible from other devices.
    config.adminpassFile = "/etc/nextcloud-admin-pass";
    config.dbtype = "sqlite";
  };

There are a couple of deviations here from the original post. First, I needed to upgrade to pkgs.nextcloud30 instead of pkgs.nextcloud28, as the docs recommend (it’s officially deprecated and nixos-rebuild switch will hassle you about it). You also have to change "PWD" to a password that’s allowed by Nextcloud’s default password policy as mentioned in the article above, which, in my case, just amounted to creating a secure password with a password manager and them using that.

Also, be sure to later enable the TCP ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPs):

nixpkgs.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 80 443 ];

I was able to access the Nextcloud UI at 10.8.0.2 after this! However, I got stuck in password hell for reasons I cannot fathom (it seemed like it was loading my password correctly, only to tell me after over 10 seconds that the password was wrong). What I think was happening was that Nextcloud wasn’t accepting the original password I used, which was something stupid simple like password123, and it was failing Nextcloud’s password rules. But then when I went to change it, something about the database was already screwed up or my IP address was just banned and I couldn’t login even after having set a good password. In the end, I just ended up nuking all the Nextcloud setup via sudo rm -rf /var/lib/nextcloud (careful with that command!), and then I re-ran sudo nixos-rebuild switch which re-setup the config with a good password from the start this time. And wouldn’t you know it, things worked! I could login with the default username of root and the password I had set in the config above.

By the way, another neat trick I learned is that you can look up what options exist for a nix service by using the nixos-option command. By running nixos-option services.nextcloud.config, I found you could set an admin username of your choice as well via config.adminuser.