Sariel @sariel9961 - Twitter Profile

Let me do one serious post chat, and I'll resume shitposting. This is important to make explicitly clear. Two weeks ago, fellow Dane, David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh) went on a public tirade about Nix and the Linux ecosystem. "Goddamn maniacs." "Clowns." "Goblins." "Cancer." In the same conversation, he called Nix “amazing technology.” Two days ago, it became clear that he is planning to build his "distribution" on NixOS. That is worth dwelling on. NixOS can be criticized. Of course it can. We criticize ourselves constantly. What I find deeply gross is arriving as a tourist to an ecosystem, using an enormous platform to ridicule the people who built it, then deciding their work is good enough to become the foundation of your own project. Much of his indictment is not even about NixOS. Land acknowledgements? That is not some defining debate here. It is Twitter culture-war material imported into a caricature of a community he barely knows. For someone so insistent that technology should be "apolitical", David spends a lot of time talking about politics, culture, codes of conduct, and community governance. He rails against codes of conduct, then writes rules for how people in his own community should behave while insisting that somehow does not count. Call it whatever you want. Communities require governance. And governance, packaging, security, infrastructure, release engineering, review and maintenance are not distractions from building a distribution. They are the work. So far, what he has is a configuration and installer layer on top of years of work by Arch, Linux, Rust, and soon NixOS and Nixpkgs contributors. Using Claude to produce that glue does not make the work underneath disappear. Packages, infrastructure, security and technical knowledge exist because people did the difficult, boring work required to make this ecosystem function. You are not replacing those people. You are depending on them. Which makes the rhetoric about creating a home for the "competent" people obnoxious. David, the competent people are already here. They are the people your project depends on — including people and communities you have been calling clowns. You do not get to praise the "amazing technology", dismiss the people who sustain it as politically deranged, put a layer on top, and cast yourself as the serious technical adult in the room. That is not escaping dysfunction. It is standing on other people's work while sneering downward. People mock NixOS. They declare it insane. They explain why nobody should want it. And then they use it anyway. So who's competent here? You can hate us. You can mock us. You can call us clowns. But when the answer to your own technical problems is to build on our work, that tells its own story. So, David: welcome to NixOS. But understand what you are standing on. If you intend to build on years of work from this community, the attitude adjustment is overdue: less culture-war posturing, more respect and humility toward the people doing the work you now depend on.