I have little artistic ability myself, but I am continuously in awe of what artists create. It makes me hope for the optimistic outlook of AI where UBI frees people to pursue creative and intellectual pursuits, rather than constantly trying to push a stock price uphill.

This has interesting applications. For example, you can exploit this with dilute metal vapor in an expanding helium gas to cool the metal vapor to very low temperature - the Joule-Thomson expansion of helium increases the helium's temperature by converting the energy of the intermolecular forces into heat. This draws out energy from the metal vapor. If done in a vacuum chamber, then in the region before the shockwave formed by the helium, the supercooled metal atoms will form small van der Waals clusters that can be spectroscopically probed in the jet. This was an interesting area of study back in the 80s that advanced our understanding of van der Waals forces.

"In short, if you use this project to generate revenue, the Open Source Maintenance Fee is required."

Perhaps I'm being too semantic, but I don't feel that is an accurate representation of the license terms involved here.

"To ensure the long-term sustainability of this project, use of the WiX Toolset requires an Open Source Maintenance Fee. While the source code is freely available under the terms of the LICENSE, all other aspects of the project--including opening or commenting on issues, participating in discussions and downloading releases--require adherence to the Maintenance Fee.

In short, if you use this project to generate revenue, the Open Source Maintenance Fee is required."

I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a difficult concept to succinctly explain in a short paragraph. But that summary - that revenue-generating use requires payment - feels misleading to me. Under their license, nothing stops me from creating my own build from source and using it per the terms of the MS-RL license, including for commercial purposes. So to me it feels like a scare tactic to coerce commercial users into becoming sponsors for the project.

I certainly understand the challenges faced by open source maintainers today, but the specific approach taken here just doesn't feel ethical to me. I ended up passing on WiX for that reason even though I'm not a commercial user.

One thing I've found I enjoy is working on a larger-scope toy project composed of many loosely coupled systems. It works well for me because no matter what type of project I'm interested in working on, I can usually find something applicable within the larger project. Currently on my to-do list are behavior trees and procedural terrain generation, and honestly I don't know how I'm going to decide which to do first.

I'm a big fan of Lua, including for the reasons you mention. I suspect the reason this one thing is always brought up is twofold: it's easy to notice, and it's very rare these days outside of Lua (if you consider VB.NET to be a legacy language, anyway). Other criticisms take more effort to communicate, and you can throw a rock and hit ten other languages with the same or similar issues.

It's also worth noting that the interface is clean in such a way that it is straightforward to automatically generate bindings. In my case, I used a handful of Roslyn Incremental Source Generators to automatically generate bindings between C# and Lua that matched my overall architecture. It was not at all difficult because of the way the interface is designed. The Lua stack together with its dynamic typing and "tables" made it very easy to generate marshallers for arbitrary data classes between C# and Lua.

That said, there are plenty of valid criticisms of the language itself (sorry, not to nitpick, but I am really not a fan of one-based indexing). I'm thinking about designing an embedded scripting language that addresses some of these issues while having a similar interface for integration... Would make for a fun side project one of these days.

I'm not totally sold on embrace-extemd-extinguish here, but learning about this case was eyebrow raising for me.

I've seen a number of homes in my area where the builder received special permission to build right where the drainage needs to go. Some were beautiful and I was tempted to give it a shot, but your story reminds me that I need to trust my gut on this issue and head for high ground.

Edit: Ah, nevermind, I see now why I don't have that issue. It's because I can't easily iterate the primes in that domain even though I can iterate the reduced number of bits. Thanks!

I guess another way to pose my question would be: is there an issue with sampling the entire 2^n space that makes us only take the highest 2^(n-1) subset of integers instead when selecting factors for a key?

I can understand setting the low bit to 1 since an even number will never be a prime (edit: obviously except 2). But why set the high bit to 1 as well? Admittedly I don't know much about prime numbers or crypto, but it seems to me like this is just giving up a bit of entropy unnecessarily. What am I missing here?