Could we see what portion of Americans live inside large cities? Because, well, if 2/3 of Americans live in huge cities, being within 2 miles of a public charger isn't that impressive anymore.

That change doesn't even need a new change on x86-64 systems, just going back to the non-flat model where the CS/DS/SS/ES registers can contain segment selectors instead of being forced to be a single segment. That would enable segmented memory again, allowing a second method of controlling memory access permissions via segment. It'd also allow the stack and heap to grow without running into each other. The capability is there, since the FS and GS segment registers can point to separate segments.

In the past, it was fairly easy to create new jobs for low-skill workers. From the service industry to support jobs. These are now being threatened by AI. Tech support is already being replaced increasingly with AI-based solutions and since the fast food industry splits the responsibilities of the workers between the customers, ordering via app or in-store kiosks instead of with the worker at the counter, and a food delivery system that makes human interactions more and more obsolete, we're taking away these no/low skill jobs.

New jobs that would replace them won't emerge, though. Or rather, if they do, they, too, will quickly vanish due to AI based systems that can easily accomplish them.

What, are you worried they'll be unemployed soon? Well don't, they've got a pretty powerful union making sure that the established, shitty players will always have a job.

Ada is still a language where, if you have no data to return, then you simply return an invalid pointer and expect that the caller already knows not to dereference it without checking first. Basically like handing somebody a loaded gun with a round chambered and assuming that they'll just check to make sure the safety is on because it's expected to do so anyways. Sure, even if they don't, most of the time nothing will go wrong.

Most of the time...

https://www.rollingstone.com/t...

(Sorry, this joke had to be made at some point, and some poor language was going to be the victim...)

But they've still yet to actually even pull even that off.

Bjarne Stroustrup did his bizarre "call to arms" speech in response to this with his key argument being that there's more to safety than memory safety. Problem is, when you listen to his words carefully, his definition of memory safety seems to be extremely narrow. It seems like his only definition of it is temporal safety, which yeah, there's more to memory safety than temporal safety, but it seems like he wants to brush that aside solely because it literally can't even be solved in C++ without fully breaking backwards compatibility. His smart pointers have already proven to be insufficient for it, and unlike some C++ fans, he's well aware of that. Meanwhile, Rust's definition of memory safety includes things that he thinks he might solve some day but ultimately isn't sure how and probably never will, like data races.

It wasn't meant to be.

I wasn't making any argument about this, but I'd argue C is harder than Rust. Sure, C is small and well-defined, but much of what you do with it is well-defined as being undefined in very subtle ways that arguably takes at least a decade to get (mostly) right. C++ on the other hand is just an ultimately pointless extension of C, and I completely understand why Linus Torvalds doesn't want it.

Then why is it no C++ developers can actually manage to do so? Not even the so called good ones. In Rust, smart pointers are all there is. Sure, you can create raw pointers, but unless you use unsafe you can't actually do anything with them.

(Not really a fan of Drew DeVault, but he makes good points here: https://drewdevault.com/2019/0...)

With regard to marketing...well...The main thing you can say about Rust is that it's the only language that not only has already delivered everything it promised, it continues to deliver a hell of a lot more on top of it: Performance in excess of what it even set out to be, easy as hell parallelism and concurrency that actually works and intuitively so. Turns out all you had to do to get all of that was set a few strict but simple rules around pointers.

No, C++ code is the flaming security disaster. For C, I think the argument is that large C codebases are a potential security disaster.

A good analogy I'm sure everybody can relate to is writing big code projects purely in dynamic scripting languages. The reason for this is basically that you don't have a compiler there ensuring you're doing things like properly re-initializing variables between for loops so that you're not carrying over data from a previous iteration and getting confused looks from your peers when your code spits out spreadsheets.

Disagree? Well then I humbly invite you to debug this code: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/...

There is none. Either it's satisfied or it tells you to get your clothes on and get out.

It's hard to overstate just how little of a difference it is. Some researchers actually put out what is likely the most useful, meaningful, AND practical measurement for this, which is in terms of power consumption.

https://thenewstack.io/which-p...

Spoilers:
These numbers are normalized so that the most efficient is a 1.0, higher numbers are less efficient:

C: 1.0
Rust: 1.03
C++: 1.34
Ada: 1.7
Java: 1.98 (this actually surprised me; ada is almost as inefficient as java, apparently, or java is almost as efficient as ada depending on your perspective)

Some other noodles:
Go: 3.23
JavaScript: 4.45
Python: 75.88

Why is this practical? Well, suppose you ran a data center, and all of the code, including firmware, is done in C. If you power bill was $1,000/month, changing it all to rust might raise it by $20. Maybe. Possibly. In other words, you won't even notice the difference, but you get a much more robust stack in return. C++ night raise it by $300, definitely enough to notice, and you get nothing in return.

And in case you needed a reason why you really shouldn't build your backend in python...well...

Anyways, it's interesting that the rust developers targeted C++ level performance, but for all practical purposes got C performance.

The problem isn't that we can't imagine something. The problem is that people have a finite mental capacity. You can't retrain someone who can barely count to 100 to be a software engineer.

AI is raising the "intelligence bar" for jobs. Even jobs not yet invented, if it's a job that can be done by AI, it will be done by AI. And that will include every job that requires, let's be politically correct, "limited mental capacities".

So what jobs do you plan to give those of sub-average IQ? Remember, we're talking 50% of the population here. Whatever job you can create that could be done by them will be done by AI instead.

So what do you plan to do with these people?

Like cars and alcohol? Shit, I've got about $4k worth of scuba gear that's very dangerous if misused, and there are no laws at all governing its use. Literally, not a one. And I ONLY use this gear for recreation. It's easier to hurt yourself with this than any medical equipment, even after you've removed it and think everything is all fine. And what do I need it for? Well, nothing, really.

Again, bullshit argument.

Asking as a small part of the rest of the world, what's moral about choosing a person as a president who has shown that he's corrupt through and through, cares about nothing but himself, and himself alone, and who has shown zero interest in the country he is supposed to represent beyond the question how to fleece it the best?