But otherwise chains of microwave links does get much closer to c in applications where you want absolute lowest latency (or much more commonly, when digging a fiber line is too expensive)

Of course, it depends on the altitude of the satellite but speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum so you can afford some detour

Surely it isn't cheap, but given the price of the hardware, does it add substantially to the total cost of a datacenter?

My grandmother keeps a little notebook with detailed instruction on how to do things such as sending a message on facebook or pay a bill using netbank.

For a lot of things, the choice isn't going to be doing it herself or giving orders to the computer. Its going to be not doing it or giving orders to the computer.

Even if it will look very inefficient to people such as you or me

And if my experience from embedded development is in any way transferable, they're probably fairly spread out and probably takes a fairly big chunk of address space too.

It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available. And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables

This allows it to split complex instructions into multiple operations instead of having dedicated hardware for it.

High performance cores can also do the opposite trick of "fusing" two instructions into a single uOp: The usual example is compare-and-branch

For the vast majority of non-number-crunching code any theoretical difference between instruction sets vanishes in the noise of core design.

Not to say there isn't war, but they're small wars with a million deaths being a big one.

More people died in Second World War[1] than in all wars since then combined. If not for the Russian Civil War and WW2, the same would probably true for the Great War.

War is terrible, but the fraction of people who died in wars the last 75 years is substantially smaller than the 75 years before that and I do think that is worth celebrating. I am not confident this will hold for the next 75 years

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

With the exception of (sigh) newlines, I surely hope your text editor accurately records the characters you paste into it. This job isn't different just because the characters are strange, multi colored ligatures.

Edit: As long as you work in UTF-8 that is, but you have to go out of your way to use any other encoding as an interchange format these days, even if alternative internal encodings aren't uncommon-

x86 assembly isn't something I'm familiar with (and I should really get back to $dayjob), but I will mention the existence of emoji-test.txt [1] in case somebody wants to try and mine more executable sequences. It might be worth paying attention to the minimally-qualified, unqualified and component lines, which can be added and removed semi freely. No idea if they actually correspond to useful byte sequences.

[1]: https://www.unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-test.txt