Both of those things are true, I'd guess.

I am not an accountant, but as I understand it, "Profit margin" is generally "operating profit margin", meaning revenues less operating expenses, all divided by revenues, and their operating expenses aren't that large, so they can absolutely have very strong operating profits. But they also have mind-bogglingly huge capital expenditures going on, so when you account for those they're losing a lot of money. I'm surprised they're projecting profitability as soon as 2030, actually. That's only 3.5 years away.

Well... an AI model that is capable of hacking into the benchmark database and altering its score is clearly better than one that is not.

Nope. You misunderstood. It's not that the US model wasn't able to detect it, it's that the US model's guardrails prevented it from explaining. This doesn't demonstrate a capability gap against Chinese models, it demonstrates a two-sided failure of the safety protections of the US models. On the one side, the safety guardrails on the OpenAI model failed to prevent the attack. On the other side the guardrails on whatever US model(s) they tried blocked the model(s) from explaining the attack (presumably to protect against the explained-to people from learning how to perform it).

It's absolutely nicer. I've been writing C++ for 36 years and really enjoy it, but I find Rust to be much more pleasant to work in.

I don't know about Qt from Rust (I avoid UI code). It's been 15 years since I wrote any Qt code so I don't really remember it all that well even from C++, and it's probably evolved, so I can't even guess about what it might be like and whether the impedance mismatches with Rust are significant -- The C++ and Rust object models are somewhat different, so there definitely can be mismatches.

But in general, I find Rust is just nicer to work in. I'm more productive and the code feels cleaner and tighter.

As for the "nagging"... that's really only a learning curve issue. It's a non-trivial learning curve, true, but once you get past it the borrow checker doesn't really get in your way. And what you get in trade for that learning curve is fantastic. You just don't have to think about a whole raft of memory-safety and concurrency problems, because the language guarantees they can't occur. You can get the memory safety guarantees in Python and similar language, but they come at a heavy runtime cost.

And, yes, I know all about "Modern C++" and how avoiding raw pointers, etc., is supposed to give you memory safety. And it does help, a lot... but you'd still better run valgrind on your programs to check for subtle mistakes, and even that might not catch them all.

Overall, Rust is just nicer.

I don't care whether I use Python or C++ or Rust... though I prefer Rust. It's nicer.

No, the Python APIs are implemented on top of C++. Qt is a fundamentally C++ API and library. Anything other than C++ will be some sort of wrapper.

Agreed, though the trend towards expansion of presidential power through executive orders goes back long before Biden. Back to Reagan, at least, and much of the root of it was in legislation signed by Carter (IEEPA). Every successive administration -- both parties -- has pushed the boundaries. Dubya was probably the worst, mostly because he had the biggest hammer. But the pattern is that each administration takes a bit more and when the other party gets elected, they don't give any of it back.

Very much a "both sides" problem.

Same with Python.

There are a lot of problems with both, but neither deserves the title of worst criminal state. Most hypocritical state, maybe.

It does. I got a notification in early 2025 (running a pre-release Android 16 build) while traveling in NY. I got someone who was working on the feature to pull the detailed logs from my phone and they were able to get quite a bit of detail about what kind of fake tower it was. Pretty cool.

Not if you want to have mobile phone/data service.

If your mobile provider supports VOIP and you have Wifi available (e.g. at home) you can just disable cellular service. Then everything will go through your Internet connection -- and everything is encrypted these days. But that only works when you have Wifi.

(I'm not claiming any equivalence between coffee and heroin, but the "I enjoy it so I don't care about health effects" claim really only works if the health effects are fairly minor.)

You can use Qt from Rust.

My point is that if that low-level stuff is what makes C fun to you, then Rust and C++ will be fun, too... but without all of the drudgery and error-prone crap C makes you do.

If that's not what makes C fun to you, then what is? It's certainly not being able to accomplish a lot quickly; higher-level languages are much better for that.

I have to push back against your assumption that Rust is a language that limits developers. It absolutely does not. As for the AI bit... I use AI to write code all day. It's great, but it makes the same sort of mistakes humans do. I find Rust is a great language for AI to write (under appropriate supervision).