Yeah, projects also exist in the real world and practical considerations matter.

The legacy C/C++ code base might slowly and strategically have components refactored into rust, or you might leave it.

The C/C++ team might be interested in trying Rust, but have to code urgent projects in C/C++.

In the same way that if you have a perfectly good felling axe and someone just invented the chain saw, you’re better off felling that tree with your axe than going into town, buying a chainsaw and figuring out how to use it. The axe isn’t really the right tool for the job anymore, but it still works.

C is not how a computer truly works.

If you want to know how computers work, learn assembly and circuit design. You can learn C without ever thinking about registers, register allocation, the program counter, etc.

Although you can learn assembly without ever learning about e.g. branch prediction. There’s tons of levels of abstraction in computers, and many of the lower level ones try to pretend you’ve still got a computer from the 80s even though CPUs are a lot more complex than they used to be.

As an aside, I’ve anecdotally heard of some schools teaching Rust instead of C as a systems language in courses. Rust has a different model than C, but will still teach you about static memory vs the stack vs the heap, pointers, etc.

Honestly, if I had to write some systems software, I’d be way more confident in any Rust code I wrote than C/C++ code. Nasal demons scare me.

Right tool for the job, sure, but that evolves over time.

Like, years back carpenters didn’t have access to table saws that didn’t have safety features that prevent you from cutting off your fingers by stopping the blade as soon as it touches them. Now we do. Are old table saws still the “right tool for the job”, or are they just a dangerous version of a modern tool that results in needless accidents?

Is C still the right tool for the job in places where Rust is a good option?

Keep in mind, though, AI progress is often more like punctuated equilibrium.

Each new approach gets you much further, and polishing each approach gets you slight improvements until the next approach comes along. Improvements to chatgpt might plateau until the next big breakthrough architecture. Or maybe not.

MicroSD cards are better, here. They’re 250mg; a pigeon can transport 75g. That’s 300 microSD cards, ignoring the weight of the SD card enclosure.

It’s a real quote, from the 80s, published in a networking textbook.

It’s amusing, but it’s always been a serious and occasionally practical observation.

IPoAC is a joke about printing actual IP packets, sending them by pigeon, then scanning them.

You do the whole usual TCP ACK/SYN thing, but with pigeons.

It’s not the same as ‘sneakernet, but strapping microsd cards to a pigeon’. It’s way, way sillier.

Levelized cost averages the fixed costs over the lifetime of the generation

They’re generally comparing utility scale installations, not home rooftop solar though.

I’ve never actually used PHP.

Does it still have random Hebrew in error messages like ‘unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM’?

The old joke is that C++ is an octopus made by nailing legs to a dog.

So it should probably be a rifle-chaku made by connecting two Garands with a chain.

C# vs Java is also really weird since C# started out as basically a Java clone.

Reddit very much depends on the subreddits you subscribe to.

Browsing /r/askhistorians or /r/programming isn’t really the same experience as r/memes or whatever. Not logging in to reddit makes it way worse since you only see the popular low-effort threads instead of better niche content.

Would you really rather see <\Foo> than )?

There’s a reason why most popular languages use } rather than end if or fi. The added verbosity doesn’t actually help people read your code more than e.g. indentation or editors with paren matching or rainbow parens.

Python virtual environments feel really archaic. It’s by far the worst user experience I’ve had with any kind of modern build system.

Even a decade ago in Haskell, you only had to type cabal sandbox init only once, rather than source virtualenv/bin/activate.sh every time you cd to the project dir.

I’m not really a python guy, but having to start touching a python project at work was a really unpleasant surprise.

If you knead bread by hand, it’ll have some human DNA in it from e.g your skin cells. It’s almost impossible to cook or process food while preventing it from getting literally any human cells into it, because humans are shedding cells and DNA literally all the time. You can wear gloves, hairnets, and frequently mop up, but eliminating the problem entirely is hard.

Both a vegetarian burger and a beef burger are probably going to have more human DNA in it than either a steak or a pot of black beans would.

Pigs and chickens don’t eat air, you know.

70% of US soy becomes animal feed. Some of the rest is used industrially, or becomes biodisel. Relatively little US soy becomes soy sauce, tofu, etc.

Soy subsidies, in practice, mostly function as a chicken and pork subsidy.

You’ll notice that we heavily subsidize animal feed crops like corn and soy, and spend much less money subsidizing fruits and veggies, nuts, and other legumes like black beans or lentils.

No.

Honey bees are dying because of parasites and pests, pathogens, poor nutrition, and sublethal exposure to pesticides.

It’s not just one thing. Most of those things on their own won’t even kill them. For example, Varroa mites will kill an already weakened hive, but not a healthy one.

Lawns absolutely contribute to poor nutrition, due to habitat loss. Same with all the mowed grass we have everywhere in suburbia. Monocropped agriculture does as well, because bees do best with a variety of flowers.

I’ve let the back part of my property grow wild the past couple years, and it’s currently filled with a ton of goldenrod, chicory, and a bunch of other random flowers. You would not beleive the number of honeybees I’ve seen back there at once, or how loud the buzz was.

Similarly, there’s a reason I see a ton of fireflys in my yard, but I see almost none in my neighbors yards. It’s because they’re well- manicured green wastelands

But I guess non-action and bootlicking while we wait for our thoroughly bribed politicians to do nothing is better.

Nation-wide action, of course, is best. Something like the green new deal or even a market-based solution like cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.

On a local level, though, there’s a lot of action that can be done.

Nation-wide, the biggest category of carbon emissions is transportation, at 28% of all emissions. Over half of all transportation-related emissions are from cars and trucks.

The amount people drive is closely tied to local urban design, which comes down largely to local zoning regulations and infrastructure design. Those are primarily impacted by the people who show up at town meetings and vote.

Advocate for walkable, mixed-use zoning, improved bike infrastructure, etc. Most people aren’t “drivers”, “cyclists” or “public transit riders”, they’re people who want to get from point A to point B as easily as possible and will take whatever is best.

The problem with gas stations isn’t their LCD screens.

A large number of gas stations are franchises. Breaking the LCD screens hurts the local franchise owner, not whichever fossil fuel company they’re working with.

More to the point, breaking LCD screens accomplishes absolutely nothing. Most people don’t drive because they love driving, they drive because of zoning, sprawl and a lack of reasonable alternatives. If you get rid of fossil fuel infrastructure without fixing the underlying car dependency, they’ll be stuck at home.

Efficiency in economics has a particular technical definition.

Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off

Free markets are great at producing outcomes that are efficient in a particular technical sense, but not especially equitable.