I think it is pretty reasonable to say that even for those in the continental US the state of the world in 1942 provided much more cause for concern than anything going on right now. At the very least, for a child born then you would be very unsure what kind of world they would end up growing up in.
True--I don't think things got better in the US until after the Korean War. And even the 60s were marred by Vietnam (far more than the impact of the War on Terror).
My parents were born in Peru in 1941/42. Peru was neutral for much of the war, but in 1942 they began deporting Japanese individuals suspected of Axis sympathies to internment camps in the US. In 1945 Peru entered the war on the Allied side. If the war hadn't ended, I'm pretty sure my dad and his family would have been interned.
And even after the war, the situation was unreal. My dad's uncle didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. He thought it was all just allied propaganda. In 1949 he sold all his possessions and took his family back to Japan--to Okinawa, in fact. When he got there, he saw the truth: the country was smashed to rubble, and he had to beg in the streets for food. My grandfather travelled to Japan, taking my 10 year-old father in tow, to bring the uncle back to Peru.
That's probably one of the tamest, least tragic stories from that time. Even in the US, 400,000 never came home and 600,000 came back wounded. That's a million families affected. Germany, Japan, Russia, France, China, Korea, and even Britain, had far worse stories.
Whatever troubles we have now (and we have plenty), they are not on the same scale as those from that time.
> It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too.
Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. Trying to resist a government by using a digital currency is putting the cart before the horse. The dollar is an abstraction and an accounting convenience over the genuine temporal powers of the consensus that issues it.
> Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter.
That's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously the early adopters are going to be the people for whom the existing system fails, but if you use that as an excuse to ban it or otherwise make it an insurmountable inconvenience for ordinary use through regulatory suppression then you're just preventing people from using it to buy lunch, not preventing them from using it to buy drugs. Which is useless and spiteful, especially when you're not going to address any of the problems that caused people to want it to begin with.
Only if they use it purely as a git SaaS which they don't, it's also an issue tracker and discussion forum. Even PRs aren't strictly a git concept. Given they use all those things and given they're against having AI features built into them, it does not seem ironic to me at all.
The US is the largest market for firearms, so the NRA can use the threat of boycotting a manufacturer within the states to prevent the technology gaining traction elsewhere.
To profit, they would first have to sell the goods. Who is actually in the market for a smart gun? Consumers aren't, surely. There is virtually no upside to your gun tracking you, at your own expense of buying a more complex piece of tech to boot. So that leaves something like (apparently) New Jersey where the government would compel purchases of smart guns because they were interested in the tracking. But eg. China simply don't allow citizens to purchase guns period. There may be some application to applying it to state-owned firearms to track military and police usage, but deploying that at Chinese scale would be an extremely expensive endeavour for what appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Not to mention the biometric lock concept, if implemented, is introducing an entire new axis of unreliability to a life-or-death tool.
Gun owners in the US probably wouldn't want their gun to be used against them in a home invasion, or by their child at a school. Seems like that could be a large-ish market. Especially if you can lobby regulators in favor of making it a requirement for all or some people.
You are right that gun owners wouldn't want those things, but they are unlikely to want a smart gun as a solution to those things.
They want the gun to be available to them, and not be under duress to use a fingerprint reader or pin pad or RFID ring to do it.
Responsible gun owners keep guns out of children's hands by locking them up or supervising them, and irresponsible ones aren't going to want to pay extra for smart features.
I think there's a very narrow range of smart features, something like a gun that is unlocked when removed from a holster, but locks up if it is dropped or grabbed, that might be interesting. That makes having the gun taken from an officer less of a threat, which might have an institutional appeal. Give it a 10-hour maintenance mode so that it can be used as a "nightstand gun" while automatically being locked if left idle for longer, and it would basically meet the needs of police both on and off-duty.
In my personal experience gun owners want mechanical foolproofness too. They want something that's not going to lock up or fail or discharge at the wrong time. Smart features just add a layer of complexity with fail possibilities to address a problem that many of them would prefer to be addressed differently anyway.
I think a country like Australia could be a good starting point for smart guns. Yes, not a very big market-around 8% of US population, with significantly lower rates of gun ownership-but culturally more open to gun control, with a much weaker gun rights lobby, and a marked political tendency towards surveillance and “nanny state” regulation
IIRC Australia doesn't have legal frameworks for gun ownership for the purpose of self defense, and there's no great implementation of smart guns in the first place.
A smart gun is like an AWS authenticated motor twisting ballpoint pen. Just no one ever seriously pays for such a thing, and it has not even been seriously made if it ever was actually conceived. Making it a requirement is basically out of question.
> Making it a requirement is basically out of question
Why? If there’s the political will, it is doable. There are Australian gun manufacturers (e.g. Lithgow Arms, owned by Thales)-and if none of them are willing to cooperate, the government can always start their own gun manufacturer. Indeed, Lithgow Arms was founded in 1912 as a government-owned arms manufacturer, and remained in public hands until the Australian federal government sold it to Thales in 2006.
Same reasons as why things like Clipper Chips isn't happening. It completely lacks technical basis, and even political consensus gets sketchy quick.
Post-war Commonwealth nations are generally bad at gun designs as well - UK tried once and produced an infantry rifle that will(not could) seriously injure its user if held and fired in left hand. So even if forced, the approved gun will be more of a theoretical product, and the smart gun mandate will just be a less politically viable alternative to total firearms ban.
I'm trying to picture in my mind a person who is a fan of Rust and somehow against an OS with a formally-verified kernel no matter the language. I'm not having much success.
Thoughts on Ada / SPARK? Why are you not using Ada / SPARK considering it has such a neat type system, pre- and post-conditions, formal verification, and so forth. It has built-in concurrency constructs as well and it helps you avoid deadlocks and race conditions.
Well, why should I? Does it bring anything else to the table? After 50 years it doesn’t have the momentum rust has, or the tooling and ecosystem.
In any case, it really isn’t comparable. It doesn’t have a borrow checker, contracts are enforced at runtime not compile time, no move semantics and no smart pointers… I find it strange actually that there is always someone bringing up “what about Ada/SPARK?” in the comments when there aren’t even comparable.
It brings more to the table than Rust does. I have talked about this before, but here I go again (because your comment is full of misinformation).
SPARK contracts are compile-time verified, not runtime. The GNATprove tool statically proves absence of runtime errors, buffer overflows, arithmetic overflow, and user-defined contracts (preconditions, postconditions, invariants) at compile time with zero runtime overhead. This is formal verification, not runtime checks.
Ada has move semantics since Ada 2012 via limited types and function returns. Limited types cannot be copied, only moved. This is enforced at compile time. Build-in-place optimization eliminates unnecessary copies.
Ada has smart pointers. Ada.Containers.Indefinite_Holders provides reference semantics, GNATCOLL.Refcount provides explicit reference counting, and controlled types (Ada.Finalization.Controlled) give you RAII-style resource management with deterministic finalization, effectively custom smart pointers. Search for "Ada smart pointers".
Ownership/borrowing in SPARK: While not called a "borrow checker," SPARK's ownership model (Ada 202x, SPARK RM 3.10) provides compile-time verification of pointer safety, including ownership transfer, borrowing (observed/borrowed modes), and prevents use-after-free and aliasing violations. The verification is actually more comprehensive than Rust because it proves full functional correctness, not just memory safety.
Certification: Ada/SPARK is DO-178C certified for avionics, used in safety-critical systems (Airbus, Boeing, spacecraft), and has Common Criteria EAL certification. Rust has no comparable certification history for high-assurance systems.
The tooling argument is partially valid. Rust has better modern tooling (although Ada now has a proper package manager) and a more lively ecosystem. But claiming Ada lacks move semantics, or smart pointers is factually incorrect, and SPARK proves what Rust's borrow checker only approximates, and does so with mathematical proof, not heuristics.
Why should you care? You answer that, but I think you may be right, you are just a Rust activist.
What I find strange is the confidence with which you make verifiably and demonstrably incorrect statements about Ada, a language you clearly have not studied.
You are right. I just plain don't care. Maybe I am misinformed. Maybe you are misunderstanding my requirements. Either way, it doesn't matter.
You seem to be missing the point - there is an entire ecosystem of things built in Rust, a community of developers using it in related fields to where I am working, and a vast store of experience and knowledge to draw upon.
Outside of aviation or defense, does Ada have that? No, it does not.
That is why no one uses it.
PS: This subthread started when someone made an assumption that Rust activists would pounce on this for not being written in Rust. I chimed in to say that, as a "rust activist" seL4 is actually pretty cool and that's fine. Then you butted in preach the Ada gospel. Not a good look.
> Outside of aviation or defense, does Ada have that? No, it does not.
> That is why no one uses it.
Both of these statements are false as well.
(I only made this response because you keep spreading misinformation about a language you know nothing about, self-admittedly, and demonstrably. Not a good look. Neither is your response to you being corrected. If you do not care, at least stop spreading bullshit so confidently about a language you do not know at all.)
I'm a Rust fanatic but probably not an activist. I am curious about Ada / SPARK though.
From what I've seen, taking on SPARK means taking on full verification, close to what seL4 is doing. Doesn't that make it extremely difficult to use for larger projects? My understanding is that seL4 is an absolutely heroic effort.
Ada is very scalable, suitable for everything from blinking LEDs on an AVR microcontroller board to controlling interplanetary spacecraft. Similarly, SPARK can be used incrementally, proving lower level or critical parts first.
How does this SPARK/non-SPARK mix compare to Rust's safe/unsafe mix though, in terms of both safety and pragmatism for larger non-interplanetary software? Like, for creating a CLI tool, a GUI application, a game, a web server?
It's funny how people always allude to fanatical Rust developers in the most tangential threads, but they never actually turn up and demand we rewrite the entire Kernel in Rust or whatever terrible takes they're alleged to have.
> Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses
You could argue LLVM is technically of a similar level of complexity, but operating a browser requires far more actual business than developing a compiler.
More to the point, those organisations get enormous amounts of "free" labour in the form of contributions from large corporations that benefit from them, in a way that Firefox absolutely does not.
I do not think that if the bot detection model inside your big web proxy has a configuration error it should panic and kill the entire proxy and take 20% of the internet with it. This is a system that should fail gracefully and it didn't.
> The real issue
Are there single "real issues" with systems this large? There are issues being created constantly (say, unwraps where there shouldn't be, assumptions about the consumers of the database schema) that only become apparent when they line up.
France is a western country with its own economic and labour troubles. The enormous expense of building nukes in the US is entirely its own making and much more complicated than just "western" inefficiency.
You might want to look up flammanville. They built a new reactor there and that also took 20 years or so and was way over budget.
We've built a lot of nuclear in the last century and then largely stopped. A lot of the know how is gone which is what we're paying for now.
Also, in France, all those reactors were largely the same leading to economies of scale when building them. Everything we build today is essentially a one of so you don't get to spread that cost over multiple.
Hyper administrative state-capitalist economies all have the same problem with infrastructure. The US has an image of being more capitalist and efficient, which is true to a degree, but once you get a large-scale project that hits all fed->state->municipal politics it's not much different than France. It's just minor variations of who the mandatory 'stakeholders' are ...who demands a cut and who delays/blocks progress.
As soon as some project is being pitched by politicians as "creating thousands of local jobs" it's either DOA or will be many years late and over budget.
Not unless you're talking about quantum indeterminacy, do you think that's where OP's agency comes from?
Or what about the Indian stalker's agency, should they "try harder" to reverse the genetics, pre-natal nutrition, toxin exposure, and gut biome that led them down the path of mental illness?
reply