manholio

Go into the CEO's office, ask for a large raise and tell them the product is in a very bad shape and will require you to put your utmost effort to turn the ship around. If word were to get out, it would surely kill the company!

After you get the raise, go into your cubicle, close email and phone, and start working on your own projects until the moving guys come to take your desk.

Sorry for the lack of clarity, by "exposing the binary over the internet" I certainly wasn't implying re-implementing a HTTP server, HTTPS and certificate handling etc. You would of course have an nginx frontend that would cache the request and subtleties; the Rust FastCGI would see a well formed request, and rush to execute it just like any other dynamic language, PHP, Python.

You can of course still do stupid things inside the rust application that explode your number of concurrent requests, like waiting for slow external resources, databases etc. For a simple static formatter, it should not be the case, it would just repeatedly hit the disk cache and some minimal CPU.

Why even bother with a static generator when you can run rust code at essentially wire speed and dynamically generate all the required formatting on the fly?

Because Rust binaries are so secure, you can expose them over the internet safely. With a little bit of glue, you can automatically recompile the CGI binary every time the rs source is touched, for a dev experience similar to interpreted web scripts.

Those three premises are still insuficient to warant desalination.

"Shortage" means little, what we have is a restricted supply curve, that can still meet demand at a higher price. And if that price is insuficient to pay for desalination then it won't happen: when you build your desalination plant and try to sell water at production costs, you won't find any takers. They'll tell you yes, we have a shortage, water prices have exploded by 100%, 2 cents instead of 1 cent, but they certainly won't pay you 10c for desalination.

> "when the punishment is money, it's only a punishment for the poor."

And there is nothing wrong with that: if you are poor and waste 10000 gal watering your lawn during draught, you should be punished because your are just as anti-social as the millionaire next door.

I'm ok with that as long as there exists a free/low cost tire that covers the basic necessities of a regular family, so that even the poor are guaranteed a certain level of service.

> These people do not care about the price of water.

They will if the top tire price is $10000/gal. It might be politically unpalatable to push such prices, but it would surely solve the consumption problem without compromising revenue.

Desalination is exceptionally expensive compared to just waiting to have water fall from the sky.

You can do it in extremely arid climates, for example to provide water to cities, but it makes no economic sense when you already have huge amounts of free water that you waste on inefficient irrigation techniques.

I would go on a limb and say Rust (or more specifically, a limited dialect of it) could become a good language for beginners if:

- the compiler had better life time inference, so that you wouldn't need to annotate simple functions and introduce beginners to complex issues related to lifetimes, i.e it should "seem" to work like python, initially.

- better learning resources for absolute beginners are developed, step by step tutorial, an easy to install full IDE with friendly error messages etc.

Python definitely considers itself a serious language, not one intended for 500 line scripts. They have libraries supporting server creation, GUI and desktop applications etc.

It's just that in practice, the trade-offs the designers made for easy development made writing large applications next to impossible, unchecked exceptions being one of the major sources of instability. You write very fast buggy code and get excellent productivity initially, but as the program grows you fave a factorial growth of interactions between components, and, because the interface points are not well defined and checked at compile time, what you gained during development is lost under an uncontrolled torrent of subtle runtime bugs.

Rust has no exceptions and enforces correct propagation of errors at compile time. There are few if any strong typed languages in current use that offer a similar experience, for this mix of [memory safety + strong types + error correctness + close to machine performance] you would have to go to some very exotic language route.

Unlike those exotic options, Rust also comes out of the box with a very powerful free linter (clippy) which you definitely want to use, and has a wide community, library, cargo ecosystem, is very stable and tested etc.

When you total it up, you get a fast, safe program that exhibits 60-70% less runtime bugs than something written in either Python or C++ for a similar development effort. You still need to test of course, but you can focus on major integration and logic bugs instead.

Wonderful!

I know about the extensions, it's exactly how I was able to run that specific applet, but that's a high friction experience for the user. If the applet does not run it's very unlikely I will install an extension (or search for a Firefox alternative) unless I'm very motivated.

I'm thinking more like a line or two you can add to your pages hosting applets, and it would enable any modern browser to use it. Minimal friction for the webmaster, zero friction for users.

Now someone please compile a real JRE into WASM and do it right, so I can revive applets with a simple embed. There are loads of old applets that have huge historic and technical value which are becoming harder and harder to use.

Example: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/ienzl.html

It's only odd because we project our own biases and values onto them: one is a criminal as far as the western law systems are concerned, another is an entrepreneurial foreigner.

But in reality, both are bold, inventive and motivated. The difference is just the capital - financial, social and educational - each one holds, those who have nothing are simply willing to accept riskier propositions.

Don't for a moment think you you can bootstrap a business in a corrupt African state using nothing but your hands and back, with no education, no connections and no money. Even if you are insanely productive and entrepreneurial, without greasing the right hands you will be picked clean by criminal rings, protection rackets, unscrupulous competitors etc. It's hard for a westerner to relate to a life where rule of law is spotty and tends to cover only major crimes.

The whole point is that they are unable to make that choice. A substantial decision made in sound mind implies rationality, which mental disease, by definition, diminishes.

If you equate a person's rational choices with everything that comes out of their mouth, then you will euthanize a whole lot of mentally troubled or people.

> Instead they can end their life inhumanely anyways

That's an option that always exists. I simply have a (much) higher threshold than you in regards to a state killing its own citizens.

It's depressing how the housing bubble and the consistent failure of western cities to properly control their expansion - and create adequate supply of housing and urban transit - has induced people into extreme versions of 19th century utopian socialism, such as de-facto nationalization of all land.

Instead of a working state with minimal powers that affords us the liberty to thrive, we are dreaming that a mythical and benevolent Leviathan will come and make order. Well, guess what, that benevolent Leviathan does not exist in practice, the state is made up and run by private individuals who are profit maximizing just like the grubby property owners gouging their tenants.

We know private property works, and that it has created a society where people enjoy political and economic freedoms unprecedented in the history of mankind. Yes, land is different, and while it's essentially unlimited (from a housing perspective), due to it's 2D structure there are strong externalities related to its use. There is a whole discipline related to solving those problems - urban planning. We can go even a step higher and force cities, using national/state law, to create the necessary housing supply and transport systems - if they are willing to for whatever reasons, say the illusive property appreciation induced by scarcity.

This is all much more tenable than a "100% tax".

He had a documented history of depression. By definition, he was not in sound mind, there is ample precedent of people suffering from depression, trying and failing to commit suicide, and later recovering and thanking those around them for saving them.

This idea that "one's mind is sovereign over their destiny" is unsustainable in practice. There are many versions of it floating around, for example related to gun control issues. You just can't create policies that ignore the reality that a large portion of people are not rational a large fraction of time.

Sounds about like what I would expect. Old age with an incurable degenerative disease is living in hell, so it's no surprise people take the option if it's available.

But safeguards must be put in place to prevent people with a history of depression or mental diseases to be approved, it's simply an impossible decision for the state to make even if it would legitimately benefit some of them.

How about:

transistor switches /( s * mm * Joule) ?

Koomey's law seems to hold strong.

SpaceX did it on the Dragon too. Hard to imagine an environment that is more mission critical and less cost sensitive than a space ship under severe engine vibration or tumbling out of control though space.

We are clearly talking about a planetary-sized magnetic field. But I don't think it's in the realm of impossibility. With a sun-shade like that of JWST, temperatures naturally drop to superconducting ranges and at that point a closed electric loop has effectively zero resistance. So, at least in theory, you could induce an infinite current into it, slowly gathering solar energy until you build up the required magnetic field. The limiting factor would be the physical strength of the winding.

I don't have the technical expertise to estimate if such a project would require mere billions, or planetary sized piles of money.

Methods that involved splitting CO2 will always be power intensive due to physics.

What many people forget is that the martian atmosphere has massive total amounts of gaseous oxygen, even if it makes just 0.16% of a very thin atmosphere, if you could capture it and store it would be more than enough for centuries of human colonization. NASA is investigating this very scenario with some low energy adsorption methods, that promise to be very energy efficient: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/vhnuqa/nasa_funding...

This could enable, for example, the creation of suits that extract unlimited oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere as long as they have electric power - say a few solar panels.

You can buy a ride on the Bezos Vomit Comet up to the Kármán line, but that does not make you a martian - or that contraption an orbital rocket.

There is no self-driving car in existence today that can do what most people understand by driving. Waymo is just a simulation of what a self driving car should do, achieved by painstakingly mapping every square inch of street in a very limited area. It's a ruse achieved by brute-forcing, not self-driving. Not even their makers trust it to be self driving, assigning back-up human drivers in unpredictable service areas.

By that standard, my cat is a truck driver because she can ride the Roomba.

That sounds about right. Why bother with a clock anyway, asynchronous is the way of the hardware samurai.

Although it should be fuzzed a bit with signal and power noise, to kill those "solutions" that only work due to a lucky photo-resist error that manifests itself at exactly 3.03V.

It shouldn't come as a shock, since self-driving cars currently do not exist - not even in the prototype stage.

> will we demand perfection from autonomous cars before we allow them out of “test” status?

Not perfection, just no human injuries for the limited duration of the tests, that is, for a few billion km or so.

She *was caught

> Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos, lost investors $1 billion. She faces up to 20 years in prison.

> Adam Neumann, founder of WeWork, lost investors $11 billion. He then raised $350 million for his next startup.