Crazy how much bigger modern games are … I wonder how many total pixels were shipped in the art assets of Warcraft 2 vs. StarCraft 2? My guess is at least 4 orders of magnitude higher for SC2
That seems very far away. My understanding is that these PETases digest plastic VERY slowly and need human engineering efforts to digest it in any appreciable amount of time (hours to days rather than years). And human bioengineering of these enzymes is still not to the point where it's actually usable at industrial scale. The paper just says they've discovered the variants, not "oh no all animal life on earth is now dependent on microplastics" :D
> What happens to the plastic economy when plastics are no longer useful because they'll be decomposed too quickly?
We already use lots of biodegradable things for crucial applications, such as the wood used in framing houses. Just because wood can rot in a damp forest doesn't mean that the wood inside your walls will rot away just because. There are conditions where it can start rotting, and we're aware of those conditions and how to prevent them, at least enough for a house to last for decades.
Elixir is the closest thing to OCaml that has a chance at semi-mainstream usage IMO.
It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which has a great track record as a foundation for backend systems. It doesn't have static typing, although the type system is a lot stronger than most other dynamic languages like JS or Python, and the language devs are currently adding gradual type checking into the compiler.
If the "check"/offline payment bounces, I wonder if it's the merchant that is out the money? Or is there any assurance from anyone else, like maybe the network would go halfsies?
Edit: on second thought, that doesn't really make sense and would be a great way to defraud the network of a ton of guaranteed money