The speed of light in vacuum is a hard upper limit. Most signal paths will be dominated by fibre optics (about 70% of C) and switching (adding more delay).
But, yes TrueTime will not magically allow data to propagate at faster-than-light speeds.
There's a world of difference between "simple configuration needs" and "complex configuration needs".
I will take a kubernetes deployment manifest as an example that you would want to express in a hypothetically perfect configuration language. Now, eventueally, you end up in the "containers" bit of the pod template inside the deployment spec.
And in that, you can (and arguably should) set resources. But, in an ideal world, when you set a CPU request (or, possibly, limit, but I will go with request for now) for an image that has a Go binary in it, you probably also want to have a "GOMAXPROCS" environment variable added that is the ceiling of your CPU allocation. And if you add a memory limit, and the image has a Java binary in it, you probably want to add a few of the Java memory-tuning flags.
And it is actually REALLY important that you don't repeat yourself here. In the small, it's fine, but if you end up in a position where you need to provide more, or less, RAM or CPU, on short notice (because after all, configuration files drive what you have in production, and mutating configuration is how you solve problems at speed, when you have an outage), any "you have to carefully put the identical thing in multiple places" is exactly how you end up with shit not fixing themselves.
So, yeah, as much hate as it gets, BCL may genuinely be better than every other configuration language I have had the misfortune to work with. And one of the things I looked forward to, when I left the G, was to never ever in my life have to see or think about BCL ever again. And then I saw what the world at large are content with. It is bloody depressing is what it is.
I am actually all for YouTube becoming less of the behemoth in the market. One way of accomplishing that would be to enforce human moderation instead of machine moderation. Because nothing at the scale of YouTube can (sustainably) use mostly-human moderation and I suspect even "machine-assisted human moderation" would simply require too many people.
If we take "you need about 3x the time of a video to make a considered moderation decision" as a baseline, and trust the numbers from https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/ as valid, we would need....
300 hours per minute * 1440 minutes per day * 3 moderator hours per day. Let's round that up to 1.3 million hours of daily reviewer time. Let us also assume we have super-human reviewers that can squeeze out 8 hours of solid reviewing a day. That means we need 160k - 170k reviewers. And then we need to account for illness and hols, so make that about a quarter of a million people, to keep up with the incoming and maybe make some inroads on what's been uploaded in the past.
That is actually less than what I expected, I thought the numbers would end up in the "low millions" (call it 3.14 million).
Yes, sort of. I think one of the early Foundation books was essentially composed of two or three shorter works and had both a time gap and a change of protagonists.
But having a change of protagonists in "continuous time" actually was not easy to pull off, and I am not sufficiently happy with the result to consider it worth distributing wildly.
Nonetheless, actually keeping at something means it's surprisingly easy to amass results over time.
I wrote a novel-shaped object (OK, it was never printed, so "object" is perhaps a bit bold) over about 6 months, by the simple expedient of making sure I spent at least 15 minutes every morning with the NSO editor open. Target was "Minimum one word", but (apart from a long stretch in the middle), more like 500-1500 words per day.
The long stretch in the middle was when I had to figure out how to deal with the main character dying half-way through, due to the logic of the story. That took a fair bit of revising previously written prose and setting things up for a sequel character, as it were (the main "protagonist" of what was intended as a series was an organisation, not an individual; as it turns out, there's a reason that is not a common format).
This would be why pretty much every Usenet post I made from 1996 (or so) onwards had an X-No-Archive header. How many actually honoured it, I cannot say, however.
But, yes TrueTime will not magically allow data to propagate at faster-than-light speeds.