Interesting, I've also heard the exact opposite opinion [0] where Zulip’s non-standard approach is seen as its main strength.
54 karma · joined February 24, 2021
I wish them success but realistically they won't have success.
[A]ctual solutions to a major problem tend to be arrived at by a process more like the following (often involving several mathematicians over a period of years or decades, with many of the intermediate steps described here being significant publishable papers in their own right):
1. Isolate a toy model case x of major problem X.
2. Solve model case x using method A.
3. Try using method A to solve the full problem X.
4. This does not succeed, but method A can be extended to handle a few more model cases of X, such as x’ and x”.
5. Eventually, it is realised that method A relies crucially on a property P being true; this property is known for x, x’, and x”, thus explaining the current progress so far.
6. Conjecture that P is true for all instances of problem X.
7. Discover a family of counterexamples y, y’, y”, … to this conjecture. This shows that either method A has to be adapted to avoid reliance on P, or that a new method is needed.
8. Take the simplest counterexample y in this family, and try to prove X for this special case. Meanwhile, try to see whether method A can work in the absence of P.
(... 15 more steps)
[0]: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of...[0]: a Lisp that compiles to Lua, https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel
The argument is that we could have kept nuclear running and shut down all coal. In 1990, nuclear power plants were producing 153TWh in Germany. Today, coal+nuclear together is producing about as much.
This scenario is definitely possible, but it requires a little more work than "one guy keeps running an old eth1 node".