There are a few gnarly things about Nix, even for someone who’s familiar with Haskell (the most similar language to Nix that’s even close to mainstream).

• Dynamic typing (you mention this briefly). Some people like the extra flexibility that dynamic typing gives, but there’s a tradeoff: more errors. The thing is, due to NixOS’s complicated structure, the traceback for an evaluation error might not give you any information about where the cause is (indeed, the traceback might not include a single line of your own code!). This makes errors unusually costly in NixOS specifically, so any language feature that causes more runtime errors automatically has a worse impact than it would in a more “normal” language.
• The “standard library” (builtins) is extremely sparse. You basically have to depend on at least nixpkgs-lib if you want to get any real work done.
• No real data abstraction mechanisms. No ADTs, no nominal types. The only composite types are attrsets and lists. The usual way to encode a custom type is as an attrset with a _type field or some such.
• While we’re at it, very limited pattern-matching.
• Clunky list literal syntax: no commas between list elements. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve forgotten to surround list elements in parentheses.
• Can anyone remember the rules for escaping ${ or ''? I have to look them up every time.

Do you have support for smooth full-screen Flash video yet?

I don’t remember if that ever got fixed. Even if it did, Flash was already on its way out by that point.

Vance said this well before he became the VP.

Don’t treat Vance like he’s harmless. Vance is dangerous. Unlike Trump, he has something of a coherent vision, and he believes in things beyond himself. He’ll be willing to violate the rule of law for the sake of ideals.

Fiat isn’t “silly” insofar as there’s an underlying reason why fiat has value. The US dollar is valuable because the US government only accepts tax payments in USD. As long as the US government demands tax payments and has the ability to make good on those demands, US dollars will have value.

Vance has an old school polotician side. If left to himself, he wouldn’t go against the courts for example.

Don’t be so sure about that.

“I think that what Trump should, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, [is] fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” he said in 2021 on a podcast. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Now, Vance doesn’t have the iron grip on 33% of the country that Trump has, so it’s possible that he’d have to be more cautious. But he’s definitely not against ignoring the courts in principle.

But that’s not even true. Trump is fucking things up for everyone in difficult-to-reverse ways. Schumer just doesn’t seem to have realized that.

Even so, the way Schumer handled this was just awful. Vulnerable Democrats in the House stuck their necks out to vote against the CR. Then Schumer acted like he was going to filibuster it, but it was really just a procedural ruse. He burned his colleagues in the House and the Democratic base. If he was going to allow the CR to proceed, then he should have been signalling that since the beginning, and he certainly should never have acted like he was going to block it.

Also, as a personal matter, the tone that Schumer has been taking really grates on me. His solution is always to just roll over and let the Republicans do whatever. Maybe that’s the rational thing to do, reasonable minds can disagree, but he always seems so smug about it, as if that were obviously correct, and anyone who suggests that we should fight is a moron.

And whenever I hear him talk, I never get a sense of urgency. It’s as if nothing that’s going on really bothers him, and he’s 100% certain that things will turn out just fine like they always have. And that’s just objectively not true. Regardless of what our strategy should be, Trump is doing irreversible damage. Even if we end up winning the House in 2026 and the Presidency in 2028, our international reputation is going to be completely fucked for at least a decade, and very likely longer than that. Schumer should be worried, even if only for his own self-interest, because the system that has been so good to him is at risk of collapsing.

Even if he made the rational move in allowing the CR to proceed, I really think he’s just not a good leader or spokesperson for the party.

That’s comparatively very easy. Americans instinctively mistrust all governments, and especially their own. America was founded on hatred and mistrust of government, and those roots run deep. But we have no actual beef with Canada and the Canadian people. And sure, the Republican propaganda machine can try to invent one, but I just don’t think it will stick. It’s easy to target the scary poor brown foreigners coming in from the southern border, but people just won’t believe you when you try to demonize Canadians, because they’re basically the same as us culturally.

Most people aren’t freaking out right now because they don’t take Trump literally. You’d think that they would have learned better by now, but one of Trump’s legitimate talents is that he has an almost supernatural ability to get people to selectively believe what he says: they believe the things they like and think he’s just bullshitting about everything else. If something actually happens with Canada, people will wake up fast.

Unfortunately, I think a Panama invasion is more likely, and I actually doubt that most Americans will be so upset in that situation.

You’re going to have a hard time getting Americans to rally behind shooting at the polite white people next door. I really don’t think even the Republican propaganda machine could make that happen.

Doesn’t always work that way for me, unfortunately. Weed often makes it impossible to avoid or ignore negative self-image problems that I’m usually constantly pushing down.

Weed can be very helpful for focus. Not necessarily very helpful for clear thinking, but it can be very good for getting started on something so that you can come back to it later when you’re sober.

AI is not technically new, but generative AI was not a mature technology in 2014. It has come a long way since then.

It’s actually exactly in line with what the link above says.

In June 2015, the Cochrane Collaboration—a global independent network of researchers and health care professionals known for rigorous scientific reviews of public health policies—published an analysis of 20 key studies on water fluoridation. They found that while water fluoridation is effective at reducing tooth decay among children, “no studies that aimed to determine the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing caries [cavities] in adults met the review’s inclusion criteria.”

In other words, water fluoridation might not make much difference for adults, but it can for children.

Even trans people aren’t beating the “nearly all mass shooters are men” statistic.

Counterpoint: I live in an area without fluoridated water, and I’m told that dentists can reliably identify people who didn’t grow up here by the state of their teeth.

Well, that’s a completely different argument.

If something is wrong, then it’s wrong, regardless of how efficient or inefficient it is.

How much earlier are we talking? I bet if you asked prehistoric hunter-gatherers whether they thought animals experienced pain, they woulds say yes. The idea that animals were automata comes from Descartes.

What? The fact that plants physically react to being cut has absolutely no bearing on whether they have conscious experience.

How about I just get to eat meat because I consider it far more humane to be more efficient about proteins?

What does this have to do with anything? This is bringing efficiency to an ethics fight.