Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.

[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.

Expecting a kitchen sink approach for a low-level language can't work out. In low level systems languages your algorithms and interfaces are (or should be) much more tightly bound to specific solutions. It's much easier for abstraction to become excessive and counterproductive.

The comic has been quoted online many times, but I had to buy an old copy of Michigan So Far on eBay to actually see the comic: https://25thandClement.com/~william/links/img/Writing-Guindo...

If the Latin Mass advocates were serious, they'd engage with the Novus Ordo. For example, seek more uniformity--the Novus Ordo has too many optional variations, which means the mass might have different prayers in one geographic area than another, whereas the Tridentine Mass is more uniform. (See, e.g., https://lms.org.uk/missals) The fact they don't betrays some of the underlying motivations and dynamics.

Another aspect mostly unrelated to the mass itself was the Second Vatican Council deemphasisizing the role of clerics and religious--nuns, religious sisters, etc. That's a whole 'nother thing, but it's a significant factor behind the movement. It's far more understandable, but again can be addressed directly, without the subterfuge.

All institutional religions struggle with the tension between traditionalists and reformers; it's a form of politics. What has made the Roman Catholic church almost singularly unique has been it's ability to hold together so many people across diverse cultures and geographies. What's playing out now has played out many times before, though obviously the Roman Church has not always been successful at avoiding schism. Notably, though, it continues to keep in mind undoing previous schisms, and some choices made by the Second Vatican Council were focused on reconciliation, both with Protestant but also Orthodox churches. For example, the change in biblical readings seems to have been aimed at Protestantism--the readings in the US are coordinated through a group that includes representatives from, IIRC, Methodists and Episcopalians. Being less doctrinaire about some of the prayers in the Tridentine Mass was a way to affirm the validity of Orthodox rites.

It was the rediscovery of the Justinian Code during the Scholastic age which kickstarted a blossoming of legal theory in Europe. But they didn't understand that the Justinian Code wasn't a reflection of Roman law so much as a reflection of Emperor Justinian's reforms, which were in part an attempt to reassert control over and simplify the legal system.

Most of the changes people associate with the Novus Ordo were completely optional and often not even expected to have become so common. This is why all the popes have been exasperated, to varying extents, with the Latin Mass movement. Literally nothing prevents dioceses from celebrating the Novus Ordo mass in Latin, ad orientem, chanting, etc.

When writing library code, it's important to consider EINTR because you can't know about signal dispositions. Though, the common practice of looping on EINTR kind of defeats the purpose.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07966.pdf

Most law generally is non-monotonic. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic) The French tax code is one of the few exceptions.

I presume you're referring to this code:

  pid = waitpid(pid, &status, 0);
  if (WIFEXITED(status))
    rval = WEXITSTATUS(status);
  else
    rval = -1;

A check should probably be added in case the situation changes in the future, triggering spooky action at a distance, or were that code to be copy+pasted somewhere where the invariants didn't hold. But I think the current code in its current context is, strictly speaking, correct as-is.

[1] OpenBSD lacks the kernel features for such surprises that might theoretically be possible on Linux.

No other species has been shown to systematically display non-kin, non-mating-system altruism (for which empathy is probably an integral component). It seems likely you need systematic non-kin altruism to achieve the ubiquitous, complex cooperation humans exhibit. And that complex cooperation is probably a prerequisite to make our degree of intelligence evolutionarily profitable. Otherwise human-level intelligence should be more common than our immediate lineage. (Some cousin species may very well have been smarter or more cooperative than us; relatively speaking it could be homo sapiens found a more effective equilibrium. Nonetheless our immediate lineage seems to be the only one to break through the selfish gene bottleneck that restricts other species along these axes.)

The bug here actually involved the intersection of unveil and pledge. IIUC, it was more a pledge bug that accidentally allowed bypassing unveil checks.

How many Linux services use seccomp? Or chroot, mount namespaces, or landlock? If they do at all, it's usually imposed externally by systemd or docker, in which case they usually run with overly broad permissions because there's no integration with the specific application code, thus the AF_ALG exploits in containers. On OpenBSD services continue to narrow their privileges after starting up so by the time an external request is serviced they have only minimal access to syscalls and the filesystem, often only read/write/send/recv syscalls, and if open is allowed only the specific files and directories needed to service requests. Typically even the network-facing daemon accepting TLS connections doesn't have access to the private key--you simply can't do that by running a vanilla service application in docker.

Does OpenBSD have bugs? Of course. The question is, which environment has more trustworthy backstops? The Linux kernel provides all the facilities, but they're not used effectively, for many reasons.

Conflating the two is why some people have trouble understanding why religions like Buddhism and Christianity seemed to tolerate so much inequality and violence; or more generally just assumed people writ large were historically more callous and uncaring than today.

Arguably one of the downsides, though, to a focus on rights vs intrinsic value is that rights are typically couched in materialist terms. Most of the time that's probably for the better, but sometimes maybe not.

I think ISPC is still the proper way to go. But these days everybody wants One Language to Rule Them All along with standard libraries for doing everything out-of-the-box. And while in principle ISPC's approach could be stitched into C or C++ in a fairly clean manner (perhaps with well-defined and enforced segregation of constructs to minimize complexity), it's just not gonna happen: C++ is too enamored with constructing libraries through deeply complex templated types (hammer, nail, yada yada), and C is just too conservative (though if GCC or clang went the distance with a full implementation, there's a good chance the C committee would adopt it).

https://www.awphooey.com/kbhr

https://www.awphooey.com/retrofit/autumn

Full list at https://www.awphooey.com/retrofit

(I only know this from your post, so thank you. Just mentioning in case KBHR piques someone's interest more than WKRP. I loved both TV shows.)

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/amd-chips-are-powering-newest-sta...

[2] https://docs.amd.com/r/en-US/ds955-xqr-versal-ai-edge/Genera...