fleventynine

The fact that there are some domains where Rust is clearly the best choice? Or that there are plenty of corporate Rust users who don't make their language choice part of their identity?

Most of us don't spend our time arguing online; we're busy using the language in domains where it's clearly the best choice: embedded and systems software where memory safety and a tight memory footprint are more important than productivity for new developers.

Once you have a few years experience under your belt, it's natural to want to use the language in other domains like large web applications, even though it's only a reasonable choice because you already spent the effort to learn the language.

Obfuscated javascript is no more transparent than webassembly. And today the webassembly "state machine" is quite isolated from the web-page and web APIs, making it easy to observe all inputs and outputs.

Also, nothing is stopping a web page author from implementing a simple webassembly interpreter in javascript and using that to execute the code if the browser's webassembly engine has been turned off.

Sleeping in a room with no windows is preferable to sleeping in the street. Just change the codes to make the conversions inexpensive and quick-to-deploy.

Maybe, but by being a paying customer with lots of options (including collective negotiation), you have a lot more leverage to get them to do what you want.

To align incentives, maybe it's time we start paying for the web content we consume with money.

> non-attestable browsers will be locked out of attested sites and it will be a numbers game to see if sites want to risk losing these customers/viewers.

Rather than being completely blocked, I think non-attestable browsers will be subject to more CAPTCHAs and other annoyances, similar to what TOR users see today from anti-DDOS services. Perhaps ad-supported services using large amounts of bandwidth will decide not to support non-attested users, since the ad revenue from those isn't enough to pay for the bandwidth.

What I would like to see is a solution for anonymous microtransactions, so web sites have a monetary incentive to serve users who want to use a non-attestable browser (and don't want to see ads).

This will force fraudsters to build farms of "trusted" devices, with cameras pointing at the display with computer vision and simulated fingers clicking on the ads.

This hasn't been true for a long time. Stable rust can do bare metal armv7m or risc-v development without any C code; just a bit of (inline) assembly to call into a rust main() function using the C ABI.

It really comes down to memory requirements. If you can afford to give every task it's own stack and dispatch it directly from prioritized interrupts, that's great. Even better if you can use memory protection hardware to isolate the tasks from each other.

But if you have many long running tasks that only need to keep a handful of bytes of state when they're waiting, a mechanism like rust async can allow for huge memory savings while mostly retaining the same code style as stackful tasks.

And you can even use both approaches in the same program, with isolated stacks for realtime critical tasks and cooperative state machines for everything else.

Although it's not an ideal situation, I'll still take neoliberal globalization over crippling inflation and mass third-world unemployment.

> It might be possible for a land tax or property tax to be countercyclical, but this would likely depend on the centralized adjustment of valuations, since there is not so far any automatic technique for valuing real property other than immediately after a sale.

Yeah, this is a problem that would need to be solved.

Consumption taxes have a lot of the same privacy-invading problems that income taxes do. To enforce them, the government has to have the ability to audit the financial records of at least one of the parties in a transaction.

If there are consumption taxes, they should only be for the raw materials and energy (as part of mineral rights).

I'm confused, are you suggesting that malnourished kids should pay for their own lunch (or for that matter, education?). There are some services we have to collectively pay for to live in a stable society.

Taxing financial assets has a lot of the same privacy-invading, subjective-enforcement, and loophole problems as taxing income.

However, most corporations own a lot of other assets that are already registered with the government, or pay rent to other corporations that do: real estate, mineral rights, and intellectual property. If we can figure out how to tax these things, that could help.

You wouldn't necessarily need to shut down social programs. Rich people and their companies own lots of property, spectrum, water rights, intellectual property, etc, and the funding from these taxes can still be used to fund a social safety net.

As a bonus, if property taxes (or better yet, land value taxes) were 5x what they are, we probably would fix the housing crisis as all the property hoarders unload their underutilized property onto the market.

Income tax is the problem. I wish governments solely relied on property taxes and user fees for funding, even if they had to increase them a lot to make up for the loss of income tax revenue.

The alternative to price gouging is empty shelves with no option to buy at any price.

The high prices work to incentivize competitors to enter the market and increase the supply. If only the government would stop letting competitors merge together...

The ubiquitous SM7B (podcasting) and SM58 (live vocals) are both dynamic mics.

There are almost no empty homes anywhere near good jobs. Demand far outstrips supply, and putting all the greedy landlords in prison won't fix the imbalance.

If we don't expand the housing supply dramatically, additional subsidies to home buyers will lead to even more inflated housing prices, and transferring even more money from the working class (who pay taxes and want to buy houses) to old rich people (who own most of the desirable property).

If we were to expand the housing supply by 20% over the next 5 years I would expect to see house prices and rent crash to a more sustainable level.

More and more firmware is using complex protocols like TCP/IP and TLS, which are risky to implement in a memory-unsafe language. Embedded Rust is very attractive for those applications.

Computers ARE state machines and the primary purpose of a programming language is to help humans manage all this state.

> the natural environment will select...What do you mean by this?

The initial group of settlers will self-select themselves; not many of us are willing to live in such harsh conditions.

Kids that grow up in this environment are likely to develop grit and cooperative spirit, and they will see first-hand how it is necessary just to survive.

> There's no reason to believe that Mars will magically become a political paradise, simply because it's a long distance away from here.

Obviously it won't be a paradise. But the natural environment will select for hard-working individuals with grit, determination, and community spirit.

I'm skeptical of any such top-down hierarchy surviving for generations, especially if it isn't willing to be open to some form of self-governance necessary for political stability.

If things eventually do escalate to interplanetary warfare, Mars has the significant advantage of having a much shallower gravity well. It's much cheaper for them to send missiles to Earth than vice versa, so perhaps the MAD threat will be enough to keep them safe.

Only until the colony can become self sufficient. The colonists will eventually develop more loyalty to each other rather than silly institutions on a planet 9-48 months away that know nothing of the harsh reality of martian life.

The nice thing about frontiers is that there's enough space (and lack of oversight) to try new systems of government without upsetting "the establishment", which hasn't yet had centuries to ossify into an out-of-touch bureaucracy.

When America was a frontier, this exploration yielded significant fruits...

Don't underestimate the value of asynchronous collaboration (where person A is working on the project while person B is doing something else).

Sometimes "using the absolute best tools regardless of platform" is not the thing to optimize for.

Maybe the client wants to tweak their vocal performance and get a mastered mixdown right away (using the engineer's last-used settings for the session) without waiting (or paying) for them to re-do the master.

> Google Docs is not a tool for accomplishing a task that used to be (and to some extent still is) considered a lifelong learning experience requiring significant skill (audio engineering)

I would argue that the lifelong learning experience has more to do with developing a good ear (and taste) than learning specific technical tools or workflows. Anything that helps experienced audio engineers collaborate with talented musicians and composers working from home is a good thing.

With regards to plugin APIs, hopefully the web-DAW community can agree on a de-facto standard based around WebAssembly, and ideally that standard would be fully open. If it is successful, the native DAWs have the option of supporting it too.