| 29 Apr 2026 |
 Alex Nicolaou | you have to bear in mind that the reason LLMs get it wrong is because the wrongness is out there. | 13:15:26 |
 Ihar Hrachyshka | I will not take a position on whether you SHOULD use llm, but if you want to use it to understand how code works, make sure it has access to the code checkout - use coding agent, not a browser UI that doesn't have cheap way to ground itself in reality. | 13:17:58 |
| Alex Nicolaou | this does unfortunately remind me that I'm overdue to wipe my laptop and reinstall everything ... an annoyance but the only way that I can be 100% sure I haven't infected my perfect nix world with manual config. | 13:27:19 |
 zeroq7k | Yeah, I get what you're saying and I concur. I'm testing qwen3.6 locally at the moment and it's useful to explain things or even help creating nix files but for answers to questions like the above I simply don't trust it :-)
Oh, and Ihar Hrachyshka: +1, chatbots without context, access to files or other tooling are more or less useless when working with code.
| 13:28:13 |
 Randy Eckenrode | The default is null, which means unmanaged, so it should only change the setting that you set. | 13:29:34 |
| Randy Eckenrode | However, it will work if you use sudo chsh. That’s how I set it. | 13:31:29 |
| Alex Nicolaou | Unfortunatley the OSS models are still light years behidn the foundation models and I am unable to use them for anything real. | 13:33:03 |
| zeroq7k | Didn't work for me a couple days ago. I had to explicitly add the path to the shell to /etc/shells before it applied it. | 13:33:25 |
| Alex Nicolaou | Must be something I'm misunderstanding about the shell discussion, why would you want to run a one-off command for it instead of configuring it? | 13:34:35 |
| zeroq7k | 
Download Screenshot 2026-04-29 at 15.34.48.png | 13:35:53 |
| zeroq7k | They are not that bad anymore, here's the answer to my question above... | 13:35:54 |
| Alex Nicolaou | I'll be trying out the new deepseek soon and see if it can be used but overall i regret buying my machine because it was very expensive and I can't readily make use of the local LLMs for anything but toy demos. | 13:41:06 |
| Randy Eckenrode | nix-darwin doesn’t support managing your shell. The setting doesn’t use chsh. In general, nix-darwin is very conservative when it comes to managing existing accounts. | 14:16:42 |
 Spore | In reply to @anicolao:matrix.org
I'll be trying out the new deepseek soon and see if it can be used but overall i regret buying my machine because it was very expensive and I can't readily make use of the local LLMs for anything but toy demos. I use my macbook at $work for some image editing | 14:18:05 |
 WeetHet | Unfortunately, I wish there was support for more account management, but the downside of that is that someone would wipe their account following LLM instructions I guess | 14:20:39 |
| Randy Eckenrode | Or even doing something that seems harmless like rolling back to before when you added yourself to knownUsers. Supposedly there are safeguards now, but the documentation hasn't been updated. | 14:22:37 |
| Randy Eckenrode | See https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin/issues/1237 | 14:22:41 |
 samasaur | We actually do, it just uses dscl instead of chsh | 15:33:21 |
| samasaur | the documentation also says that shell is only honored when creating a user but that does not appear to be the case in practice | 15:34:49 |
| Randy Eckenrode | When did that change? Do you have to be a member of knownUsers? | 15:35:00 |
| samasaur | yes you do | 15:36:59 |
| samasaur | I'm not sure when it changed, it seems like the behavior has been there for a while | 15:37:41 |
| samasaur | of course if the documentation says that it won't do anything, people are less likely to try it | 15:38:00 |
| Randy Eckenrode | That’s good to know. I still avoid knownUsers for historical reasons, but maybe I should reconsider that. | 15:38:25 |
| samasaur | Yeah, I avoid all of the user settings for the same reason, I was just pretty sure we supported setting your shell | 15:40:43 |
| samasaur | well "historical reasons" and "apple likes changing things out from under us so even if something used to work there's no guarantee it still does" | 15:41:21 |
|  altaria joined the room. | 23:14:22 |
| 30 Apr 2026 |
 EmilioAK | In reply to @alexfmpe:matrix.org
messing with some of them can bork your system and force you to log into recovery mode or whatever it's called to repair the plist files manually Thanks for the heads up! I was thinking of making a pull request for this because it did seem very straightforward, but I’ll hold off then 😅 | 10:17:29 |
 alexfmpe | Maybe it is for some/most settings | 10:29:45 |
| alexfmpe | I just don't know how to tell | 10:29:51 |
