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Nobody cares about iMessage in the EU. That level of classist discrimination is a US phenomenon.

The WhatApp dependence of EU countries is worse than the US SMS situation. At least I (US resident) can communicate with whatever app/device I choose.

And if the blue bubble matters to one's "friends" in the US...then one needs better friends.

I think it will take way more than political will.

The USA is enjoying the wealth they gained in both world wars and they also kept their defacto colonies in the South America and Pacific.

Europeans destroyed their wealth in the world wars and they lost their colonies. Of course the end of the colonialism has ended some of the human suffering but it has a cold-hearted economic impact.

The American venture capitalists are all coming from the industries that got stronger at and after the world wars. They invested silicon and then the tech industries that built the wealth exponentially. The Europeans had to rebuild their countries until 70s and the investments they made are smaller. Similarly the US spent its government money to nuclear and space programs that further strengthened the economy. EU spent its surplus to improve post-Soviet countries which may or may not pay dividends in the future.

It may require significant reallocation of resources from certain places to tech. It may require diverting the resources spent on old pensioners who are the biggest voting block. It is not a simple lack of political will. It requires reshaping a century of decisions.


When installed and kept up properly with good policymaking railways are always a positive for the economy. They cause a huge amount of cheap movement that increases business activity. Little towns that become railway stops develop much faster. The bigger stations are great for shops and food. The access to education and high-value driving extracurricular activities increase for younger people too. They overall make the economy resilient against all sorts of crisis (energy, markets)

The more railways are used for commuting, the less people are on the road. So it increases the road efficiency too and reduces degradation. Railways are great drivers of innovation and the technology they generate can be backported to cars, they are initial investment drivers.

However, the first if/when is a big one. You can half ass roads. You pay compensation for a pothole every now and then and make small improvement to get votes. You cannot half ass railways. They require constant maintenance and a whole mindset built around them.

Japan does railways correctly. China is getting there. The Netherlands is nearly a paradise of bike and railways. Germany isn't. The countries with almost the same culture, Austria and Switzerland, care much more about their railways and invest them properly however their government aligns. Germans keep electing the right wing party with their ministers of ~BMW~ transport and then complain about 50% of the non-cancelled trains are late and the maintenance cost of the falling apart rail system is quadrupled.


As someone who's been to both China and Japan I'd say railway is far ahead in China than the rest of the world.

Again, according to GPT, the price per kilometre between them is €0.03-0.06 in China vs €0.15-0.26 in Japan.

I know Japan has a lot of high speed rail coverage but so does China and the difference in price is absolutely insane.

Rail between Beijing and Shanghai for example has an average speed of 300kmh. I believe their high speed network is vaster than Japan's.


Most of these numbers are probably due to differences in wages and the size of the respective countries.


If they aren't completely fabricated.


and then your gc will leak it. Rust programs are not only safe but CPU and memory efficient.


I simple standard mark-and-sweep GC will not "leak it".


This has been a solved problem for decades.


Nope it isn't. You just aren't experienced in system programming. Working with hardware is unsafe since it has state that one cannot completely encapsulate in a single program. The entire specific design of a chip isn't available to programmer; only the machine code is. We usually don't know how a processor decides to cache things or switch to kernel permission level. Usually this isn't even the level we're at, OSes have private internals that change behind the programs and they are not accessible from user space. Pressing Ctrl+C to interrupt changes so many things in memory, it would be outright impossible to write programs that handle every single thing.

The fundamental / syntactic promise of Rust is providing mechanisms to handle and encapsulate unsafety such that it is possible to construct a set of libraries that handle the unsafety in designated places. Therefore the rest of the program can be mathematically proven to be safe. Only the unsafe parts can be unsafe.

Coming from Java or Go or Js or Python angle wouldn't be the same. Those languages don't come with mechanisms to let you to make system calls directly or handle the precise memory structure of the data which is necessary when one is communicating with hardware or the OS or just wants to have an acceptable amount of performance.

In C++, the compiler can literally remove your code if you sum or multiply integers wrong or assume the char is signed/unsigned. There is no designated syntax that limits the places possible memory overflow error happen. The design of the language is such that some most trivial oversight can break your program silently and significantly. It is too broad so it is not possible to create a safe and mathematically proven and performant subset with the C and C++ syntax. It is possible with Rust. It is like the difference of chips that didn't have a hardware mechanism to switch between user and kernel mode so everything was simply "all programs should behave well and no writes to other programs' memory pinky promise".

Rust doesn't leave this just as a possibility. Its standard library is mostly safe and one can already write completely safe and useful utilities with the standard library. The purpose of the standard library is provide you ways to avoid unsafe as much as possible.

Of course more hardware access or extremely efficient implementations would require unsafe. However again, only the unsafe parts can cause safety bugs. They are much easier to find and debug compared to C++. People write libraries for encapsulating unsafe so there are even less places that use unsafe. If people are out of their C++ habit, reaching for the big unsafe stick way too often, then they are using Rust wrong.

Whatever you do, there will be always a need for people and software that enables a certain hardware mode, multiply matrices fast, allocates a part of display for rendering a window etc. We can encapsulate the critical parts of those operations with unsafe and the rest of the business logic can be safe.


> Those languages don't come with mechanisms to let you to make system calls directly or handle the precise memory structure of the data

Here’s a C# library for Linux where I’m doing all these things https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Rea... As you see from that readme, the performance is pretty good too.


> In C++, the compiler can literally remove your code if you sum or multiply integers wrong or assume the char is signed/unsigned. There is no designated syntax that limits the places possible memory overflow error happen. The design of the language is such that some most trivial oversight can break your program silently and significantly.

Here is an interesting case of an optimization-triggered bug in Rust code I've heard of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBjQ3HqCfxs


> Those languages don't come with mechanisms to let you to make system calls directly or handle the precise memory structure of the data

Eh? You can of course do all of that in python. https://docs.python.org/3/library/struct.html


To be able to decode under heavy interference you need heavy error correction in the digital hardware and in the standard. Nobody designs space-grade consumer radios. You are basically limited with the bits you have and the recovery you have, no more. A really bad digital signal is unintelligible by definition. It is a sharp cutoff when you reach the limit.

However an analog signal is ehmm .... an analog of the original. It is continuous. So the error is also analog and you're only limited by the average case. The signal degradation is also analog, there is no sharp cutoff. So as long as human brain can extract the information from the noise, analog continues to work.


Space Grade? Only in the sense that it’s technology we mastered in the 1950s. Error correction is a feature of radio transceivers that cost pennies.


if you design the protocol well you could easily make a digital signal degrade cleanly. rather than sending a plain signal, break it up into a low, medium and high fidelity version where the higher fidelity versions store extra frequency info but the low quality ones have more error correction


Basically CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs all converge to the crab equivalent of computation. They all expose the same capability with different areas of optimization.


If the majority of the code and functionality is written by WordPress, Having a little GPL component in there will not affect them to change the license. GPL's idea of infecting copyright with small libraries is a convention. I don't think it will hold in an actual court that will test who wrote what at what degree of substance.


Did the little GPL component force itself into the codebase without anyone noticing? Was it so useless that nobody could have removed it from the project to get rid of this obvious parasite?

I think it will hold in court specifically because, since it is so aggressive in what it is set to do, a company choosing to use it in their otherwise non-GPL codebase is declaring that it is not easily replaceable and thus proving it contributes to the overall value.


Yeah, I think getting sold to a company like Proton AG would be the better outcome for Firefox.


Well you, the programmer, usually don't upload it. Some package maintainer does it since they want your software and ideally they should handle the bug reports for their package as well.


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