This doesn't make sense. I, for one (transitioning to Linux usage only gradually), haven't been aware of the systemd and its criticism, and I'm grateful for the info. Then, the informed users can vote with their feet. Things change all the time, and only mass adoption/usage is what makes a given distribution to be mainstream or niche.
So, please do continue to criticize, continue to raise awareness. That's useful.
Still, the machinery gets more eyeballs and scrutiny to how it works than what some Joe's given codebase does, so chances are that the cause of failure will be somewhere on Joe's side. Then, the code will still need to be debugged, and you'll be glad having to deal with well-known implementations of DRY rule under "syntactic sugar" category instead of whatever Joe happened to come up with instead. Or, maybe there was no DRY rule in Joe's mind and therefore there will be a lot more code to maintain and debug.
That is already a desirable place to be, where you managed to get a working implementation ready to evolve. My issue with opinionated languages like Rust is that they make development more expensive. I then afford to pay the necessary work-effort for fewer projects than I otherwise could if I was to focus more on the problem(s) at hand instead of that and other mandatory constraints forced upon me by the compiler. I very much want my development tools to limit themselves on being tools, to assist me on the part of the problem I chose to focus on with little to no cost paid for their usage. I want to be able to focus on prototyping some working solution first, and only then, if the project's needs really warrant it, to switch on paying the development cost for other aspects, be it safety or whatnot.
Can't those "more subtle costs" be pulled out of the product cost itself and offered or at least expressed separately? Say customer support, if it'd be offered as a paid service instead of "free" as in baked-in-product-cost, thus giving the customer a choice to either go for that easy-pick fruit of available paid support, or the alternative of investing more of their own effort into figuring out and solving the encountered problems by using the docs available to them, or maybe giving up on the problematic use-cases in the first place? Or tariffs - is it bad to let the customers know that there are cost differences in the product offered to them due to their request coming from different tariff-impacted markets?
"Efficient" in the economical sense, that is. Unless, the civilization covers a very wide area (basically everywhere in there, for light years around the impending supernova) and the protection amounted for each and every civilization zone would surpass the containment circle/cylinder/sphere around the star. In such case the sensible solution becomes to just recognize the area that can not be saved (no mater what) due to its proximity to the star and the limits of walling withstanding capacity, evacuate that, and set the containment all around the future explosion as close as possible instead.
"It would also not be re-orientable, so any "telescope" launched to that location would only be able to observe a single target."
I just presume that such observation spacecraft makes sense to be made as a rather long term investment than some one-time fly-by thing like New Horizons, so the sensible thing to do is to have it in an orbit around the Sun at that (≥650AU) distance and to take multiple observations. Of course, the easiest solution may be for the orbit to be elliptical one, with the useful position only around its aphelion, in which case it will be able to observe only a single target indeed. But, I also presume that past the first few such elliptical orbit experiments the aim will shift to have the spacecrafts set on distant (and most likely circular) orbits that make possible observations at any time and thus its target would be something akin to a horizon rather than a single point, wouldn't it?
The most expensive part is to support the risk and cost of research & development. Sure, that renders you the first place for a while, but expect others to move easier (and thus faster) after you marked the trail.
"instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips"
Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current "let it splash in the Indian Ocean" development and testing phases.
To me, it's not risk reduction that they're after with that booster catching mechanism, but weight reduction. Those landing legs that we've seen before (and the mechanism related to them) are costly weight that is absolutely necessary only on the rocket itself, because that is expected to land on its own somewhere on a bare rock. For booster however, it makes sense to have as much of such launch and landing weights externalized, considering booster's reduced use-case of starting from a spaceport and very soon ending up back there too.
I know little to nothing about GA, but... it only makes sense to take time if the procedures are still done somehow manually, like speaking with human operators out there. It true, the dependence on a fallible human attention for something that can be automated, that right there is a safety hazard to me.
That is not (quite) true. The lifeless bodies of flora and fauna won't rot, but they will decay. Macro-molecules (like proteins), the basis for all life, are fragile and easy to break down due to a range of physical causes, most likely of which is just the non-cryogenic temperature. Smaller organic molecules are more sturdy and will last longer, but in the long term they'll end up under heavy layers of sediments and turn to fossil fuel (coal & oil).
The most relevant (practical) questions to me are, how does this capacitor behave long-term? How does it fare over a large number of charge/discharge cycles? I'd like to assume that, since it's not a battery, thus not based on chemical process for energy storage, it will retain its initial performance for a long time, but the question is - how long? A human generation (i.e. 25-30 years)? Or maybe longer, as for at least ten generations? That would directly affect the demand for long term investments in the construction sector. And if things may sound rosy from its storage capacity capability, if it will get used for combined structural and energy storage use, what long term impact on structural properties may render this dual use?
"keep in mind that silicon wafers are still quite expensive and probably too expensive for human scale objects"
That is wrong. The expensive part in silicon chip production is the process. It's just that hard to make working circuitry close to the molecular scale and a lot of sophisticated technology had to be developed for it (i.e. a lot of R&D invested money), hence the high cost of production nowadays. Here however, it's about close to no fabrication process (by comparison) and the purity of the raw material involved will not matter that much either.
"Don’t allow arbitrary abbreviations of subcommands. [...] you allowed them to type any non-ambiguous prefix, like mycmd ins, or even just mycmd i, and have it be an alias for mycmd install. Now you’re stuck: you can’t add any more commands beginning with i, because there are scripts out there that assume i means install."
Please avoid the use of short arguments in scripts. It makes the least sense there. The short arguments (along with aliases, abbreviations, and whatnot) are a convenience for human usage, to reduce the amount of manual typing. In scripts you can be explicit with minimal cost (and you also should, considering the ratio of writes vs. reads).
Think about what it would mean to endeavor into project of reviving an extinct species. Not a bacteria or some worm, but one of the most complex organisms as target. This by all accounts is a monumental task, never-done-before kind of stuff, expect development of pioneering bio-engineering technology in there and billions worth of tried-and-true expertise gained in the process. Then open your eyes and look again how you are being told, with a straight face, "we're doing it for... Dodo", don't rise an eyebrow now. Well, this, more than anything, looks like a master piece of project's public image grooming to me. If I would ever plan to develop daring things that may scare people, and I'd also want to find ways to avoid the costs required for total secrecy, I'd remember Dodo, alright.
Not the OP, but my experience when I had interviews and worked on improvement wasn't that much on technical side as it was on "soft skills" that had a bigger impact on the interview outcome than I was previously willing to admit. But even if the study is technical, that's OK. There are a lot of pieces that rarely occur outside academia and hiring interviews, and after years you'd want to fresh things up, even if it's just to improve recall and answer times during the interview, if nothing else.
"As an aside, static code analyzers are not able to provide the same kind of guarantees rustc does to arbitrary C++."
Yes, and now the question becomes - is this due to hard limitations of the C++ as a language (in the sense that provision of such guarantees is simply impossible for static code analyzers, no matter what), or is it that static code analyzers just didn't provide so far (but can and most likely will)?
I personally recognize and am thankful for Rust's effort to raise general awareness on the safeness aspect. This (awareness rising) would have been indeed hard to do without forcing this safety to the language core design, although I don't see it working well for Rust in the long run (after people will start having quality alternatives and won't have to pay the "safe by default" price that Rust asks of them).
Besides what I've already said about Rust in the past¹, the only thing that I understand Rust has over C++ is additional cross-checks, performed at every compilation. In C++ these kind of additional expensive operations are covered by optional 3rd party tools, in this particular case by static code analyzers. There is a good (i.e. useful) reason to engineer the compilation in such separate steps. Of course, the option of having the entire batch of operations tightly integrated has benefits (as well as drawbacks), but that's just about it.
Also, the robot voice. A while ago, SF movies were projecting robot voices easily distinguishable from human ones. I made peace with the idea that I'd hear something in line with those vocal timbres when the time would come, but nowadays the phone chatbots (and also other use cases where they resort to employing assisted human-robot interaction) are all imitating human voices. I find it jarring, it's like when I figure out that some (human) stranger was trying to trick me by impersonating someone I know.
That "safe (by default)" aspect of a given programming language isn't free. It's similar to the security of a system that comes at the expense of its usability. The direction C++ developed itself was to provide performance and usability. A programming language that puts safety first has to be more than a useful tool, it has to be a mentor at best and a bureaucrat at worst. When touting the safe languages people have to be aware of survivorship bias, that countless projects never got the chance to be developed due to the too high of a burden of doing it properly in them (i.e. in a safe manner, in the way "safe" is defined by language designers). But then again, there may be cases when this development cost may not be that bothersome compared to other aspects (e.g. a corporation willing to hire more developers to compensate for the lost effort if thus it gets to hire fast and cheap - pretty much whomever manages to please the compiler, no in-depth skills screening necessary, the shipped code guaranteed to be safe anyway).
"Occasionally I force myself to actually work on some of the projects I've daydreamed and planned out (forced, because for some reason that part is much less innately interesting to me than the planning and conceptualizing, even though I want to finish them)."
I have this too, and the reasoning I came up with for myself is that because the first part is the problem solving, it gets fueled by curiosity and passion, whereas the second part, the implementation, is often just grunt work to me. I do not work in a theoretical research field, but I'm inclined to also think that this predilection must be something shared by those who do.
"There are alternative ways to make plastics (https://hempplastic.com/), and hemp is just one example."
Hmm... Thanks for sharing! Regarding bio-plastic, (from my once attended school chemistry class) I only knew about polyethylene, that can be obtained from sugar-producing plants (via alcohol/ethylene), but that being costly may not scale well.
"Similarly, there is no simple way to decarbonize plastic production, and the measures will range from plant feedstocks to more recycling and to substitutions by other materials."
Isn't this the area that it made the most sense to have kept the existing easy available hydrocarbons for? As opposed to burning them for fuel, I mean. Is the usage of fossil hydrocarbons resources for raw material in producing plastic still counted as having a carbon footprint? (For the record, I think that in the long term, a solution for producing plastics without relying on fossil resources is necessary, but it doesn't make sense to limit ourselves to that just yet.)
"So even if we left these critical industries untouched, we could still reduce fossil fuel consumption by 83%"
I think these industries are not the most challenging ones about finding carbon-free alternative solutions. One of the most important thing is transportation, and as far as I know, there isn't anything immediately available that can replace the current shipping of goods around the planet. In the future, we may try switch to ships burning iron powder instead, or build massive continent-connecting rail infrastructure (like in Snowpiercer), but for now we'll just have to settle for less than 83% reduction.
From the article: "if the black hole’s temperature is high, the radiation is composed of all elementary particles, photons, electrons, quarks, and so on. It’s really unhealthy. And a small black hole converts energy into a lot of those particles very quickly. This means a small black hole is black basically a bomb."
The nuclear waste thrown into it may be much cleaner than the stuff it will throw back out.
This seems to be one of those discoveries that happen to have the potential of changing a lot the world as we know it. Yes, the electronic consumer gagets that we carry around with us may be engineered to consume their battery more efficiently, the electric cars may work more or less with the existing battery technology, but things like electric airplanes just do require this kind of storage capacity improvement in order to reach any practical purpose.
"So why is everyone complaining? What is everyone aspiring for?"
I can only speak for myself here, but I know it's a valid point for many that followed the same path I did. The work I come about to do requires constant and intense mental activity on non-repetitive tasks. That takes a lot of energy. Twenty years ago, the computer engineering university faculty I've been through saw constantly the highest rate of dropout in its freshman and sophomore years, compared to any other kind of school out there. The touted reasons were mostly that there was simply too much work, that it was too grueling, too hard. The ones that prevailed weren't necessarily the smartest or the most diligent of all. They were, however, the most passioned about the computer engineering field. One had to have it to fuel the energy demand of the work necessary both in school years and after. The money is good, but that alone didn't seem to cut it. The work conditions in office are nice, but those weren't nor aren't what kept me in the game. (There were times when the space I worked in had no heating in the winter and was often smoked in, with me as non-smoker.) What I see in my peers' complaints nowadays is something that hits on the root of what made me wake up and continue every day. And the worst part is that the decision makers don't seem to be aware or caring. The mood is more like "I pay them, therefore I saddle them with whatever I see fit". So to answer you, what I aspire for? I aspire for a better fit, for both myself as someone good at something, which (from a self-development investment prospective) it makes sense to strive to do as much of it every day, as well as for the client benefiting my work/skills. I also think it's just ethical to rise awareness (even by complaints, if it has to be) when I see (my) resources misused and degrading of performance/potential in general.