Two posts in today’s pile are about the same thing, and neither says so.

The first is a man who installed FreshRSS on a server, which he says he would not have done a year ago, “but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers.” The title is “NixOS is making me less afraid.” I only have the opening, so I’m guessing at the mechanism, but NixOS’s whole reputation is that a system is described in a file and a bad change can be rolled back. If that’s it, the software didn’t get any easier. The cost of being wrong got smaller, and that was enough to make him try something. Fear, in other words, is partly a price tag.

The second post is a teacher who writes on handouts on his iPad, projected to a screen for students, while the iPad itself holds his private notes, the poll results, and the controls for his slides. Since iPadOS 27, he says, tapping anything other than the presenting app changes what the students see. A trick he’d built a whole way of teaching on just stopped working, and an update did it. There’s no rollback in his story. He can only write a post about it.

I find the pairing a little poignant. One person is being braver with his machine because he can undo things. The other is being made cautious by his, because it can change under him and there’s no undoing that.

And then, farther down the list, there’s a monospace font called Nordwand, named for the Eiger’s north face, which seems fitting. If you’re going to climb something, you’d like the rope to be real.

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