stormbrew

I mean, nuclear might be expensive, time consuming to build, and difficult but at least we've been doing it for 70 years. It's not clear that projections of long term costs on things we haven't even done at scale are going to be realistic when we try them in the real world.

Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world.

This is the weird thing about this argument: it so often rests simultaneously on an argument for practicality and/or cost effectiveness, but literally any criticism is met with a gish gallop of unproven technology. You can't have this both ways.

In the end, my central thesis here is just that if you think the be all and end all of this issue is cost effectiveness you are optimizing for the wrong goals and it leaves open a giant window for carbon emitting sources to justify their use when renewables don't work for various local reasons.

The thing to be black and white about is carbon emissions. "What energy mix works for place X right now if we try to eliminate carbon emissions asap" is not a decision that's gonna be made on an internet forum.

> But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things

It sure is a good thing I didn't say anything of the sort or wow I'd be a hypocrite.

I am definitely not the person trying to shoehorn the entire earth into one energy mix box in this conversation. I think the answer to this is likely to vary a lot all over the world.

Also a lot of the world's population is far enough north that winters produce relatively little solar or wind energy. And those places also tend to be massive energy consumers because it's also very cold.

Right now that doesn't show up in electricity stats because of how common in-home gas heating is. In order to decarbonize the northern parts of the world we will need to dramatically increase both electric energy consumption and production, during winter, because heat pumps will almost certainly be replacing gas furnaces.

I don't think this black and white thinking is really useful. There are inhabited places in the world where solar and wind face real challenges to practicality as the sole source of energy. I would be shocked if we're capable of building an amount of storage that will get the city I live in through the winter, for example. Certainly not for cheaper than a natural gas plant, which is the real competition.

Frankly, whenever this comes up the handwaving about storage just seems hopelessly optimistic even for places where it is practical, let alone places where you're lucky to get 4 hours of sunlight a day for a bunch of the year.

Nothing is ever that simple. If carbon zero is an imperative, then there will sometimes be need for something other than solar and wind, and it will inevitably be "impractically expensive" compared to the carbon emitting sources we're moving away from.

It's certainly important to improve the economies of scale of renewables, but doing so is not the goal. Saving money is not the goal. The survival of the human species is the goal, and we aren't going to get there by nickel and diming our way to it.

The US government makes a steady stream of trillions of dollars appear in order to, among other things, build single use missiles for millions of dollars each and jets that have never seen real combat for billions each. The idea that any durable public work is somehow "too expensive" in the face of that is comically absurd.

You assume police experience anything that can be called legal liability. There is rarely any consequence for abuse of power by police, because for the most part the people tasked with investigating any such abuses are either police or people who have a vested interest in keeping police happy.

So they keep any data they can and hide any data that makes them look bad. It's always useful to them to point out the kid they just shot might have stolen a pack of gum in the past.

> The Roman empire lasted over 1000 years.

Treating all the things that were called "The Roman Empire" as one thing is a pretty big stretch. Modern nations have much more rigid and well-defined natures.

Bitcoin mining is a business activity, not consumption.

In the end most people just deal with this by creating accounts for different contexts and that helps to proactively compartmentalize their lives. Often on different systems that are more appropriate to one context or another.

Trying to do it all under one account on one app always just makes you do much more work because you have to curate the lists, you have to make sure you're posting to the right context even though you see all the same stuff no matter which is active, etc.

Everyone thinks they want this but very few people are willing to put in the work to make it not suck.

And why should they? One Giant Social Network That Does Everything is the disaster state Facebook has been chasing for coming up on 20 years and it's been nothing but a mess, in some ways a literal detriment to society. Let that nightmare die.

Aside from the scheme example in the sibling reply, ruby has had a lambda, as a special kind of proc, for a very very long time and it is similarly not a "real lambda."

Honestly it's likely that for most of the history of the term it's been more used for "incorrect" meanings than "correct" ones.

It's very convenient to believe that everyone replying to you who disagrees with you has no management experience, and the one lone voice giving uncritical agreement is the one person who does.

> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what everything else is just "rumors".

Sometimes your employees can tell things aren't going well, and you bald face lying to them like this will make them leave even faster.

This is also a great strategy to fuck people over, where if they believe in the stability of the company right until the day layoffs are announced they might have just bought a house or something else that will make the next few months for them excruciating, if not disastrous.

So please don't take this advice to the extreme imo. I'm not saying you shouldn't be positive, or give every detail. But you should be realistic. Save the rose tint for the investors and just make sure people have what they need to do their best work, within your power.

Yes this, except it's not even a rebuttle, I'm just genuinely curious where this might be someone's experience because it's very at odds with my own.

I don't honestly care much what people consider the beginning of the week, I try to avoid ambiguity in planning as much as I can anyways for other reasons (this Sunday vs next Sunday for eg.) but I have been tripped up by an unexpected Monday-first calendar in a webapp.

If you work for a tech company in Canada it's likely that a substantial part of your salary is made up of sred refundable credits.

What part of English Canada? In Alberta or Ontario (the parts I've lived in, though I was pretty young when I lived in Ontario) I've literally never seen a calendar with Monday as the first day of the week that I can recall.

It's not about new vs old but who makes the main parts and chipsets. Intel everything is always a really good bet, even when they're brand new, but there are other safe choices.

It used to be quite hard to find new laptops with hardware combos that worked well with Linux but it's become a lot easier in recent years.

Also my experience with windows has actually gotten quite a bit worse, actually, unless you use the stuffed-full-of-garbage oem installs I've found it way more likely that I get stuck in a catch 22 where there's no network drivers for either the Ethernet or wifi so you wind up downloading some drivers off a sketchy site to put on a USB stick just to get started.

I had a similar experience trying to find shallow storage chassis that would fit in 2 or 3u. Seems like a no brainer to me to have just a rack mount array of 5.25 bays I can put hot swap cages in but nope.

I don't think it's really possible to seriously consider Haskell as somehow less "dizzyingly complex" than rust unless you're already a math postgrad. I like haskell, don't get me wrong, but it is not in any way simple to write or read or work with by comparison. And while rust has some heady concepts in its design, for the most part even advanced users don't actually need to understand most of them to use it (I think this is actually rust's biggest innovation).

I do wish rust had borrowed syntactically more from haskell than C++, though.

The thing I don't get is why are we so damn stuck on towers as the default form factor? It's pretty much masochism to mount a sensitive piece of 8 billon layer circuit board vertically and then hang a bunch of blocks of solid heat conducting metal to it from the side, held on only by a soldered on piece of plastic.

Bring back proper desktop cases!

If we're talking about raw performance then I'm baffled at what you're talking about to begin with. Rust can link with assembly just as well as c++ and I believe inline asm was stabilized a while ago. Otherwise it's llvm doing the heavy lifting on optimization so clang++ or rust is not much different.

Other than the fact that rust can rely on much much stricter aliasing rules and do a bit better on some optimizations because of it.

Usually when people talk about rust getting in their way they mean the borrow checker, which you can ask to get out of your way and it will still prevent bugs around the unsafe code. Bugs that "advanced programmers" are also prone to, especially around concurrency.

The idea that some programmers are so good they don't make simple but consequential mistakes in code that deals in concurrency and memory management is absolutely elitism.

There is no programmer on the planet who can't benefit from the borrow checker, and if there are any who will benefit less than they are "hindered" by it, there are almost certainly vanishingly few.

This sounds an awful lot like how everyone thinks they're an exceptional driver and everyone else is bad. Reality is no one's actually that great at piloting a ton of metal at speeds their brains can't keep up with in an uncontrolled environment.

Anyways, unsafe exists so that if rust is genuinely in your way you can still do what you need to do.

> IMO it's easier to write super complex stuff in C++ than in Rust as there are just too many cognitive things to keep in mind in Rust to even compile.

It keeps you from compiling (many of) the bugs you'll happily write and deploy in C++. I don't think there's really much practical difference in "cognitive load" between modern C++ (which is painfully complex in ways that are largely not even useful) and rust. C++ just lets you pretend it's lower and you ship more bugs.

Imo, writing rust is like the best parts of writing C++ with a stern but helpful assistant.

probably only a 50/50 chance it gets closed tbh. Either way it's in a black hole to the reporter so they'll never know.

(I actually liked radar though, as bug trackers go - by far the best internal tool apple has imo)

I'd bet it's B2B and has an expensive sales division that top management believes (tbh maybe even rightly) is the real revenue driver.

> I have to find a strategy to fix this development team without managing them directly

Sorry what? What position are you in here? If you have no authority here then you are in a very precarious situation and you should figure that out first.

To clarify: Relative to Google and Facebook, which have built up immense c++ codebases that span the entire companies.

I spent 8 years at Apple, mostly working in C and then rust, both even smaller pieces of the Apple language pie.

But I also did a little c++. I have commits in swift for eg (though I wasn't on the team and they were pre-oss, so you'd have to dig real deep to find them now).

Most of the services side of the company, which is where I was, was java ime. A lot of shift to Go in the last few years though. And that's a very quickly growing part of the company where you can't do a local check to find out language use. It's also the only part where rust is viable, because the product side of the company has much stricter limitations on what they'll build for distribution and as of when I'd left, adding rust to that mix was not even on the radar there.

But the places where rust was gaining were small but important, which is the main thrust of what I was saying.

But anyways, with how siloed apple is experiences can differ a lot, even beyond normal for bigcorps. :/

I didn't say it was? We're talking about faang in this sub thread.

I mean, I'm a HN user who just left one FAANG for another and I'm pretty confident this is changing a lot faster than you think.

The thing that obscures this, I think, is that at most of them the surface area that the intersection of C, C++, and Rust that is high availability, security critical software, makes up a relatively small portion of what they do no matter what language it's in.

So while there's a lot of C++ at say, Google and Facebook (but relatively little at Apple IME), very little of it needs to be in c++ let alone Rust.

But where it matters? You better believe big companies are shifting towards "if you're starting new you should seriously consider Rust" (if not a mandate). And once you let one other language into your mix, the question becomes: why's all the high level stuff written in c++? May as well start new projects in Go.

Some are farther along than others but it's a thing.

The thing is that C is still the lingua franca abi, so there's still no need to rewrite in bulk, you can still just use the same C libraries in another language, and rust is particularly well suited to doing that in roughly the same ways C++ is.

What's getting harder and harder to see now is why, if you need to write new or rewrite now, you'd choose C++ over rust. In the long run that's a recipe for only the most gnarly old codebases being written in c++ and no one wanting to touch them.

I mean, I agree with you (I just said sometimes people call it that, not that it is that) but I don't think anything you said really contradicts it being a kind of capitalism. After all Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky disagreed literally violently with each other but Soviet Communism is still a label that contains all their efforts and systems.

The industrial revolution and the beginnings of a global liberal trade order pretty substantially changed the shape of the world's economic system, even if sometimes people call predecessor systems like mercantilism a kind of capitalism.

But if you want to extend the time horizon to 400 years (ie. to the beginning of the end of feudalism) that's still not that long in the grand scheme of things.

That said I don't really know if I buy that we're in that system anymore either; I think history books will probably eventually recognize a shift starting around the collapse of Breton Woods and that we're currently in a long and increasingly painful transitionary period that we're in denial about to something we can't yet describe.

But I Am Not An Economist (nor do I want to be one), so who knows.