the most important feature of NixOS for me is reproducibility
Reproducibility is a big topic for Guix developers and users as well, just have a look at how many times they talk about that: https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2022/07/is-reproducibility-practical/
Also correct me if I'm wrong but I think Guix goes further on reproducibility than Nix, because everything they package is from source, whereas my understanding is that a lot of Nix packages are built from binaries.
The turmoil surrounding Elon Musk’s handling of his Twitter takeover has renewed concern over the perils of a public good in private hands (Nature 613, 19–21 (2023); see also Nature 614, 602; 2023). Another form of scholarly public discourse is also owned by profit-driven entities — academic publishers. We propose an answer to both problems.
The most-discussed solution for Twitter is migration to Mastodon (see Science 378, 583–584; 2022), a social-technology platform that communicates over a distributed network of servers (‘instances’ in the ‘Fediverse’), akin to e-mail, and is immune to private takeover. Similarly federated solutions exist for journal articles (B. Brembs et al. Preprint at Zenodo https://doi.org/gn6jjc; 2021), but free social interaction is still hampered by inertia in scholarly organizations — in particular, resistance by scholarly societies that rely heavily on publication income.
There is now a golden opportunity for every scholarly society to implement a Mastodon instance for anyone interested in their field. If the academic community can create a public resource protected from private interests, it could become a model for bringing the remaining scholarly record — encompassing text, data and code — into the Fediverse.
Nature 614, 624 (2023)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00486-3
America has a unique love affair with pickup trucks — the Ford F-150, for instance, has been the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for more than 40 years. During that time, pickups have changed significantly: they’ve become bigger, more high-tech — and more dangerous.
Open Access is one of the pillars of Open Science. In this episode I am talking to Jean-Claude Guedon from the University of Montreal (Canada). Jean-Claude is one of the authors of the declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative from 2002. ...
Here’s how NASA is incentivizing open science, and how you can too.
We are calling on scholars in all disciplines and all countries to sign an open letter addressed to the United States government. We want a truly free and open system of publishing for the benefit of researchers and society.
The US government has issued a new policy that in future, all government funded research will have to be made freely accessible to the public. However, they have not specified how this will be achieved, and publishers are pushing for a model in which the current system continues unchanged except that the authors and institutions pay the publishers rather than readers. This is a form of open access, but the excessively high prices they charge mean that it would exclude many from being able to publish their work in these publishers' journals. In other words, this policy which is supposed to create equitable access would have the unintended consequence of making participation in research itself less equitable.
We are calling on the US government to make sure that their policy is implemented in a way that allows everyone to participate equally in research, not just read it. Since this is likely to shake up the old business models of publishers, we further call on the US government to support or build a publicly funded and freely available publishing infrastructure to guarantee to all the ability to participate in research, and to create the conditions for a lively and innovative ecosystem of new approaches to publishing, better adapted to the modern world.
Sign the letter now, share this article, or read on for more details and references.
By taking multiple COVID-19 shots, the man from Germany would have got real vaccine batch numbers that he could put on fake vaccine certificates.
If you got shuned by the society not because of what you did but what your neighbor did, you will cry bloody injustice. This is exactly what is happening in SPAM blacklisting.
<p> The stable Inkscape 1.1.2 winter release is out, fixing many bugs and crashes!<br> At the same time, we're also releasing a feature-packed alpha preview version of the upcoming 1.2 release, giving you the opportunity to help the project with testing all the new bells and whistles.<br> Along with...
From the law court of Venice comes the first precautionary order that protects the GPL license
TinyTeX is a custom LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live that is small in size, but functions well in most cases, especially for R users. If you run into the problem of missing LaTeX packages, it …
TinyTeX is a custom LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live that is small in size (about 61Mb on macOS/Linux, and 94Mb on Windows when (g)zipped), but functions well in most cases, especially for R users. If you run into the problem of missing LaTeX packages, it should be super clear to you what you need to do (in fact, R users won’t need to do anything). You only install LaTeX packages you actually need.
The online LibreOffice Conference 2021 starts tomorrow! Here’s how to take part… Program The schedule of the conference is available from here. Time zone is on the upper left: depending on your system settings, it usually is Europe/Berlin time (UTC+2). There is an app available too – downloads from ...
There is no shortage of package managers. Each tool makes its own set of tradeoffs regarding speed, ease of use, customizability, and reproducibility. Guix occupies a sweet spot, providing reproducibility by design as pioneered by Nix, package customization à la Spack from the command line, the ability to create container images without hassle, and more.
Beyond the “feature matrix” of the tools themselves, a topic that is often overlooked is packages—or rather, what’s inside of them. Chances are that a given package may be installed using any of the many tools at your disposal. But are you really getting the same thing regardless of the tool you are using? The answer is “no”, contrary to what one might think. The author realized this very acutely while fearlessly attempting to package the PyTorch machine learning framework for Guix.
This post is about the journey packaging PyTorch the Guix way, the rationale, a glimpse at what other PyTorch packages out there look like, and conclusions we can draw for high-performance computing and scientific workflows.
