I’ve had the privilege of switching from C++ to Rust almost completely in my professional work. I can tell you in no uncertain terms, the language itself makes an enormous difference.

When I was doing highly concurrent multi-threaded programming in C++, I would sometimes have to waste entire weeks hunting down subtle data race bugs, despite the fact that I have a solid understanding of concurrency and multithreading. In some cases the bugs would originate in third party libraries that I was using, even though those libraries came from credible sources like Microsoft, Google, and GNU.

Switching to Rust, those bugs are gone. By the time my code compiles there’s at 95% chance that it will work exactly the way it’s intended to without any debugging. The remaining 5% is silly little logic accidents like saying if condition { ... } when I meant to say if !condition { ... } and those bugs are trivially caught by writing a few simple unit tests (and Rust also makes it easier to write unit tests than any other language I know of).

When I see my colleagues struggle with debugging problems in their JavaScript, Python, or C++ code, almost every time it turns out to be something that would’ve been trivially caught by the Rust compiler.

By no means does using Rust guarantee that your code will be completely bug free. But the language alone gets you so close to that goal that it hardly takes any special effort beyond compiling to get all the way there.

I think this is a huge reason that the ecosystem grows as quickly as it does: it’s so easy to write code that you can feel confident enough about to publish for anyone to use that many people go ahead and do that, and others feel confident using the work of others because the compiler does so much to ensure quality. It creates a virtuous cycle where people can develop faster by taking advantage of other people’s efforts and then release their own effort back into the community.

Whenever people complain that in Rust “the compiler is tough to beat”, the real problem is that individual’s mindset.

I had this problem as well when I first started playing with Rust. I thought I was very smart and that I know exactly what I’m doing when I’m programming, so if the compiler is complaining so much about my code, it’s just being a dumb jerk.

But if you stick with it instead of giving into your initial frustration, you’ll realize that the truth is the compiler is your friend and is saving you from innumerable subtle bugs that you’d be putting into your code if you were using any other language.

When you realize that the 1.5x time+effort you need to spend to satisfy the Rust compiler is saving you 5x-50x time+effort that you’d have to spend debugging your program if you had written it in any other language, you’ll come to appreciate the strictness of the compiler instead of resenting it.

There’s a reason us crustaceans are so zealous and the ecosystem is growing so rapidly, and it’s not because we’re super smart or have some unusually high work ethic. It’s because the language and the tooling is legitimately really good for producing high quality software at a rapid pace.

There’s going to be an inflection point where the people who keep dismissing Rust are going to be left behind by the entire tech industry because there’s no other language that allows an ordinary developer to produce as high quality software as quickly that can work across EVERY platform, including web (via compiling to web assembly). I won’t pretend I can predict exactly when that inflection point will happen, but it will definitely happen.

I bet the most important factor in his healthcare is all the physical and mental exercise that he got from continuing to build houses for the underprivileged into his 90s.

You have that totally backwards.

The board (which is the board of the non-profit) wanted the company to be more focused on its mission and less profit-driven. Altman is the one that’s been letting Microsoft get its tendrils around OpenAI and push a narrative that everything must be closed off and profit focused.

That’s explained by the muscle memory of the sleeve that he’s in. A mouth that has only practiced pronouncing American English will not have the neural pathways to pronounce words in a Japanese way. The consciousness and memories transfer but the sleeve doesn’t change.

It’s a convenient plot device but also it fits the narrative cleanly.

The difference is that for one side the “violations of the Geneva convention” are not being carried out by the duly elected government 🤔

This is a rare case where sentient is being used correctly. Sentient beings do have feelings, e.g. dogs and cats are sentient and can have cravings and even feel hate.

Sapient means having enough intellect to understand and reason about the situation. The post doesn’t actually require that.

A statement like “veganism is unhealthy” is so objectively wrong that it really harms your credibility in general. I wonder how much you actually read from the article, or did you just grab the title and run with it?

There are a small number of specific nutrients that are readily available in meat that are harder to come by in a vegan diet. Harder but entirely possible, especially with supplements.

And many of the meat alternatives that you were disparaging earlier are specifically engineered to provide those nutrients (in particular Impossible and Beyond brands).

“Veganism is unhealthy” in the same way that any eating pattern is unhealthy if you aren’t mindful of what you’re eating. Conventional meat-based diets have much higher risk of heart disease due to high cholesterol, so let’s go ahead and label that unhealthy too.

Mirror universe Janeway would use the caretaker technology to conquer the Delta Quadrant and become the Borg queen without even being assimilated.

If you think prices will be high without the use of fossil fuels, oooh boy just wait for the coming climate collapse that will obliterate all modern agriculture, create billions of climate refugees, decimate human civilization as we know it, and end all global supply chains.

I agree with this, the theory doesn’t track very well unless the executives locked themselves into expensive long term leases for their offices and don’t want to feel embarrassed that it’s a wasted cost.

I think the more likely explanation is that the companies want to drive people into quitting so they can reduce payroll without being on the hook for unemployment insurance.

I want this for when climate collapse destroys modern civilization and the survivors are left to rebuild society without the benefit of global supply chains or information infrastructure.

Personally I think the “compiling Rust is slow” narrative comes from comparing it against scripting languages like Python. If you compare compiling Rust against compiling C++ code of similar complexity, I think Rust will come out very favorably since C++ templates and headers tend to carry a huge compilation burden.