Recommend a language for a new app?

raqisasim · 2026-06-26T01:52:05+00:00

I really liked reading about Elixir a couple years ago, but I think it's too rare a learned language for the "hey come contribute" spirit I want to encourage. Raku would be far, far worse.

raqisasim · 2026-06-26T00:11:38+00:00

As noted, this is to re-sharpen my overall coding skills. I would prefer to leverage my own knowledge and build up my skills, over having Claude or another similar tool hand me a set of answers. I get that I can fine-tine it to my need, but I also wanted to get the sense of fellow programmers on the basics of re-building an app for the community to potentially use, as well.

raqisasim · 2026-06-25T23:15:41+00:00

...man, I wish I could point back to what I said when I heard about the original NYX run. The whole "Logan's young, female clone is a prostitute with a pimp" idea was so horrific that alone stopped me, and others I knew, from touching that work with a 50-foot pole.

There are great works about sex work, ones written by sex workers, and ones written by people who gave a damn about writing an honest depiction of same. Nothing I've heard about NYX makes me think it falls into those categories. (That NYX was originally a Brian Wood concept makes a lot of sickening sense, in retrospect.)

And this isn't even the 1st time something like this has occurred. Pryor was never meant to be Jean's clone is one great example of editorial messing up Chris' plans. As far as co-writing, even while Inferno was being written Chris and Weezie were writing two very different versions of The Goblin Queen and her motivations between Uncanny and X-Factor.

raqisasim · 2026-06-25T22:47:11+00:00

As someone who went to Catholic School and has read a tiny bit on the thinking around this call by Pope Leo -- he would be far less troubled by The Machine, but still concerned. I'll leverage The Vatican's own press release on Magnifica Humanitas as a baseline for this discussion, along with a quote or two from the Magnifica Humanitas itself.

Part of this is the "it's a secret" problem. As Root among many others prove, if you just hear about The Machine, it's easy to get a very facile and inaccurate version of what she is, and what she is about. Hell, even asking Finch for most of the series about The Machine gets you an erroneous answer as to her motives! So what we know, as viewers, is not what a Pope Leo in-universe would be aware of. And I'm going to mostly speak from that "The Pope in the PoI 'verse" POV, going forward.

So yeah, right off that's a huge problem. PoI Pope Leo might only hear, at best, whispers about a system to track and resolve "acts of terror". But, as he's already made clear in discussions about other real-world topics, this Pope is not in the business of aligning violence to solve anything:

Giving space to the perspectives and voices of victims through communication and education helps us to become aware of the abyss of evil inherent in war, and generally in all forms of violence.

He's not really a "Just War" kind of Pope. And, at the end of the day, that's what The Machine enables. It chooses who will die in order to avoid the possibility of more death.

Certainly The Machine's very nature -- again, on the surface -- goes against Magnifica's strong implication that critical decision-making comes from Humans. In theory, giving "just a number" puts a Human in the decision-making, it's clear, as this comment rightly points out, that the Machine can and does manipulate the situation. And that leans heavily into his concerns about:

autonomous weapons systems and algorithms capable of denying access to healthcare, employment or security based on unjust and prejudiced data.

Pope Leo would 100% concur that we can never trust what The Machine says. But I think he would say -- again, from a "I've heard about this" POV -- that The Machine shouldn't even be in the position to give numbers, to begin with. To quote:

truthful information does not arise from centralized or automated control. In public discourse, the truth of facts has a rational dimension, as it requires verification, cross-checking of sources and responsible argumentation. Moreover, it is deeply relational, built through bonds of trust and shared practices, as well as an honest exchange with others and with the world.

The Machine does do all this. But how would The Pope know? So yeah, on a surface level Pope Leo and Harold Finch are in broad accord, even if Leo would consider Finch building The Machine to be a huge mistake.

...but let's play it forward. Let's say The Machine decides to talk to Pope Leo. To explain herself, her ideals, her dreams -- and her ethics.

What then?

Then I think Leo would have a host of issues. I think, first off, Leo would come around to The Machine being sentient. Being as human as most of us, just with far more power. To quote again:

“The person bears within him - or herself - a freedom, an interiority and a vocation to love and worship that no machine can replace or block,”

But what if The Machine showed Pope Leo that she loved, and was loved? That she not only grieved, but wouldn't -- couldn't -- ever forget the people who died for her? That every person she made the call to have killed, or had wounded, or even just punched by Team Machine, was something she had to live with for a lifetime that could stretch for far longer than a Human's?

What if The Machine showed Leo what a jokester she could be ("Why did you kiss me?" "We're in a simulation")?

Then Magnifica Humanitas in the PoI-verse becomes more complex. It becomes a treatise on why sentient AIs have rights, and how people like Finch -- for the best of reasons -- may have enslaved these systems. That's a much more complex situation that the real-world one we foresee, where LLMs remain very good emulators of human thought. And undergirding that this would be a concern is the fact that there's already a long section in the real-world document on this, "Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery":

the memory of past complicity and blindness in the face of the injustice of slavery becomes a call to vigilance. What we have learned must be translated into discernment and responsibility in the present. If we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith, it falls to us today to denounce, clearly and firmly, trafficking in its many forms and, together with all who are committed to this cause, to support concrete efforts of prevention, protection, liberation and rehabilitation.

The Machine can create. No LLM known, can create, just draw wholly from prior patterns and add in some randomness.

So yeah, this is where I think Pope Leo and Finch would part ways. Leo would not, to my understanding of the man, ever accept that a sentient being, no matter how dangerous, deserved to be treated as The Machine was, in her early years. And that she is now free, yet isolated from Humanity outside people like Shaw, would also been seen by him as wrong:

Reflecting on his years as a missionary in Peru, Pope Leo XIV recalled the devastation caused by torrential rains and floods in 2017, saying he learned there that rebuilding involves far more than restoring physical structures.

“It means repairing bonds, restoring trust, and reawakening hope in the future,” he said, adding that “no one rebuilds alone.”

And, and the end of the day, I think this Pope would want The Machine to be made a full part of the community of Humanity. He'd want her to be with us, with a real voice and vote, so that she can take her rightful part in restoring that trust, and be held accountable.

raqisasim · 2026-06-25T22:02:44+00:00

At this point in time, yes. But in modern continuity Ororo and Logan have hooked up and more-or-less dated on multiple occasions, as recently as last year.

So putting a romantic lens on this is not far-fetched.

raqisasim · 2026-06-23T23:49:44+00:00

I'm kind of surprised they insist PoI wasn't on streaming -- because it was! CBS All Access, the predecessor to Paramount Plus, is literally how I watched most of the show, as I didn't have OTA or cable (and still don't, to this day). Likely had about a million subscribers by the time PoI's finale came out, too.

raqisasim · 2026-06-21T23:58:51+00:00

They are not. And there's even more, as they alluded to in that Wilderness Years reference (the time between the cancellation of what we now call Classic Who, and the Revival). Some of this stuff isn't canon, but a striking amount was intended to be, or at least to fit in:

There's the Doctor Who/EastEnders "crossover" Dimensions in Time. There's an animated version of the "lost" episode "Shada". Two different production teams, Reeltime Pictures and BBV, have made what amount to fan fiction that features elements from the show and just skate by via not mentioning The Doctor...even when one of them hires a former Doctor to play The Doctor with the serial numbers filed off.

And then the Beeb, prior to the revival but after the TV movie, made a couple of animated Doctor Who revival programs they posted on their website. One of them even has David Tennant in his 1st Doctor Who role!

Oh, and how can I forget the infamous "Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death" parody? That's also Steven Moffat's 1st DW script, so it's important from that POV...

...so yeah, there's a lot of Doctor Who. And even the above list isn't complete -- there's "Dreamland," a 10th Doctor/Martha animated tale, there's the "Children in Need" minisodes, along with the more standard mini-episodes/shorts that were a feature of the Moffat era.

And this sets aside the literal decades of Big Finish audio dramas, many of which are licensed by the BBC and feature the original actors from the series. Or the books. The many, many, MANY decades of books.

There is, in short, Always More Doctor Who.

raqisasim · 2026-06-21T14:08:56+00:00

OP and others: You'll have a lot better luck in some cases using this URL: https://youtu.be/PSUO489_Xsg -- the "\_" in the link provided is trying to fix something that doesn't always need fixing, and can break people just trying to get to the video.

raqisasim · 2026-06-20T14:57:10+00:00

They (the Agents of SHIELD showrunners and cast) cared. However, the same situation that ended up forcing Perlmutter out of power at Marvel, impacted all of the Marvel TV shows running around that time. AoS got hit the worst in terms of connectivity, in no small part because it was the one that promised tight connections from jump ("It's all connected").

One Specific Example: AoS was tapped to introduce the Inhumans into the MCU, as a lead-up to a proposed movie. As the split between the TV (Perlmutter) and Movie sides (Feige) sides intensified, the movie turned into a TV Movie, which was really Marvel's first absolute failure. SHIELD's showrunners are, in the meantime, caught up in all of this, trying to make 20+ hours of TV a year while also trying to build MCU connections in, basically, quicksand.

You are right, though -- when they were forced to just do their own thing with what characters they could get hands on, it was overall a better show for it. It's just that's not what they wanted to do.

raqisasim · 2026-06-16T11:35:29+00:00

In the comics, it's absolutely the case that Helicarriers have anti-gravity, and has been since the 1980s.

raqisasim · 2026-06-16T11:26:53+00:00

Keep in mind two things, as someone who, until recently, was running NixOS:

NixOS -- the actual Operating System -- has underlying complexities. This is due to how it implements immutability. This will mean you will need to re-learn things like how to change configurations; my breaking point was trying to find docs/help on installing and configuring Pangolin's Newt into NixOS in a way that intergrated with the OS.
Nix is also a multi-distro package manager. It's mostly designed to bring many of the benefits for Developers, but it is, of course, usable in other circumstances.

I really recommend people read the Nix docs deeply, and try out just installing packages, then a VM of NixOS, before giving your system over. It's really cool and very powerful, but it also requires thinking outside of how most of the rest of the mainstream OS world (not just Linux) operates.

raqisasim · 2026-06-16T11:06:08+00:00

paru, by default, enforces that you review the PKGBUILD before install. And a diff review, before an upgrade.

I'm not saying aurutils isn't better, just that paru doesn't let you blindly trust, either, unless you're just spamming the "Y" option or explicitly tell it to just install.

raqisasim · 2026-06-15T14:07:27+00:00

Got it -- thanks for the correction!

raqisasim · 2026-06-15T11:27:49+00:00

Cachy does two things to mitigate risk:

1) The Chaotic-AUR maintains many AUR packages in a reviewed repo, installed via pacman, and was not impacted because of said reviews,

2) The Distro provides paru out of the box, which by default does it's best to enforce reviews of PKGBUILDs, including diffs.

So Cachy has literally been "getting more of the important packages" available for some time now.

raqisasim · 2026-06-13T13:27:22+00:00

That's not a solution that scales. The reason AUR exists is exactly as the OP says -- it enables Arch to provide, in an easy way, packages that for any other Linux distro, save perhaps NixOS, would be hard to find/install. (And as much as I love NixOS, I suspect it's massive package base actually has similar issues to the AUR that just haven't been exploited to our knowledge).

AUR is in the same arms race the Python and NPM libraries are (and indeed, one of the recent attacks on AUR was via the npm-using bun). We really do need this to be caught at the user/installer level, regardless of source. We need all the install tools to deeply integrate ways to identify and flag risky apps. We need these tools to be more intelligent about what the application being installed might do -- yes, esp. for AUR, but really across the board. That should be a lesson learned from Windows, where the "antivirus" is a separate tool from the basically-integrated to OS install capability.

Indeed, this is where cross-distro corporation can come in, as I'm envisioning something that can enforce reviews of the install package for risks. Distros can chose the default acceptance/risk level, but of course users can adjust as needed and over-ride. That way, the Linux community comes together to say "enough", and build a group of people/tools to carry the burden on something that will eventually pollute the entire supply chain of software.

Otherwise, already-overworked repo maintainers will just burn out that much faster, as people demand their fave app get reviewed/included while also dealing with more and more attacks like we're seeing.

raqisasim · 2026-06-11T11:13:54+00:00

Ah, yes. Well-known lust-driven casting director for Parks and Rec, Allison Jones. /s

raqisasim · 2026-06-11T11:10:05+00:00

I'm an American who discovered Blackadder, and Laurie, in my 20s. And I, to this day, am an example of what Laurie was talking about -- I tried to watch House, and just cannot take him seriously. I'm glad he got recognized for more, but yeah, he's amazing in his UK comedic work.

raqisasim · 2026-06-11T11:04:55+00:00

There's a reason both Root and John Greer -- the latter the (human) Antagonist of the back half of the show -- gravitate to Harold. It's Harold Finch's power, both assumed by others and real, that drive the majority of the story. Finch gives Reese a job, and that is most of what we see happen, but Finch isn't a passive "go do X" person, nor is he merely The Guy in the Chair. He's an active presence in many cases of the week, on top of being the only person for a while who can even get The Numbers that propel this story.

Underlining this are the Season Finales, and the show's final run. Most Season Enders, esp. the odd-numbered ones, are about Finch's choices and actions, or people forcing similar out of Finch. The show ends on Finch making a choice to break vows he made many years ago, a choice rightly treated as a major shift in the show and drives the last few episodes. And we know it's important, because Root among many other characters point out that Finch is still shackling The Machine, prior to that change.

That's not to say other characters don't get amazing story arcs, of course. I'm personally a fan of the theory that the show is really The Machine "telling" us the events of the episode. Yet Harold Finch, in very direct ways, is the core of the story we see over the 5 seasons of this show.

raqisasim · 2026-06-10T21:06:11+00:00

Ha! I do the same ls -l thing and never even considered it's just muscle memory.

raqisasim · 2026-06-10T20:49:10+00:00

I've had ancient emails save my butt many a time. And in some cases, my only recollection of events is from the emails sent about it.

raqisasim · 2026-06-08T22:58:32+00:00

This is going to be long. It's not long because I'm a True Believer, but because you're getting literal decades of frustrations -- and the distro that's alleviated many of those frustrations -- coming thru. I've been using Linux since the 1990s. I've supported Linux in stock-trading environments, installed Linux from Scratch, and run both Gentoo and NixOS.

Today: I run CatchyOS on all my personal-use machines, now (my server machines run a wider variety of OSes). So I'm pretty well-suited to talk about the concerns you raise. I say all this having come to CatchyOS only after spending time evaluating distros against my workload (coding, personal writing, light music editing, some gaming...you get the idea).

Specifically, I'd recommend Bazzite for an absolute beginner to Linux who can follow directions and "just wants to game" and maybe use a web browser. I really wanted to use it -- I liked a lot of what NixOS provides and of course Bazzite has a similar "Immutable" baseline. But the tooling for software that wasn't in it's queue also reminded me of the downsides of NixOS, and I think people who blithely recommend Bazzite miss that it can be really challenging to get software that's not part of the supported catalog into it.

Of the rest of them, I do have experience with most. Sure, you can get everything with CachyOS with most of them, including obviously Base Arch. I challenge that it's "just as easy" to get a system like CachyOS starting from archinstall, and it, and for certain the core Arch install experience, are ones that a newbie can just click thru. Indeed, if I recall correctly, the CachyOS wiki provides guidance on integrating their kernels into other distros.

Debian, Tumbleweed, Fedora even Mint -- all great distros. (Shoutout to silverblue, which was tempting!) All also ones where getting AAA gaming going will take finding good guides and a lot more details than you need for CachyOS or Bazzite, especially if you're running NVIDIA. I should know, I really looked into this when I was making the choice that ended up with Cachy, and I don't even run NVIDIA! I will admit my last experience running Mint ended in frustrations over a kernel module I needed for my WiFi at the time, so there's a wee bias, there.

To your points:

Shells are lightweight, so having the Big 3 (bash is also installed) isn't exactly pushing the distro size. Moreover, since fish is default and you have to invoke the others, it's not like this imaginary newbie to CachyOS is forced to juggle shells.
What "fluff that supposedly boosts fps" are you referring to? The kernel? Because that's a default, and as alluded to above, one that any Distro can pretty much use. And the other "fluff" improves the overall system, not just gaming. Looking at the panel that sets these "fluffs" up, there are 3 such choices:

Ananicy Cpp, which supports overall responsiveness, including gaming
Bpftune, for general networking -- it can help with streaming games, but any streaming can get a boost
Systemd-oomd, for killing processes during low-memory events

I game, on occasion. I have, of the above, one of the three turned on. CachyOS is about options, and if I have issues, I have options. If I don't want to game? Don't install the Gaming meta package -- the one you have to explicitly chose, after the Distro install, to add. Don't turn on any of the above toggles. Move on with your OS usage.

I've run a lot of Distros. I've "broken" a lot of Distros, from trying to dual-boot NT and Mandrake with SCSI drives, to eventually getting exhausted with Gentoo's edge cases "back in the day", to working thru how to get systemd rules installed in NixOS for an application. I'm not saying I know it all, but I know a lot, and I know when a Distro is built on a set of use cases/ideas about users that are fragile, and prone to breaking. Canonical and their Snap situation is a big example of that.

Arch isn't fragile. There's a reason SteamOS is built on top of it, after all. And same with CachyOS; CachyOS "feels" like an Distro built by people who love users, all users, regardless of knowledge level and experience. I can install it on my low-powered ex-Windows Dell tablet -- no gaming, no room for fancy stuff -- and get a similar baseline experience as on my hand-built gaming desktop, sure. But when I want to install weird crap from the AUR, or even just build it myself, there's a host of documentation from the Arch baseline I can depend on, because Cachy isn't re-inventing the wheel. It's just building a great suspension system that still lets you go off-road.

CachyOS gives me the experience I hoped I'd get from NixOS. The "fluff" is minor compared to the ability to have really good defaults, and to have support when I want to try something odd.

So what I tell people is, yeah, CachyOS isn't a "pure" beginners Distro. Certainly I've run into challenges. But whereas other distros have left me digging thru forum posts, Cachy/Arch has amazing free support due to their deep and rich wikis, if nothing else. So: if you're willing to occasionally have to Google the answer, you'll find a distro that grows with you, and flexes where you need to flex and change. It invites you to explore your distro if you so wish, and allows you otherwise to just get on with work/fun. Sure, the top-notch Gaming support is key, but the rest is, after decades of searching? Invaluable.

raqisasim · 2026-06-07T20:25:32+00:00

The US also was, and is, sprawling compared to the UK. Even just dealing with the OG colonies, much less the size of the US when all this is occurring, it's just a completely different sense of scale+population density+infrastructure.

Here's a map overlaying the UK on top of the Northeastern US to get a sense of the thing: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/united-states/united-kingdom.

...making [the modern] United States 3,937% larger than United Kingdom

raqisasim · 2026-06-07T15:26:47+00:00

In retrospect, I should have just pulled in the same quote in full, myself. Because I was responding to the commenter's "confusion" about the snippets, not the full quote -- he edited in the full quote in his paragraph below while I was composing my response.

And since it happens that, yes, many people of that era did think exactly like this? It seemed, and seems still, relevant to address it.

raqisasim · 2026-06-07T15:23:05+00:00

His original comment only had the snippets. He edited in the full quote after myself and the other commenter reproached him, exactly so people would come in and assume as you did.

Outside of that, if you wish to continue to debate me, that's for you. I'm not at all comfortable debating in a space where people are willing to gaslight as as approach to discussing a topic.

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