What is the app?

Why? It is the same power dynamic as any other open source project that is primarily built by a company.

From what I read in the HN thread the token is only used for governance (and possibly also fundraising), it is not baked into the actual platform. I am happy to be corrected though if anyone knows more/has more details.

I agree that Forgejo looks good as well and is likely more usable than Radicle right now. But I do think there is value at looking at P2P solutions.

From what I read in the HN thread the token is only used for governance (and possibly also fundraising), it is not baked into the actual platform. I am happy to be corrected though if anyone knows more/has more details.

In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don’t repeat yourself] of the repos visited.

So I guess previously people might first look inside their repo’s for examples of code they want to make, if they find and example they might import it instead of copy and pasting.

When using LLM generated code they (and the LLM) won’t be checking their repo for existing code so it ends up being a copy pasta soup.

Nice, I hadn’t heard of that before, will check it out!

I just see it as less practical than maintaining a toolchain for devs to use.

There are definately some things preventing Nix adoption. What are the reasons you see it as less practical than the alternatives?

What are alternative ways of maintaining a toolchain that achieves the same thing?

That seems like an argument for maintaining a frozen repo of packages, not against containers.

I am not arguing against containers, I am arguing that nix is more reproducible. Containers can be used with nix and are useful in other ways.

an argument for maintaining a frozen repo of packages

This is essentially what nix does. In addition it verifies that the packages are identical to the packages specified in your flake.nix file.

You can only have a truly fully-reproducible build environment if you setup your toolchain to keep copies of every piece of external software so that you can do hermetic builds.

This is essentially what Nix does, except Nix verifies the external software is the same with checksums. It also does hermetic builds.

You might be interested in this article that compares nix and docker. It explains why docker builds are not considered reproducible:

For example, a Dockerfile will run something like apt-get-update as one of the first steps. Resources are accessible over the network at build time, and these resources can change between docker build commands. There is no notion of immutability when it comes to source.

and why nix builds are reproducible a lot of the time:

Builds can be fully reproducible. Resources are only available over the network if a checksum is provided to identify what the resource is. All of a package’s build time dependencies can be captured through a Nix expression, so the same steps and inputs (down to libc, gcc, etc.) can be repeated.

Containerization has other advantages though (security) and you can actually use nix’s reproducible builds in combination with (docker) containers.