The Magicians (2016): It often gets pitched as “Hogwarts for adults” because it features a magic college/university, but honestly that is just the initial backdrop and a massive undersell.

It is the rare show where the creators were seemingly handed a blank cheque to be as creative as they want to be, and they make full use of that in more ways than I can list here (but which definitely includes both the magic system itself, and the hilarious nonchalance towards the consequences of magic being a reality); yet all the while, they stay true and fiercely loyal to their characters, who are all deeply flawed, but which you can’t help but want to see succeed; plus they managed to write genuinely great humor.

The best summary of the show comes from one of the characters themselves: “Magic doesn’t come from talent. It comes from pain.”

Be warned: the first few episodes, and possibly the first season, are the weakest and roughest of the bunch, which probably really hampered viewership. They do still manage to find their own tone, but it’s nothing compared to seasons 3-5.

Piefuckers

Diane ❤️

I’m lawful evil. It’s so great. I can keep my head straight instead of always having it turned.

Pffft. You just aren’t a Nix enjoyer yet.

I’m just going to leave this here: Wigner’s friend.

In Timelike Infinity, there’s a group following that logic through to its conclusion, committing a bit of terrorism on the galactic scale to make Ultimate Observer-senpai notice them from the end of time and the universe.

Batshit insane, 10/10, one of Baxter’s tamer plotlines.

No problem. If you do decide to give NixOS a try, feel free to ask about anything should things be unclear :)

Yeah… I heard that too, about half a year after I got really into nix.

To be honest, I try to keep away from community drama as much as possible, so I am not entirely up to date here. I think (and I might be wrong, if someone reading this knows better, correct me!) there’s three main points of contention:

• Queer, PoC, and other “minority” users experienced harassment on (semi-)official channels (Github, Discord, Forums): That fucking sucks. I’m queer myself and lucky enough to not have experienced any of that in my time with Nix, but if I had not decided on Nix yet and learned about this before getting invested, it might have given me enough pause to not put any time into this. In all honesty however, that’s sadly a problem with many, many OSS projects.
• Governance and Funding: I do not know much about the governance, afaik there was a bit of drama about the inventor of Nix acting like a (benevolent?) dictator for life, but those issues should have been resolved with a new governance model. The really big, inciting incident of a lot of community drama with Nix through was a bit over a year ago, when the committee in question decided to let Anduril fund a NixCon, against the explicit and loud protests of the community. That sucked. Hard. While obviously all kind of shit companies use all sorts of great OSS projects, inviting Anduril to sponsor your official conference is… not really understandable.
• Conflicts of Interest: the aforementioned inventor of Nix owns a company heavily invested in the nix ecosystem. A bit reminiscent of the way that, say, Google holds Chromium by the balls, though to a much less severe extent. Miraculously, features that are “extremely unstable” in nix (but wanted by the community for a long time) suddenly get released in closed source to enterprise customers… However, the open source project is separate from, and not beholden to the whims of, said company.

My position on all three points is this: They are not great; but a) they do not threaten the ecosystem, which is mature and independent of this drama, and not reliant on one or a couple of central, potentially problematic, people; and b) there are community projects that actively and effectively do distance themselves from all of these points (namely: Lix) and which are drop-in replacements for the core nix language and compiler, meaning if the upstream project actively did something to really piss you of, you could move with very little work to something independent of Nix.

I hope this will not become necessary, because Nix is genuinely magic. Once you get the hang of it, nothing on your computer is particularly difficult anymore. You also get the best-in-class package management (and it’s easy! Once you have configured your own system to your liking, you already know everything you need to package your own software and contribute to nixpkgs!), being “bleeding edge” yet at the same time incredibly stable (seriously, I have switched all of my servers and VMs to Nix and I have not had one single incident once, including after updating machines after forgetting about them for 1.5+ years).

Anyways. Sorry for the wall of text lol.

Gotcha. It’s still a fun question to think about though.

My uni switched from teaching their intro classes in Java to python the year before I started, and in defense of python, I have to say: it’s so simple for small things, that it gets out of the way in the classroom. Sure, it’s not great for big projects, but it is very easy to demonstrate concepts in a readable manner.

(That was the second program I enrolled in, btw. The first one, at another uni, they started with Haskell. No joke. And while I do appreciate Haskell and functional languages in general now, maybe in part due to this, it just got in the way of the concepts they were actually trying to teach.)

But in any case: uni isn’t really there to teach you to code. That’s something you are supposed to pick up on along the way, or on the job.

As someone else has said: NixOS. You said in a comment that you use Arch because of the AUR. Good news, nixpkgs is larger and fresher than the AUR, without needing to tap into any kind of third-party/unofficial repo.

The unstable branch is essentially a rolling release (and very stable despite its name). I am happily gaming on it with Steam. During installation, you can just choose to not install a desktop. (However, due to how nix works, it’s trivial to rip out the entire DE at any point, should you so choose.)

But it is a learning curve for sure. Steep, but not very long.

Was gonna say. Nix matches all of OPs boxes.

What language would you suggest?

Same

I miss the Be Like Bill memes

Fühl ich, Bruder.

This is about as useful as the assholes going “It’s not Pedophilia, it’s Hebephilia!”.

Baby steps: I wish it was mandated that any software receiving even a penny in public funding must be open source down to the last byte.

You are probably half-joking, but… yeah.

I fucking hate this timeline. Actually, scratch that, that is way to placid and abstract.

I hate the assholes in charge. Fuck all of them. Luigi did nothing wrong.

My blood glucose monitor is not on the play store. So one dy next year I’ll wake up and no longer be able to get that data…?

thiccccccc