You underestimate the average American teenager’s shell-buying game (honed for decades by our asinine alcohol laws.) I’m sure kids elsewhere would pick it up pretty fast too.
Plus, this would spawn massive online black markets for the codes, fueled by crypto/gift cards/other shady means of money transmission.
I'm working on an ESP32 project right now, and Espressif provides shrink-wrapped toolchains for C/++ and Rust. The latter even comes with a little tool called 'espup' that cleanly installs their fork of Rust and LLVM (for Xtensa support) - I was able to compile and run a blinky in less than half an hour.
> Many people already use non-portable SIMD for the 1-3 targets they care about, instead.
This is something a lot of people (myself included) have gotten tripped up by. Non-portable SIMD intrinsics have been stable under std::arch for a long time. Obviously they aren't nearly as nice to hold, but if you're in a place where you need explicit SIMD speed-ups, that probably isn't a killer.
You don't need years to look around and see that (unlike much of the US) there are no homeless addicts, fare evaders, or vandals on the transit in Singapore. (Or, for that matter, murderous psychos with dozens of prior arrests.)
Logically, therefore, they have superior crime policy we should learn from - nothing to do with culture.
After spending a summer working in Singapore, I fully support introducing corporal punishment to America (and accelerated capital punishment for drug trafficking offenses.) It turns out that - surprise! - actually punishing criminals where it hurts, even for "petty" offenses, works wonders for making your country a nice place to live.
Now, obviously, Singapore's methods aren't perfect - a common complaint I heard was that money can buy you kid gloves - and I imagine the Supreme Court smackdown over caning versus the 8th Amendment would be biblical. But any return to broken windows governance would be much appreciated.
macOS kinda gets there. I've (grudgingly) come to admit that it has by far the best security story of any desktop operating system. Apps require explicit user consent to access the filesystem, peripherals, and other sensitive data (e.x. Discord requests "Input Monitoring" access to determine if you're "actively online" even when unfocused.)
The only place it seems to fall flat is network I/O - LAN access requires permission, but dialing out to the wider Internet does not.
Compare Windows, which has jack (except for bloated anti-malware hooks in NTFS.)
Linux is _trying_ to replicate macOS with Flatpak/XDG portals, but those still need more time in the oven.
Source: I use both a MacBook and a Linux desktop daily.
To be fair, Vim and Curl are almost certainly dynamically linked, so they get to "cheat" a little. 10 megs is entirely reasonable for a statically linked utility intended to "just work" when you dump it somewhere in your $PATH.
Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)
Honestly, as someone who just purchased his first MacBook, Liquid Glass is... fine? The control center could use a little more opacity, but besides that, my opinion tends to range from "whatever" to "hey, that looks pretty nifty!"
My dude, before HTTPS, anyone could go to a Starbucks and skim every customer's Facebook session with a free Firefox extension. That's not an "edge case."
> Sedans, coupes, or anything with less mass will be ... more capable
I beg to differ. They may be safer and more efficient, but they get those advantages by trading off cargo and passenger space. A crossover can carry a heck of a lot more than a sedan and still fit 5 people - hence why it's the "local maximum."
> Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV
Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
Cool - now let's see how much it costs in compute to generate a single clip. (Also, notice how no individual scene is longer than a handful of seconds?)
It's simple enough that I can easily typeset CS theory homework (with all the fancy notation that entails) without having to subject myself to the insanity of LaTeX or the friction of a standard word processor.
But at the same time, I can also crank out a full paper in a (professor mandated, LaTeX templated) style without raising any eyebrows.
The fact that it's a "real" programming language is also lovely - I have a very simple template (took me an ~hour to write) that ingests TOML descriptions of recipes and marshals them into pretty, standardized PDFs for my recipe binder.
If this means that I no longer have to wait around for five minutes to have a supermarket employee unlock the laundry detergent, then I approve. Yes, there are privacy concerns, but I care more about law and order at this point.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice
Anecdotally, I've developed a bad habit of fidgeting with my expansion cards by popping them in and out. I've probably put them through several hundred cycles like that and they still work fine - I think the fact that the cards are "rail-roaded" into the slots helps a lot, since it makes it very difficult to apply pressure at an angle to the internal USB-C port.
Minority report: I will likely just switch to an iPhone, despite my typical gripes with Apple.
I've always seen my smartphone as a tool that doesn't do "much" (compared to a "real" computer) but can be relied on to always do what I need, whereas the inverse is ~true for my Linux desktop. (Think "bank app" versus "running Photoshop.")
By this metric, the only thing that historically ranked Android above iOS for me - even despite all the Google concerns - was sideloading and general openness.
Now that that's basically gone, I may as well move to a mobile OS that at least pretends to give a damn about my privacy.
Plus, this would spawn massive online black markets for the codes, fueled by crypto/gift cards/other shady means of money transmission.