Much of what you say is equally true for other modern languages with strong static typing and automatic memory management. They also provide a lot of safety guarantees. The difference is that they do it by putting everything on the heap and relying on a garbage collector to manage it.

Rust tries to keep memory on the stack whenever possible. That's a lot faster. Allocating and freeing memory are effectively free, there's less indirection for accessing it, and it tends to be more compact which helps cache efficiency. But it all goes away as soon as the stack frame exits, requiring a whole sub-language for managing lifetimes and borrowing.

I agree that concurrency in Rust is awesome. No other language I've used catches as many threading errors at compile time.

That... has not been my experience. How often do you have to resort to a RefCell because, even though you know perfectly well that your mutable reference will only modify one field of an object that the immutable reference never looks at, the borrow checker isn't smart enough to figure that out?

They're coming off as sensible people trying to find reasonable solutions to real problems. This is only a short term construction ban until November of next year. That will give them time to work out long term solutions and get the proper regulations in place. That seems sensible.

The CNBC article struck me as one sided and strongly pro-business. This article is more in depth and goes into more detail about what the bill is meant to address. A relevant quote:

Maine currently has four operational data centers and another seven that are announced but not yet under construction. It took me about 30 seconds to find that information. You could have looked it up just as easily. See my signature quote.

Speaking as a software engineer, I only spend a small fraction of my time typing in code. When people boast about how much code AI can generate in such a short time my reaction is, "How does that help me?" That isn't how I spend most of my time. Doing it faster doesn't save me much time. It also is one of the most fun parts of my job. I don't want to give it up!

So what do I spend the rest of my time doing?

Researching new features I might want to implement, talking to users to understand their needs, and designing the features to meet those needs.

Researching algorithms I can use for implementing the features, selecting the best available algorithm for my needs, or sometimes inventing a new algorithm if no existing one is satisfactory.

Writing tests.

Tracking down bugs and figuring out how to fix them.

Writing documentation.

Interacting with users to help them solve problems and use the software more effectively.

Refactoring code to make it simpler and cleaner, and to adapt the architecture to changing requirements so I can add new features.

Of all those things, finding bugs is probably the first one to automate. If the AI can find a bug faster than me that's great, and it's usually clear whether it gave the right answer or not. It could also be useful for researching algorithms, but only as a glorified search engine. I still need to read and understand them myself. It could be useful for writing tests, though it would need a lot of supervision which might end up taking more time instead of less. I won't just trust that it's really testing what it's supposed to.

All those things require me to have a deep understanding of the code, which I do if I wrote it myself, but not if I prompted an AI to generate a lot of code I don't understand. If I don't understand the code I can't properly test it, document it, debug it, refactor it, or explain it to other people. Using AI to generate code saves little time and makes everything else in my job harder.

I completely agree with this. Rust is for when you want to get the absolute fastest performance possible, and you're willing to put in extra work to get it. In the past, the main languages targeting that use case were C++, C, and Fortran. Rust is much more modern than any of those, and it's the first one to offer a high level of memory safety.

Most code that most people write is not performance critical. It's worth giving up some speed to get easier development. In that case, other languages like Java, C#, Kotlin, Swift, etc. are better choices.

I've worked in a lot of languages, and Rust is probably the single most challenging one to use. It forces you to constantly deal with issues that don't exist in other languages. That's not a criticism: it does it for good reasons. But if you're willing to give up some speed, it's much easier to use a language that just puts everything on the heap and uses a garbage collector to deal with it for you.

The amount of helium-3 on the moon is about 100x less than the amount of nitrogen (1.4 to 15 ppb). People talk about mining it because it's so rare on Earth. Even a tiny amount is still worth a lot. You don't use it just as an inert gas to substitute for nitrogen.

Lunar rocks brought back to Earth have so little nitrogen, it's hard to even measure the exact amount. The highest amount found in any sample is 1.4-2.1 ppm, and most samples have much less.

You're much better off just shipping some nitrogen from Earth (costing around $1.2 million per kg). That could work for a small settlement. If you want a large, self-sustaining civilization, neither approach is realistic.

Air on Earth is about 80% nitrogen. Guess how much nitrogen the moon has? None. Or so close to none that it's practically the same. Breathing pure oxygen is really not a good idea.

This is still useful and it will be a help for doing lots of things on the moon. But don't think it means you can produce breathable air on the moon.

You need to multiply by the capacity factor to get how much is produced. Here is data on the capacity factors of many sources of energy. It ranges from about 90% for nuclear down to only about 5% for natural gas combustion turbines. Renewables are at various places in between: around 20% for solar, 30% for wind, 70% for geothermal.

Those are just averages, and there's a lot of variation. For example, wind farms can be anywhere from 21% to 52%, with offshore ones tending to have higher capacity factors than onshore ones. It's been gradually increasing on average as offshore wind becomes more common. The average capacity factor for solar has actually dropped slightly in recent years, but for a good reason: solar panels have become so cheap, people are now installing them in less sunny places where they wouldn't have made sense just a few years ago.

The number one fanatic burning the Middle East to the ground happens to be president of the US. Is he a religious fanatic? Yes, I think so. He devoutly believes that he is God.

BREAKING NEWS: Scientists stunned to learn people think they're so easily stunned!

Worried, yes. Surpised, no. This is exactly the sort of event they've been predicting. Climate change means more precipitation will fall as rain instead of snow, and what snow does fall will melt earlier. They've been saying that for years.

It's going to get worse. This was the worst year yet, but a few decades from now years like this will be common.

This is good advice for everyone. Drive less, fly less, and install lots of renewable energy. If everyone followed it, we might even avoid destroying the planet. It also would save a lot of money, not that that should matter in comparison to saving the planet.

But we don't.

Long term settlement, yes. Self-sustaining, no. There's no realistic prospect for a Mars settlement becoming self-sustaining either. Either one will require ongoing support from Earth for the foreseeable future.

Here are some valid goals for a settlement on the moon. It can serve as a gateway for missions to more distant places. Once you're out of the Earth's gravity well, a lot of things become easier. It can mine resources from the moon that will be useful for anything we want to build in space (titanium, aluminum, etc.). Construction in space will become a lot more practical if you don't have to launch all your raw materials from Earth. It can do science. The far side of the moon is a great place for telescopes. It can perform a lot of the same functions we currently do with satelites (observation, communication), but much easier to maintain and service.

It also can be used as a launchpad for weapons that attack anywhere on Earth. Yeah, not all the potential uses are good ones. I wonder how much of the geopolitical urgency is driven by that?

My understanding (just going from memory, this might not be exactly right) is that Columbus didn't believe that ancient Greek calculation. He did his own calculation and concluded the circumference of the earth was only about 10,000 miles, making it practical to reach India by sailing west. Everyone who knew what they were talking about told him he was crazy and it was much too far. They were right, but fortunately for him there turned out to be another continent along the way.

You can get to the moon in a few days. Mars takes months at best, and even that is only possible once every couple of years. People sent to Mars will be subjected to massive amounts of radiation during the trip. If something goes wrong, an emergency return home is impossible.

Energy is not the only measure of "hard". Proximity is a really big advantage.

I don't think that shows up anywhere on their list of goals.