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.

A horse will take you to the grocery store too, but the NFT of the apartment also comes with the legal documents that show you are the valid resident unlike just a pin code. This also protects the customer from brokers and services from using illegal subletting as you can only get the ‘pin’ from the last valid owner, and that access can be traced back to the initial moment the property entered the blockchain. Also in court, discovery is stupidly easy as all transactions are public and secure

Great. You know what, I agree that those are, at least in theory, real advantages.

Question: how much value would this realistically add? When was the last time the Average Joe had a problem with illegal subletting or a complicated discovery process? I know I’ve never had these problems.

Also, this is all coming with a new attack vector—malicious smart contracts. In a court of law, I can go before a judge and argue that the terms of a contract are unfair, and they’re more likely to side with me, a non-sophisticated actor. “Smart contracts” do not give you any such recourse. I don’t want to live in a world where cold machine logic overrides human judgement, and I think most ordinary people feel the same way.

The NFT IS a contract

No, it is not. A signed piece of paper is not a contract, either, even though we often refer to it as such metonymically. A contract is a legally-binding agreement. It may be represented and recorded in some form, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s no formal specification for legal contracts. Lawyers/businesses like written contracts in standard legal language because it helps with reliability and predictability, but nothing says a contract has to look like that. Two parties can meet and agree verbally on some terms, without writing anything down, and that can count as a contract.

Yes, NFTs have this thing called “smart contracts”, but the relationship between “smart contracts” and actual legal contracts is not one-to-one: not every smart contract is a legal contract. More importantly, though, if crypto advocates’ claims are valid, then it shouldn’t matter whether a smart contract is a legal contract. A legal contract has an external enforcement mechanism—namely, the courts. In contrast, a smart contract is supposed to be self-executing. This is the whole point of the “code is law” slogan.

If code is law, then the courts aren’t necessary, and it doesn’t matter whether an NFT is a legal contract. If code is not law—in other words, if the law is law—then the courts are still the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and the NFT itself is pointless. It could have just been a digital record stored in two databases, and it would have been equally legally binding with much less hassle.

You are so welded to your meme identity it blinds you to a useful and functional thing

In order to prove that crypto is not nearly as useful as crypto advocates have claimed, all I need to do is point to generative AI. I think the value of generative AI in the short term is overblown, but nonetheless, just look at how it’s been adopted by basically every tech company in the world just a few years after ChatGPT’s release. Now look at how many companies are using crypto in mission-critical contexts more than two decades after Bitcoin was invented. Sure, a few companies hyped crypto adoption in order to pump their stock back when crypto was The Thing, but how much do we hear about all that stuff these days?

Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.

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.

A limited access club can mint NFTs for membership, allowing the holders to personally trade their access in a transparent way and provides an encrypted method functionally equivalent to a One Time Pad (One of the most, if not the MOST secure encryption method in existence) so building access can be transferred instantly between rights holders, as well as providing a secure inherent messaging between members

You can do this with a database.

This can also be generalized for apartment access. Need a place to stay? You can purchase the tenant NFT from the current renter, and have access to the property securely within seconds

You can do this with a PIN code.

Lets say a LLM is tasked with constantly sourcing the cheapest source of tin for industrial processes, and that all the tin producers set lots of raw material as NFTs. (In this case it isn’t an ideal use as the lots are not unique, but the underlying programatic contract execution doesn’t care and treats them as unique) so the LLM calculates shipping and price and automatically buys lots of NFTs to match the need, which ship out from a port halfway around the world that afternoon

Now 2 days into the 12 day shipping time, the LLM notices that there is a sudden need for tin closer to the current ship location than the initial destination and contacts the LLM of the company that posted the tin need, and offers the lots of NFTs on the ship, the other LLM agrees and the contract is made, the ownership of those lots are altered, the shipping manifest of the cargo vessel is updated and the shipping route may or may not be altered based on the judgment of the LLM handling the cargo ship. All of this happens in a matter of seconds. Once the transaction is complete, the original LLM now goes and searches for another source of tin

You can do this with databases.

The biggest benefit of NFTs is reducing the friction of complex logistic changes allowing companies to find advantages that pass too quickly for humans to notice or make best use of in a way that can be legally as binding as any other signed contract in a court of law.

In any situation where you might be tempted to call an NFT “legally binding”, it’s not the NFT that’s binding, it’s a contract, and the NFT is just a proxy for the contract. The NFT adds no value.

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.

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.

I have a feeling that that might change after this election. There’s a real sense among liberal media (that I engage with) that a loss of this magnitude needs to be answered by a pretty substantial break with the status quo.

Believing a candidate when they tell you who they are is the opposite of delusion.

First: your tone is highly combative. I wouldn’t be shocked if this is part of why you don’t have productive conversations most of the time. I’m a pretty coolheaded person, but being Internet-shouted at does not tend to bring out the best in people.

Ironically, given the vegan stereotype, you are the one why has levied personal accusations, not me.

Your utilitarianism equates mass slaughter with ‘the least suffering’. That is monstrous.

What?

Does “mass slaughter” not describe the current state of affairs, except on a daily basis? Something like a billion animals per day (including fish)? 1 billion pigs, each of which us as smart as a toddler, per year?

I’m proposing slaughtering animals that were already going to be slaughtered. The only difference is timing, right? Seriously, am I missing something?

Surely the anti-vegan position must also consider mass slaughter, in the most dispassionate and literal sense of the word slaughter, to be acceptable.

Species extinction is a great tragedy, and it is happening at a frightening pace.

If you care about biodiversity, you really don’t want to be arguing the anti-vegan position. A huge portion of species extinction is a result of habitat loss, a huge portion of which is caused by clearing land for cattle ranching. If you want to reduce your personal impact on biodiversity, don’t consume cow products.

Domestication is mutualism, animals receive great benefit from it in the form of better nutrition and medical care. You treat it as some form of inhumane torture and deny its greatest benefit. I cannot accept your arguments here.

I can’t see how you can possibly argue that animals in the meat industry have a good quality of life (on average; I’m sure there are exceptions). Jesus, have you seen the conditions they’re kept in? Have you seen the chickens so large they can barely move? Have you seen what they do to male chicks? This is, like, the core emotional reason why people go vegan to begin with.

And here the bullshit begins. I never ONCE fucking invoked a supernatural deity here and was SPECIFICALLY referring to how our diets have shaped our physiology over the last several hundred thousand years. Honestly I wanted to just stop this discussion here and block you, but I am trying to be a better person no matter how hard you make it.

Please, please. Please assume good faith on my part. (Don’t be so unreasonable.)

Of course you never invoked a deity. That was a rhetorical gesture on my part. The point is that there is no telos in nature. You cannot get directly from a state of affairs to a conclusion about how things ought to be.

I have particular qualm with arguments of the form “We evolved doing X, therefore we’re meant to do X, therefore we should continue doing X”, because they typically imply that evolution has some kind of normative quality to it, which it simply doesn’t.

No I wouldn’t, not at all, in fact I abhor the fact that agriculture ever became a thing.

You know what? I respect that stance. I used to believe it wholeheartedly, but I have a lot of reservations about it these days. I don’t think you should judge me too harshly for assuming the opposite, though—you’re part of an extreme minority.

But my original point stands—unless your argument is that we should live as much like hunter-gatherers as possible, in which case, well, I suppose that’s a consistent position—but in that case, I think you ought to be focusing your energies arguing against cheeseburgers, because “plant-based”-type vegans have a diet much closer to prehistoric humans than the average Westerner.

We are the products of a ridiculous amount of specialization that even cutting edge medicine is only now beginning to understand, your embrace of ‘unnatural’ solutions (which is a stupid phrase all things considered we are a part of nature) is ill-planned as far as outcomes. You make ASSUMPTIONS that certain outcomes are the only result with no evidence, when the real world is rarely ever amenable to such clear cut cause and effect relationships.

The original question was: “Do you not think the critical need for specific supplements to maintain good health is a sign that the diet was never intended for our normal operation?” But it seems that what you really mean is: since vegans need to take supplements, maybe it’s impossible for the vegan diet to ever be truly healthy. Maybe that should have been obvious, but I’m autistic, so I tend to assume that people mean exactly what they say.

My answer to the latter question is: maybe! But I’m doubtful. I see vegans who are doing just fine, so I really do think there’s no fundamental reason why a vegan diet can’t be healthy. And, really, I don’t even see how it could be true. In the worst case, anything that we normally get from animals can be synthesized, or even grown in a lab.

In any case, I see suffering and I think we should be willing to take personal risks to reduce it. I don’t think that idea, on its own, is so crazy. Remember, I am not arguing in favor of, like, legislation; I’m arguing that people should make these choices voluntarily.

It is an established fact that pets are healthier and longer lived than their wild cousins, this is one case where you choose to ignore your utilitarianism because it conflicts with your groupthink.

I did say I was undecided. I’m not interested in arguing over points that I haven’t even endorsed.

There is clear evidence that even non-vegan infant formula causes long term health issues and that the only complete nutrition we have now for infants is human breast milk. I do not see how a vegan solution could even come close.

Why on Earth would I have an ethical objection to voluntarily-given human breast milk? That is vegan, by any reasonable definition. I thought you were talking about raising an infant with, like, vegan baby food.

I have no objection to the substance of animal products itself, or else I wouldn’t be suggesting lab-grown meat as a future possibility.