miniblog.

Igalia's post on self-hosting CI runners is a masterclass in build engineering. It shows dealing with weird API constraints, but still finding good designs. I also learnt that some CI systems use OCR on Apple's installers to automate!

Text to speech systems seem to have largely avoided the uncanny valley effect. I've encountered robotic sounding voices but it's way less unsettling than bad CGI. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe looking at faces is just way higher bandwidth so more things can go wrong?

Do users of immutable systems (i.e Nix or Guix) upgrade more or less often than other platforms? There's less pressure to upgrade (unlike a rolling release distro) but in principle upgrading is easier.