And in a single threaded loop it feels like unnecessarily having one hand tied behind your back.

To be fair, C practically insists that you use raw pointers. I think the C standard should allow references. Also some way to handle unique_pointer and shared_pointer. (I mean a way that's standard for the language.) But this would require that the pointer know how large a chunk of memory it was pointing at.

More specifically it's worse because you can't have multiple references to the same memory location even within a single threaded piece of code. It's like uselessly having one hand tied behind your back.

Tell Python programmers that white-space block delineation is dumb and braces are better. :-)

The reason people will roll their eyes at you over that is that its an incredibly boring debate that ended 30 years ago. Its pure surface level semantics and it just isn't interesting and tends to suggest people haven't actually spent much time understanding what they are complaining about.

Python has plenty of serious problems. But if what you get hung up on is whitespace, it means you dont know what the serious problems are.

That would, indeed, probably be a good solution. The doing of it, though, is "not simple".

If you could trust an LLM not to hallucinate, that would be a good job for LLMs. There was a system called PLATO that tried something like that several decades ago, but it was both much too expensive and much too limited. Also much too inflexible.

While that's true, you should also expect a huge number of species to go extinct during the change. I expect humans and cockroaches would survive, but that our civilization would is much less certain.

I *think* you missed the sarcasm. The Mesozoic isn't exactly recently.

OTOH, it has a half-life of (IIRC) less than a decade. Of course, it decays to CO2.

"and picks your charging stops", I should have added. On long trips it optimizes to minimize charging time, which typically translates to 2-3 hours of driving, then a 20-minute stop, then 2-3 hours of driving, repeat. The charging stops tend to align pretty well with bio-break needs.

It's really not.

In practice what you do is you use the car's navigation system, and it tells you if you need to charge to get to your destination. About the only manual planning I do on road trips is to think about where we'll be for meals and override the automatic charger selection to pick chargers in those places, and check the icons on the charge station to make sure there's food nearby. This is a minor annoyance, far more than offset by the fact that when I'm not on a road trip I never have to go to gas stations at all, and pay no attention at all to my "fuel" level.

The best numbers I've been able to find put that number at about 25% of car owners. That is a large number of people, but it's not a good reason to hold up the EV transition. Such people will transition last, and only after public charging options are sufficient that they don't need charging at home (and after apartment complexes deploy charging infrastructure so more apartment-dwellers can charge at home).

Also, we need to help people understand all you really need for home charging is a standard 120V outlet from which you can safely run an extension cord to your car. L1 charging will add ~40 miles of range every night, so unless you drive more than ~280 miles per week (14,600 miles per year), L1 is enough. Access to some public charging is also required, to deal with exceptional circumstances, but it can be rare and used only for getting a 15-minute quick charge when the battery is low. L2 is nicer, of course, but it's not the minimum requirement most people think it is. L2 at home enables you to pretty much just forget about charging/fueling ever in your daily life. It's a significant improvement over having to deal with gas stations, so people want it... but it's not a necessity.

We need to avoid all-or-nothing thinking. It will likely be the case for quite some time that people with unusual requirements have to stick with fossil-fuel vehicles. If there are legal electrification requirements they need to have an exception process.

I actually don't think we need legal electrification requirements, myself. If we put a reasonable carbon tax on fossil fuels (calibrated based on our best assessment of the future cost of mitigating the warming that will be caused by burning the fuel) to internalize that externality and if we drop trade barriers that block the purchase of cheap EVs manufactured in China, the transition will happen on its own for purely economic reasons. It'll probably happen even without those steps, but they would make it happen a lot faster.

For that matter, I think we don't even need to impose the carbon taxes and tariffs, just pass them. Phase them in over a decade, so people know they're coming, and people will begin making the change even before they take effect.

Starving American sub-minimum wage earners is sadly necessary. Someone needs to encourage them to start hunting the rich folk for food and leather garments before next winter!

Heh. I am, kind of. I'm not only a registered Republican, I'm a precinct officer. I've historically always voted Republican but got active in the party in 2016 to do what I could to undercut Trump and Trumpism. I remain active for that reason. I do not consider myself a Democrat but I have been voting straight-ticket Dem since 2018[*] and will as long as Trumpism controls the GOP, while taking what opportunities I can to argue against Trumpism from the inside of the party. Of course, it's vanishingly unlikely that I'll ever get elected to caucus above the county level, not unless I lie about my positions, which I won't do.

[*] In 2016 I voted for McMullin, on the slender thread of a hope that there would be an EC tie between Clinton and Trump and the GOP-controlled House would look for a third path since the GOP establishment really did not like Trump back then.

Unless the alien comes from a society that is a hive mind or run by a dictator, or unless the alien is stupid, they will realize that building and maintaining coalitions is essential. This is true even with a central committee structure and is absolutely undeniable in a democratic republic.

Somewhat. I think it's reasonable for an employer hiring a person with a degree to assume they come with a significant amount of knowledge in their degree field. But, beyond that, sure. I'm confused as to why you felt the need to post this reply, though, since I never claimed otherwise.