So, most likely, there are two sizes in reality: the size of your user data that you care about; and the size of the memory chunk in which your user data resides, that free() cares about. So, unless you're willing to go for an API like this, you can't rely on the consumer:

  int* ptr_to_dest = NULL;
  size_t size = 10 * sizeof(int);
  size_t allocated = malloc(&ptr_to_dest, size);
  if (allocated <= 0 || !ptr_to_dest) {
    //handle allocation error
  }
  //... use ptr_to_dest, size
  free(ptr_to_dest, allocated); //careful not to pass size here!

Can they? Iran seems to have destroyed them pretty decisively, after the literal first day of casualties (which were happening while Iran thought it had just reached an agreement that would prevent a war, per the Omani negotiators at that time).

What form of life can actually survive (that is, continue living, not just go into some dormant state from which it can later resurrect like a tardigrade) in space for more than a few minutes?

We know plenty of actually very simple problems that we would not be able to solve from now till the Sun explodes even if we all of the computers on earth were only doing this. Say, solving a worse case instance of the Knapsack problem for n > 250 items easily fits into this.

If you want to be precise, the complexity class EXP best fits my description (though NP-complete would also be enough). That is, if discovering the required technology to build a self-replicating interstellar probe requires solving an instance of an EXP problem that is not ridiculously tiny, then we would likely never be find out how to build this probe. And no amount of AGI would change this, in this case.

I'm not suggesting that I have any reason for this ridiculously precise scenario to be correct. Just that some technology being allowed by the laws of physics should not be taken to mean that it is actually implementable in any imaginable amount of time, even if we were to assume singularity-style AGI.

When we see currently insurmountable problems in creating a piece of technology, it's absolutely possible that we'll never be able to build it. Even if it is theoretically constructible, there is no reason to believe that the way to build it would be found before, say, the sun runs out of hydrogen.

Plus, life can't survive more than a few minutes in space without metal encasings and electronic life support; whereas metal alone only requires life at a much longer time scale. So, while it may be possible to build a fully inorganic self-replicating fleet, it's certainly impossible to build a fully-organic one with any technology or chemistry we know about today at least.

Now, the author's position is both more and less nihilistic. The author also seems to think that human extinction is unavoidable, but he thinks the timeline is much more dragged out. He also seems to think that this is actually the preferable outcome at this point, given that global warming is our own fault, and that the only thing we should do is try to make it so that the planet is as well as it can be after we are finally gone.

Of course, they all agree on a broad narrative - Jesus was born of a virgin Mother in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth for some time, wandered for 40 days in the wild where he was tempted, then returned and was baptized by John the Baptist, collected a number of disciples while preaching in Galilee and performing various miracles, then during Passover entered Jerusalem, came into conflict with the Jewish religious authorities and/or the Roman authorities, had a last supper with his disciples, and was crucified, died, was buried in a tomb, and was resurrected.

This is about it in terms of the major plot points that are common. Major acts, such as expelling the money lenders from the Temple or the resurrection of Lazarus, are not part of the shared narrative - they either occur at different times (in John, expelling the money lenders is one of the first acts of Jesus, at the start of his ministry, not one of his last public acts at the end), or not at all (the story of Lazarus is only present in John).

I would say that there are indeed major narrative differences between the Gospels.

> But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!

> And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.

This sounds very convincing at first glance, but it completely disregards the actual history and practice of science.

In particular, for your insurmountable problems with steps 1 and 4, we actually have lots of scientific theories about singular events that we can't reproduce. Perhaps the most famous and well studied of these is the Big Bang.

If there were some god who could perform supernatural events, and presuming it didn't then explicitly try to obscure them from us, we could still study the consequences of these breaks in regular physics. If loaves multiplied for a feast, we may not be able to reproduce the event, but we could still use scientific means to confirm whether enough material had been present in the area to produce the total observed number of loaves of bread that was reported; and we could study the waste from the feast to corroborate eye witness testimonies with physical evidence (bread crumbs, stool samples, weight of the participants before and after, etc).

And historically, for step 3 - even though today gods or God are not commonly accepted hypothesis, they/he were for a long time in the history of science. However, every time something was thought to only possibly originate from supernatural causes, a natural physical/biological mechanism was later found. After this happened enough times, scientists started disfavoring this hypothesis, on the basis that it was not turning out to be useful or necessary.

But one very important thing to add here is that there is no bias against the naturalistic narratives of the Bible in mainstream archaeology / Bible scholarship / historiography. Huge swaths of the Bible are considered firmly historical, with many important Bible characters being well attested to and many events in the Bible being accepted as historical facts. For example, the prophet Elijah and King Ahab are widely considered to be real people. The events of the exile to Babylon are (now) considered as well to be real historical events.

Imagine that we found, today, the burning bush, still on fire but not consumed by it, thousands of years later. Say someone tried all known techniques to extinguish it, but it wouldn't. We may be able to study and characterize it precisely and call it "natural" in that sense, but I think many would agree that it would be very clear evidence that this claim in Exodus was actually historically based.

Similarly, say that we had credible videos, and other instrument recordings, of the blue fire that the Orthodox Patriarchs claim descends from the heavens on Jesus' tomb every year on Orthodox Easter. We may even develop a theory of what the substance is and what it represents and where it originates (spatially) and so on - but if it happens spontaneously and only affects certain things (candles held by the faithful) and not others (say, gasoline-soaked rags prepared by a scientist to test this out), then even a scientist would have to conclude that this phenomenon is real and outside the realm of physics as it is understood today.

> One can easily see the events leading to the Exodus being enabled by (or causing, depending on who you ask!) the weakening of Egypt

I think that if I'm right that the events of Exodus simply never happened that would quite thoroughly refute any possible link to the historical bronze age collapse. It would be like saying that the events of the Epic of Gilgamesh being enabled by the weakening of Egypt.

I didn't mention it, but the events in the Book of Joshua are also very much non-historical - there are no signs whatsoever of a conquest of parts of Canaan by any other group at a time that would be consistent with the Biblical narrative. The historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence is most consistent with the ancient Israelites simply being a specific group of Canaanites that established a kingdom in the area in which they had lived for millennia.

> But personally, I think the book of Judges very much feels set in the kind of post-apocalyptic world that the Collapse would have created.

The Book of Judges is also regarded as mostly non-historical by modern day scholars.