Specifically the operation of removing a file from a path without requiring the file to be unused. Open references to the file can still exist by processes.
I'm gonna defend meta here so hold with me for a bit.
Moderating bad actors is now impossible. They can, and do, produce so much content that any level of moderation is too expensive; even for meta. The scale of idiots to non idiots is biased heavily towards idiots. A slightly different version of "a lie can travel around the world before the truth gets their pants on".
Meta, Twitter, google, will not save us from the bad actors. Even if they committed millions to the effort. Nor are they willing to risk litigation from the idiots in the GOP. So guess what? The only sustainable practice for them is to block.
The fact that this will prevent dissemination of legit info from the government and professionals is a problem society created by falling into the tolerance "paradox" trap.
Good chuckle at the "Starbucks gift card". I haven't had a good manager that gave those out. Almost a perfect signal for bad management. "oh thanks... You paid Starbucks for me. How special"
The whole gift card market probably consists of: scammers ; bad management; lazy parents.
What... What problems does Nix solve? throws down his beer What value is precision? Why make a cube about 10cm per side when you can make a cube 10.001 cm +- 0.001 cm? Do you want software that's a collection of found parts that just happens to work? Or a system engineered to precise requirements?
Rant aside: that sums one difference. Both containers and Nix solve an encapsulation problem. They solve them differently. Containers gives software their own namespace. Nix requires software to exist in an a universal namespace. "/bin/bash" may be different between containers. While "/nix/store/bash-82828def8282829whatever/bin/bash" is always the exact same bash in Nix.
Precision has a cost but sometimes the precision is necessary. Eg: nix is great building closures that contain exactly the software requested and no more. While containers are more imprecise: take a base and add on additional stuff. From a software supply line perspective this can be exactly the precision required.
Nixpkgs is (afaik) the closest thing to Amazon's internal package system. So the issues it solves is definitely valuable... To at least Amazon scale orgs.
As a dev who likes to tweak their system Nix offers an unparalleled ability to alter deep dependencies and correctly propagate those through everything. Wanna alter libc and rebuild everything - jvm and all - for some Java service? Yep. Nix will handle the build no problem.
Excessive? Sometimes - plenty of systems work fine when dependencies are mutated underneath. However, when there is a need there is NixOS in a class of it's own.
Also, they are complementary solutions: nix is great at building containers.
unlink
Specifically the operation of removing a file from a path without requiring the file to be unused. Open references to the file can still exist by processes.