This is exactly my point though: What if people with autism weren't disadvantaged in society? Then the idea of "curing" it would be meaningless.

I understand that you're frustrated by the challenges you've dealt with in your life, and I acknowledge that I'm speaking from a place of privilege as someone that doesn't have any disability. But personally I'd rather see a world where people don't feel like they're disadvantaged for not matching the status quo than a world where everyone is equal just because everyone is the same.

More likely it's so they can use their personal phone to show the conversation to their Russian bosses without needing to bypass security measures.

What a sad view of humanity to think that our one defining characteristic should be pursuit of technology rather than the ability to intelligently collaborate and thereby form communities with a shared purpose.

I can assure you that the success of human survival throughout the history of our species has had far more to do with community and resourcefulness than with technological advancement. In fact it should be clear by now technological advancement devoid of communal spirit will be the very thing that brings an untimely end to our entire species. Our technology is destroying the climate we depend on and depleting the soil that we need for growing food, to say nothing of the nuclear bombs that could wipe us out with the wrong individuals in positions of power.

It makes total sense that new C++ will contain a higher percentage of bugs than old C++, but after being an almost full time Rust dev for the last two years, you will not convince me that new Rust code has more bugs than old C++ code.

So far I have yet to come across a bug in any of my Rust code that made it into production. All issue reports from users are still related to the C++ code base that we haven't managed to fully divorce from.

The only advantage to C++ interop is that managers want to see new code get deployed immediately and continuously. They don't want to wait until the corporation's billions (literally) of lines of code are all rewritten in a new language before they start to see the benefits of that transition.

Best practice when using .unwrap() in production code is to put a line of documentation immediately above the use of .unwrap() that describes the safety invariants which allow the unwrap to be safe.

Since code churn could eventually cause those safety invariants to be violated, I think it's not a bad thing for a blunt audit of .unwrap() to bring your attention to those cases and prompt to reevaluate if the invariants are still satisfied.

Valid questions. Do we have firm answers to any of them? And absent firm answers, what kind of risks to the safety of the general public are we willing to accept in service of ideological values?

Iran wants revenge on Trump for assassinating their favorite general, right-hand man of their Supreme Leader. If he goes to Iran he'll for sure be tortured and then executed.

Also I wouldn't suggest that Russia is safe for anybody. If anything I expect Trump to go there because they have the most kompromat on him, and they'll extort him into coming so they can use him as leverage. At that point you may be right that Putin would hand him over to serve Putin's own interest. But if Trump makes any other choice he'll probably end up drinking some polonium coke.

I'm disappointed to learn that she was born British so she can never run for president in America.

.. Not that the FTC chair is known to be a pipeline to the presidency, but I'm ready to turn over every stone at this point.

I mean scientists tried being polite and give gentle nudges with the climate crisis for decades and look where it got us. Civilization is driving towards a cliff and we've thrown away the steering wheel.

When I was younger I used to think that being nice to people and engaging them on their own terms is the best way to win people over to your cause, but at the end of the day people don't actually bother to change unless they realize that they need to for their own survival. So I'm done putting all my eggs into the respectability politics basket, and I'm not going beat around the bush on what a fucking cataclysmic crisis we're being faced with.

I certainly won't win anyone's affection, but if I can get at least one person to pause and ask themselves "..Am I in danger..?" then I'll take that as a win. If others think they can win people over with kindness, they're welcome to try.

And my rebuttal is three-fold:

1. Security does not depend entirely on the maintainer, and there is recourse even in the worst case scenario of an uncooperative or malicious maintainer.

2. The maintainer you quoted said he would be open to complying with requests if the requesters were willing to provide monetary support. You are intentionally misrepresenting their position.

3. The alternative of closed source software doesn't actually protect you from security issues, it just makes it impossible for any users to know if the software has been compromised. For all you know, a closed source software product could be using one of the hypothetical compromised open source software project that you're so afraid of, and you would never actually know.

If you're willing to pay a license for a private corporation's closed source software so you get the pleasure of never being able to know your security posture, then why would you be unwilling to financially support open source developers so they have the resources they need to have the level of security that you'd like from them?

Scale is everything in engineering and nuclear fusion is a good example.

It took 10 years to go from the first nuclear fission bomb to the first nuclear fission power reactor. Not bad, right? Because while the heat produced by nuclear fission is very high, it's still at a scale that can be handled by ordinary materials on Earth.

Meanwhile it took 70 years from the first nuclear fusion bomb to the first nuclear fusion reactor capable of breaking even (meaning it could output as much energy from the reaction as what needs to be input into it to maintain the reaction). That's still not a viable technology, even after 70 years. It's not guaranteed to become economically viable even if progress has been made. Only an absolute fool would stake the continued existence of all civilization on something as risky as nuclear fusion.

Before you let predatory industries exploit your science optimism, ask yourself: What do you actually know about carbon capture and its difficulties?

There's already decades of history of carbon capture filtration efforts (capturing carbon directly from exhaust with a filter) that have utterly failed to reach any useful effectiveness levels (typically falling below 10%) despite enormous investments.

Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere itself is utterly deranged with how low the concentration of carbon dioxide is (it doesn't actually take a very high concentration of CO2 to heat up the planet). The energy spent on running the giant vacuum would be more than the power generated by the fossil fuels that put the carbon in the atmosphere in the first place. That's just the laws of thermodynamics, and clever engineering isn't going to fix it.

And then even once you've captured the carbon, where do you put it? It will still be a gas so what happens if your storage leaks? Where is there even space to fit the billions of tons that we need to store? You know the brilliant idea the carbon producers have? We should pump that CO2 under the same shale rock that we frack oil out of, then seal up the hole with more shale rock. Given how fracking is known to cause all sorts of gas and oil leaks already because of how much damage it does to the bedrock, they must think we're absolute morons to believe we can safely store carbon dioxide in previously fracked caverns.

People trying to promote carbon capture to you are taking your for an absolute fool. Regrowing forests (not just planting trees but resuscitating forests that we've destroyed with their original biodiversity) is by far the most effective carbon capture technology in existence but it still can't nearly keep pace with our carbon production. It's absolutely necessary but not at all sufficient.

Transform society or go extinct. Those are your only real options and the sooner you come to terms with it the better chance we actually have at surviving as a species.

Absolute power doesn't have to come with unnecessary risk everywhere. There's nothing you can do in C++ that can't also be done in Rust, the difference is that Rust keeps it safe by default and you need to go out of your way to say "Let me do this incredibly risky thing inside this specific block of code" before it lets you do anything that has any risk of leading to undefined behavior and crashes.

And it turns out, you can have all the performance advantages of C++ while almost never needing to do anything unsafe. The average Rust developer will never use the unsafe keyword in their entire career but will still write code that outperforms the average C++ developer.