Before 2000 the government paid for 70% of college tuition. By 2003 after several rounds of cuts it was 20%.

Meanwhile here's Donald Trump telling us we need more immigration and h-1bs because Americans are just too dumb. Seriously Google it. That's what he said.

I wish my country would stop proving him right...

The risk of creating a viable competitor is too big so they will do pretty much anything a government wants in order to avoid being kicked out of the country.

It's not about the profit they can make in the country it's about making sure that there is never a viable competitor that could enter into any of your other markets.

Ultimately there really isn't a lot these companies do that's special. The most we survived because they're the ones who when the market was developing survived via survivorship bias. When you're talking infrastructure including internet infrastructure you are generally going to end up with some form of Monopoly forming. At least if you're not extremely careful to enforce competition. And I don't think there's a country on planet Earth that does that

All engineering problems are to an extent. In the final analysis, in 47 years, I've found that it's mostly moving the problem from one in-box to another in-box. The problem is still there, but now it's not your in-box.

Taking your last point - time. Time is what you're seeing as a steady state. Will Microsoft still be interested in power in 20 years? Will they form a shell corporation to sign that contract, then bankrupt it once their needs are gone? So many business use this "one simple trick" to get subsidies or reduced rates, then almost inevitably leave the taxpayer with the sack to when it suits their profit model to exit their obligations.

Question: What do you use to power the air flow for that air cooling system, and how many watts would it draw to meet the same caloric (or BTU, if you prefer) cooling of using water versus air. It's a simple formula to work out the differing efficiencies of using which fluid, air or water, you'd prefer for non-forced draft cooling. It gets a bit more involved calculating the power needs for forced draft cooling. No matter what you do though, your cooling is going to consume a portion of your power output, reducing overall efficiency, and thus adding to the time to meet ROI. The reason engineers use PWR reactors is that it makes the business math work, and other methods to date do not.

Mercy snip
You left out several options:
1. Don't use WCR's. MHD or PBR are a thing too. (See final line)
2. Use Geothermal cooling. Not aware of anything outside of paper but as long as you have a sink cooler than your source, you're good. (hint: The rocks can only absorb so much heat before you've exceeded their ability to sink any more and thus overheat your installation.)
3. Dump waste heat into salt vats, rotate the salt vats to allow natural cooling. (Molten salt cooling).
4. Use micro reactors like Toshiba and Samsung have developed. Put the power plant where the power is needed.
But none of those are commercially feasible without forever government subsidies. Again, privatizing the profit, socializing the cost.

Clouldflare flaunts copyright law, and when you send a DMCA they just turn around and go "we are protected by the DMCA, pbbt."

c. Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users
1.a
(i)does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing;
(ii)in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(iii)upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;

Most DMCA's are for this. However Cloudflare claims they are 512b.
(b)System Caching.—
(1)Limitation on liability.—A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the intermediate and temporary storage of material on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider in a case in which—
(A)the material is made available online by a person other than the service provider;
(B)the material is transmitted from the person described in subparagraph (A) through the system or network to a person other than the person described in subparagraph (A) at the direction of that other person; and
(C)the storage is carried out through an automatic technical process for the purpose of making the material available to users of the system or network who, after the material is transmitted as described in subparagraph (B), request access to the material from the person described in subparagraph (A),

The the thing is. Cloudflare controls the DNS, that's how their entire DDoS mitigation strategy works. If you rip that away from them, copyright holders could get the ip address of the real host and go after them.

When you send a DMCA to cloudflare they just send it right to the copyright infringer who cares fuck-all with it, and then uses your contact information to order 1000 pizzas, and sign you up to every mailing list in existance.

...over 143 years, 46 of which were before the discovery of the first antibiotic.

over six years, all but about one of which were post-vaccine. These two diseases are not really comparable in any meaningful way.

About 1.23 million people die from TB in a typical year, which is not that far off from the worldwide COVID death toll each year. We're mostly not talking about COVID anymore, either.

Vaccines for bacteria are... problematic at best, because they have relatively low effectiveness at preventing infection. The best way to eliminate TB is to get clean water everywhere. Stopping TB through vaccination is like stopping pedestrian deaths with inflatable pedestrian balls. Yeah, it might reduce the mortality, but the real problem is unsafe pedestrian crossings / unsafe drinking water.

More or less.

AI companies are overselling the capability, but who wants to watch this shitty EP-mode VHS-quality videos with no lip sync, and sounding like they're being played on an analog telephone.

The few "looks not that shitty" AI stuff I've seen has been stuff set to music. But there is no consistency scene to scene.

The few good uses of the AI video shit are like "vine" style 10 second react meme's. Stuff that you need a 'react' to immediately and can't commission someone to animate and wait a month to get back. Basically video shitposts.

The above was already quite long, but allow me to add a bit :-)

I spent a few minutes looking for the state of the art in C++/Rust interop for contexts that don't have a nice intermediary like binder. It turns out that the situation isn't as bad as I thought. The CXX project enables automatic generation of bi-directional definitions between Rust and C++ and is being used at scale by the Chromium project and that seems to be going pretty well.

There's also a Google-funded Rust Foundation project to define a better solution, though I don't see what, if anything, has happened since it was announced last year. Hopefully that's because there's a small group working too hard to waste a lot of time talking about it.

The reason I went to look is that my new team (I left Google a couple of months ago) might need such a thing. I've been asked to define an API that would benefit from being implemented in Rust and usable from C++ and Rust.

We don't, though the laws of supply and demand pretty much dictate that there must be some equilibrium point beyond which people buy fewer tickets and they end up losing money on non-refundable tickets.

Note that I'm not suggesting that raising prices is the right solution. It's a terrible solution.

This is bullshit.

First, do you realize what a ridiculous kind of "standard" DNT is? Advertisers promise to honor it, as long as users promise not to use it. This is a real life Catch 22, and nobody should defend it.

The issue is worse though: the DNT "standard" wasn't ever intended to stop tracking. It was intended to sabotage other proposals submitted to the W3C who would have had an impact on Google's bottom line. From this point of view it succeeded brilliantly.

At the time tracking was considered an important issue and some reasonably effective solutions were submitted for standardization. One of them, for example, boiled down to embedding functionality equivalent to AdBlock directly in browsers. That was a customer-facing design, because it would have left the choice to customers, and stopped browsers from contacting malicious tracing sites completely.

Google realized the danger and invented DNT. DNT is a terrible technical solution, and its problems were well understood at the time. Here are some issues:
  - there is no way to enforce DNT against a non-cooperating site
  - there is no way to find out in advance whether some site honors DNT or not
  - there is no way to even find out whether some particular request resulted in your being tracked
  - the feature is opt-out for tracking - an underhanded ploy to take advantage of less knowledgeable users, thus favoring the ad sellers. A standard intended to protect customers should default to more protection, not less.

Google bulldozed the alleged standard through the W3C with great fanfare, leveraging its membership in the Digital Advertising Alliance and requesting Mozilla to support the proposal (Mozilla was getting good money from Google at the time, so they embraced the DNT scam, principles be damned). Of course, DNT was a failure in the market place, as expected. But it did succeed at its real goal, which was to bury all competing standard proposals which would have benefited customers.

As a proof of the deep duplicity of Google in regards to DNT, consider that Google never honored it, even though it was their own proposal.

Telling people that vaccines are bad, ensuring that any parent who wishes to refuse to vaccinate their children is fully supported in that decision, and working to make vaccines harder to get, more expensive and more painful (RFK Jr. wants to separate the MMR vaccine into three shots, each of which will still require three injections, so kids will have to get 9 shots to be fully vaccinated instead of three).

This is similar to their plan to fight inflation by imposing tariffs and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates in spite of rising inflation (note that this last part hasn't really happened yet -- the interest rate cuts have been measured, cautious and justified by economic conditions -- but Trump is working on it). Though to be fully fair, by making the tariffs arbitrary and capricious so that business leaders are completely unable to plan, Trump is also causing a contraction in US economic activity that might eventually generate significant unemployment, which actually does reduce inflation. I see no corresponding "silver lining" in the mumps plan, though.

And, ultimately, slavery was a far less efficient and effective economic system. One might think that keeping a big chunk of the populace poor is efficient, since you're not "wasting" a lot of production on providing them with unnecessary goods and services, but it's really not, at least not since the industrial revolution. I think the core reason that it's so inefficient is the same reason that Marxist communism is inefficient: From an economic perspective, both systems value the masses only for their physical labor, and fail to cultivate and take advantage of their brains, which also actually tends to reduce their labor output. Harnessing the distributed ingenuity of your workforce requires giving your workforce some reason to exercise ingenuity and some way to benefit from doing so.

It's going to be interesting (or maybe terrifying, or maybe just sad) to see what happens when we fully automate ingenuity, too, which will mean that the system no longer depends on or benefits from distributed ingenuity because the machines are smarter and think faster, just as the machines are already stronger and indefatigable.

Which in a free market indicates that the price is below what the market would bear. Otherwise, they would be unable to make a profit by reselling them. So the GP is not wrong, at least from a pure price optimization perspective.

This is not to say that there aren't societal benefits from charging less than the market will bear, of course, nor saying that scalping in any way adds value. It is basically rent seeking behavior, which makes it a drain on society. But the point still remains that obviously the ticket vendors could raise the prices to what the scalpers were charging and still sell tickets. Whether the scalpers would then be able to raise their prices further is unknown.

I don't think vibe coding is going to last long as a thing, because it's just a sort of intermediate step to telling the AI to do what you want and having it do that. Right now, people are telling the LLM to write code to accomplish a thing and then running the code to see how it works, then telling the LLM to refine it, but that's a lot of unnecessary extra steps. I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future people will just tell the LLM what they want to do, which may require creating a custom user interface to make user interaction convenient, and may require creating databases or performing network queries or whatever, and the LLM will understand what they want, and do it.

In that future, it's possible that the LLM may generate code to implement the requested functionality, but if it does so that will be a compute-saving shortcut, essentially a way to cache the LLM's work and be able to repeat it with less effort. There won't be any need to show any of the code to the user, or even tell the user that the LLM chose to generate some code.

As an aside, the whole notion of leaning "prompt engineering" is another intermediate step that will die. The whole point of natural language-capable AI is that it will be able to understand what humans want when we express ourselves as we would to other humans. As the LLMs get more capable, it will become less necessary to treat them as something different from an entity that is fully capable of understanding and acting on human communication.

One of the things Android did very right with the Rust transition was to set up a small team of people who were entirely focused on Rust support. It wasn't a large team, only 2-6 people (it varied over time) out of approximately 1500 engineers. Having that core team who either were or became deep Rust language and toolchain experts was critical to smoothing the path for everyone else. It provided a group that had the knowledge and bandwidth to solve the problems that inevitably came up, as well as to offer advice and code review support to the early adopters.

That group no longer provides code reviews and design advice because Rust knowledge is now widespread enough that teams have their own, homegrown, Rust experts (not people designated as Rust experts, just engineers who became enthusiastic and dived deep), but the group still exists to resolve complex technical problems with language integration and to work on improving tooling and performance.

I think any shop adopting Rust (or any new language or complex tool) needs to have some people who become deeply expert in it and are allowed the time and freedom to support others who are picking it up.

So does Android. Google has been a primarily-C++ shop since its inception and although I'm not sure if Android had a lot of C++ in it when Google bought Android in 2005, it definitely became a C++-based system as soon as that happened.

The highly-segmented architecture of Android really helped facilitate the transition. Most of Android is structured as a web of collaborating services that communicate through a common language-independent [*] IPC mechanism (binder). Implementing Rust binder IDL generation and support libraries was a moderately big job, but once that was done it was easy to begin writing new system components (or replacing existing system components) in pure Rust, generally without any unsafe blocks at all.

If your code runs as a monolithic process, or has a lot of different IPC mechanisms, or uses a lot of existing libraries, it will be a lot harder, and the benefits will come slower. You'll have to wrap a lot of C interfaces in Rust -- and they will have to be C, not C++, since there isn't a good way for Rust to interoperate directly with C++. People are working on that, but it's a very hard problem and at present the best option is to layer a C interface on top of your C++ code, then wrap a Rust interface around the C interface. Yuck. Or, in the alternative, insert some other language-agnostic boundary between them.

So in a lot of ways Android got lucky because of its modular architecture and single, language-agnostic IPC mechanism. OTOH, that wasn't really "luck", it was a lot of work, done for good reasons, one of which was cross-language compatibility, notably between Java and C++.

[*] Language independent-ish, maybe I should say. The binder IDL is definitively Java-based, but this maps fairly nicely onto OO languages that support common primitive types (int, char, enum), basic composite types (array, vector, class/struct, string (which is just a vector, but used enough to be worth treating as a first-class thing)) and Java-like methods (fixed argument list, single return value). Further, it's based on "old" Java, before Java acquired functional extensions, when doing things like passing method references as argument was uncommon, and therefore not supported. So it's moderately-expressive but avoids things that get weird and complicated. My one big complaint about it is that I wish it supported unsigned integer types. That's my biggest gripe with Java, too.

Indeed.

All these mayors and governors telling their local law enforcement (you know actual men with guns) to thwart the efforts of federal law enforcement, is a hell of lot closer to 'insurrection' than J6, CHAZ and a lot of those BLM protest looked a lot more like the Whiskey rebellion(s) or Shay's than J6, and we know how those were handled.

The GP should look in mirror and be careful what s/he wishes for..