Is your point here that every pointer type for which this can be the case should include an explicitly typed null value?

This is why we don't usually have critical processes that depend on "human always does the right thing" (c.f. maker/checker controls).

I don't disagree with you that it's a realtime problem, I do however think that "just" is doing a lot of work there.

I think it often boils down to "know when you're going to start queuing, and how you will design the system to bound those queues". If you're not using that principle at design stage then I think you're already cooked.

In large, distributed systems the best we're looking for is statistically acceptable. You can always tailor a workload that will break a guarantee in the real world.

So you engineer with techniques that reduce the likelihood that workloads you have characterized as realistic can be handled with headroom, and you worry about graceful degradation under oversubscription (i.e. maintaining "good-put"). In my experience, that usually comes down to good load-balancing, auto-scaling and load-shedding.

Virtually all of the truly bad incidents I've seen in large-scale distributed systems are caused by an inability to recover back to steady-state after some kind of unexpected perturbation.

If I had to characterize problem number one, it's bad subscriber-service request patterns that don't provide back pressure appropriately. e.g. subscribers that don't know how to back-off properly and services that don't provide back-pressure. Classical example is a subscriber that retries requests on a static schedule and gives up on requests that have been in-flight "too long", coupled with services that continue to accept requests when oversubscribed.

In NYC, prior to Uber entering the market, taxi medallions changed hands for up to $1mm. Prices were fixed by the TLC.

If these are no strong indications of a cartel, I don’t know what is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_website_authentica...

You don’t get a veto on all speech from anyone who receives funds from the public purse, and it’s not a First Amendment issue that you don’t.

That’s such an incredibly odd premise; where do you get that idea from?

Could you explain how government research funding constitutes forced speech?

If an individual who receives a government tax credit (say EITC) speaks out contrary to your politics, is the government allowed to withhold that credit too?

It doesn't make sense to compare LFP vs. lithium-ion, because the first is a sub-type of the second.

My experience with email is that people have subject lines, email explicitly identifies to and cc recipients; email is threaded; email often has quotes/excerpting/highlighting from prior parts of the thread.

On the other hand, most chat usage I see is dependent on temporal aspects for threading (people under-utilize platform features for replies etc), tagging is generally only done to ping people to attract attention, chat groups are frequently reused for multiple different purposes.

Leaping to a point-in-time within a chat stream is often a bad user experience, with having to scroll up and down through unrelated stuff to find what you’re looking for.

Stuff in email is just massively more discoverable for me.