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.

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.