That does sound nice. I think the author would say that if it's part of your annual performance review, then you are being paid to do it. That's the real test, not the job description, which can't be expected to describe every single thing you end up doing once employed.
if you have some purported improvement to a codebase that would make it inconsistent, then it's a matter of taste, not fact, whether it is actually an improvement.
You seem to have misunderstood the point being made in the section you quoted. The items are not on the list because it is a list of benefits that accrue to the company from work being legible. "Making money" is not a direct outcome of legibility, although it is a second or third-order effect.
> Imagine if you brain had to be consciously aware of every breath you take, every time you move a finger, etc... you'd get nothing done. Same deal if a CEO has to be aware of and approve accelerating your unit tests with parallelism or whatever.
This is a strawman. No competent CEO thinks they need to be on top of your unit testing practices. The levels of legibility that companies actually aim for are much more defensible.
Such optimizations may be forbidden by the fact that floating point addition is not associative unless you tell the compiler not to worry about that (I believe)
I doubt they have achieved any fusion reactions. They don't state any numbers on density or temperature so it's impossible to know. But in general plasma is never "caused by" fusion. Creating a plasma is quite easy compared to getting it hot and dense enough to fuse.
I think the burden of explanation is on the great great grandparent post which proposed an accelerometer "entirely made out of the same magnetic field" which would let it satisfy an equivalence principle for "magnetic force".
It means nothing for ITER unfortunately. Changing the toroidal field strength implies a totally different plasma size, density, temperature, everything. ITER isn't designed for this strong of fields and the plasma they would confine.
The author of the article is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars Trilogy and novel 2312 include all of the possible in-solar system alternatives you mention and more.