Plus, this would spawn massive online black markets for the codes, fueled by crypto/gift cards/other shady means of money transmission.

I'm working on an ESP32 project right now, and Espressif provides shrink-wrapped toolchains for C/++ and Rust. The latter even comes with a little tool called 'espup' that cleanly installs their fork of Rust and LLVM (for Xtensa support) - I was able to compile and run a blinky in less than half an hour.

See https://docs.espressif.com/projects/rust/book/ - it also wasn't too hard for me to whip up a Nix Flake with the same toolchain, if that's your jam.

This is something a lot of people (myself included) have gotten tripped up by. Non-portable SIMD intrinsics have been stable under std::arch for a long time. Obviously they aren't nearly as nice to hold, but if you're in a place where you need explicit SIMD speed-ups, that probably isn't a killer.

Logically, therefore, they have superior crime policy we should learn from - nothing to do with culture.

Now, obviously, Singapore's methods aren't perfect - a common complaint I heard was that money can buy you kid gloves - and I imagine the Supreme Court smackdown over caning versus the 8th Amendment would be biblical. But any return to broken windows governance would be much appreciated.

The only place it seems to fall flat is network I/O - LAN access requires permission, but dialing out to the wider Internet does not.

Compare Windows, which has jack (except for bloated anti-malware hooks in NTFS.)

Linux is _trying_ to replicate macOS with Flatpak/XDG portals, but those still need more time in the oven.

Source: I use both a MacBook and a Linux desktop daily.

Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)

I beg to differ. They may be safer and more efficient, but they get those advantages by trading off cargo and passenger space. A crossover can carry a heck of a lot more than a sedan and still fit 5 people - hence why it's the "local maximum."

Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.

It's simple enough that I can easily typeset CS theory homework (with all the fancy notation that entails) without having to subject myself to the insanity of LaTeX or the friction of a standard word processor.

But at the same time, I can also crank out a full paper in a (professor mandated, LaTeX templated) style without raising any eyebrows.

The fact that it's a "real" programming language is also lovely - I have a very simple template (took me an ~hour to write) that ingests TOML descriptions of recipes and marshals them into pretty, standardized PDFs for my recipe binder.

Anecdotally, I've developed a bad habit of fidgeting with my expansion cards by popping them in and out. I've probably put them through several hundred cycles like that and they still work fine - I think the fact that the cards are "rail-roaded" into the slots helps a lot, since it makes it very difficult to apply pressure at an angle to the internal USB-C port.

I've always seen my smartphone as a tool that doesn't do "much" (compared to a "real" computer) but can be relied on to always do what I need, whereas the inverse is ~true for my Linux desktop. (Think "bank app" versus "running Photoshop.")

By this metric, the only thing that historically ranked Android above iOS for me - even despite all the Google concerns - was sideloading and general openness.

Now that that's basically gone, I may as well move to a mobile OS that at least pretends to give a damn about my privacy.