Yeah, we had a lot of construction debris once, and rented a 30 cubic-yard dumpster (one of the big ones). After we tossed what we had, we told the neighbors to bring all they wanted. It was really helpful, especially since there were definitely a few that were down on their luck.
It was an awesome way to build good-will, since the price difference between a 10 and 30 cu.yd dumpster was ~10%. Obviously most of the cost is in the truck roll.
We also did the opposite once: we were demolishing a small vacation home, so we told some of the locals to pick through and take what they wanted. It was funny seeing our kitchen.. but in a different house.
I agree completely. Just look at io_uring and PowerShell, to name some examples.
io_uring totally rethinks the notion of a "syscall". It is going to eat the world, and most of us are not even going to realize that it happened.
PowerShell is a really cool example of re-imagining input and output. Namely, it is record-oriented ("Object") rather than byte-oriented. No more stringing together chains of fragile "awk" commands to make pipelines do what you want. (I know there is prior art here)
If you think OS's are moving still, then you're the one stuck.
I think you're basically right. I know some people that looked in to building a flow battery (it didn't pan out for other reasons). The utility wanted it for frequency regulation - in other words, extremely short timescale response times.
There is also an NFC tag that will turn off all the lights and turn on a disco ball :-).