I imagine the story is likely accurate (conservative father adopts increasingly bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories and family becomes alienated - is it dementia or something else?) and it also may fit NPR's editorial angle. To me it does seem like something of an invasion of privacy, particularly if it was published without permission.
> hamster-treadmilling for mere pennies on every dollar of labour I produce
Oh, you noticed!
> structured to ensure that almost all of that generated wealth goes to those who already have obscene amounts of wealth
The most important function of business management is to ensure that value flows up the pyramid rather than down.
One advantage of capitalism vs. feudalism or prior systems is that the capitalist nobility who own the (land, factories, companies, robots, etc.) is neither directly hereditary nor based on military conquest. This allows it to claim fairness even though it is mathematically impossible for more than a few people at the bottom of the pyramid to ascend to the top.
The path forward I see is improved safety features for popular C compilers and toolchains.
Ultimately it may be necessary to convince standards committees, but it seems like adding features and flags into mainline clang/llvm (and/or gcc, visual studio, ...) paves the road toward improved memory safety for C at large.
For example, if clang supported it out of the box, I could imagine OpenBSD (or macOS or other OSes that use clang) eventually compiling all (or nearly all) of its C code, including kernel, library, and userland code, in safe mode - and maybe even making it the default. In fact we already see certain safety flags and compiler/runtime features being adopted.
> Attempts to retrofit safely to C have been around a lot longer than Cheri; fil-c is just the latest and there's no obvious reason why it should be more successful.
It is true that memory-safe C compilers have existed for decades and have seen minimal adoption.
However, improvements to clang/llvm could yield wider impact and benefit than previous efforts, since they may be supported in a widely used C toolchain.
-fbounds-safety is another change that may see more adoption if it makes it into mainline clang/llvm
For CHERI to be fully safe, it basically needs a GC. They just call it something else. They need it to clean up capabilities to things that were freed, which is the same thing that Fil-C uses GC for.
Shiny (external design) is only part of the story. Hardware, software, and infrastructure also matter. The iPhone had an attractive and functional industrial design (barring occasional missteps like antennagate) but its multitouch screen and UI, full-featured email, web browser, and music player were critical. On the infrastructure side, Apple negotiated "unlimited" data rates to prevent carriers from crippling the iPhone, and within a year had developed an App Store ecosystem that eventually scaled from a few thousand developers to hundreds of thousands.
End-to-end execution matters (Apple's vertical integration helps with this) and it's a big part of the difference between invention and innovation.
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