I've written bugs that would have been caught by the compiler in a memory-safe language. I think the last time was maybe in 2012 or 2013? I still write plenty of bugs today but they're almost all logic errors that nothing (short of AI tools) could have caught.

After the first high-profile case where authenticity of evidence gets called into question because a seized electronic document was deliberately doctored to allow for a hash collision (if that ever happens), there will be a will to change to something new.

1. It's easy enough for a lone entrepreneur with no investors to make principled long-term decisions. It's not so trivial when you owe a fiduciary duty to a board of venture capitalists.

2. Your team of engineers (which has grown steadily as you've scaled up) have built The Thing and everyone loves it. Now what? You only need 5% of the team to maintain the software. You could fire 95% of the team, which will make your company mighty unpopular to future hires, and moreover your best developers won't want to stay and do maintenance for the next decade. Easier to have them work on gratuitous frontend redesigns, bloated features that increase engagement metrics, etc. In a restaurant the contractors who build and furnish the place aren't your employees.

"Rust makes a few classes of bugs impossible to write by construction" is a very nice feature of the language. But I'm really turned off by how insufferable the Rust community is (which shines through in the OP's blog post and several comments elsewhere in the responses): it's never the quote at the start of this paragraph; it's always "writing software in anything but Rust is fundamentally irresponsible!" or "if a Rust program compiles, it must be correct!" No, not even close.

Superconductors will not help with the latter.

This time in the 20th century, relativity was “obviously” the most important discovery of the century, with the new theory of quantum mechanics right around the corner.

You can find dozens of proofs on the arxiv that P=NP and that P!=NP. What does peer “review” look like here? Most people won’t bother to write an article specifically rebutting one random incorrect proof.

Now somebody tomorrow posts a proof that P!=NP. Will people pay attention? If it’s a “big name” or somebody at a university with a good PR office then yes; otherwise no. Doesn’t seem ideal to me.

But even this is not the full story, because I can take a mass-spring network, and no matter how I choose to coarse-grain it, I will not see the entropy corresponding to that coarse-graining increase, because the trajectory of a mass-spring system is periodic. Entropy increase requires that the system is ergodic with respect to the chosen coarse-graining operation, i.e. that over long times the trajectory visits the coarse-grained states in a "random" and uniform way. It's not at all obvious to me why the dynamics of particles bouncing around in a box have this property, and particles attached in a mass-spring network do not; and neither the Sabine nor the Veritaserum videos address this or why we should expect all practical real-world physical systems to be ergotic with respect to practical coarse-graining mechanisms.

People want to install a single “Lemmy” app on their phone that shows them all Lemmy content and lets them post to all instances, using a single account and a *simple* user interface. If Lemmy cannot provide that user experience (abstracting away the federation), then yes it is doomed.

None of those threads received any non-joke replies.

The only thing that will make Reddit change course is serious competition. Probably not even that, since as long as the exodus happens after the IPO, it's the public that will be left holding the bag and not the investors.

Today I avoid Google search at all costs, and use it mainly to find Wikipedia pages or to search Reddit.

The Googlers blame SEO and there is some truth to that; but Google has on retainer a huge stable of the world’s best-paid engineers, and still couldn’t be bothered to invest in their flagship service.