Well, I haven't made that up myself - I got the idea from linguistics books - and from people that lived there for a long time. And those linguists were very clear that the language came first and then syllable script was bolted on.
When learning a bit of Japanese to me it was quite obvious that the script was most likely intentionally left (or made) complicated. By using a normal alphabet that actually fits to the structure of Japanese language it would be just another ordinary language to learn.
Using a syllables-script for an ending grammar just doesn't make sense. Using 2 syllable scripts is just strange.
It most likely helped the leaders there to stay in control. Without native Japanese translators foreigners are unable to get very far.
I'm on Windows. Other OS may differ. I experimented a lot with load times - and compared HDD, SSD, RAM-Disk.
I wrote a small program that loads everything from a big code-repository into RAM. The first time HDD and SSD and RAM-Disk make a big difference, when reading files a second time the lag of HDD (50s?) almost disappeared completely. Caching kicked in.
The RAM-Disk has less initial lag, but also it has to be filled first, so instead of moving everything to RAM-Disk just touching everything so the OS-Caching kicks in is just faster and more convenient.
Improvements in build-time are very valuable to me. But I'm not sure if a cloud would help me much. Synching can easily eat up 10s. Also my tools are very unique (including a parser that I wrote myself).
To be faster than local a cloud would have to be massively overclocked - and I can already reach good results locally.
For actual improvements I need a massive improvement in compiler technology (last time I looked there were just too many single-threaded bottlenecks in my build process). Nothing a cloud can solve for me.
Security is one issue - but hackers will most likely only get confused when they try to understand what is going on - also costs I usually don't like...
I recently experimented with a ram disk. Practically it didn't change anything.
OS-caching seems to already be clever enough and once the OS has figured out that some directories are important anything in there seemed to get done in RAM anyway.
A RAM-disk will make this less black box and more deterministic regarding guaranteed access times, but in daily use the RAM-disk just didn't make a difference.
Great news... Compile time or a clean build? I use similar tooling (older version... :-)). And I'm starting to evaluate what's going on with those new versions.
Comparing compile times is done rarely. I sometimes tried to google some comparisons, but didn't find much.
For a typical 1,5 MLOC project my clean build times are sitting around 40 seconds.
I think that's pretty good, but I don't think I have a way to improve it much. Without writing a compiler from scratch I think 10 seconds are out of reach for me...
I don't know about China, but the whole science around COVID seems to have a really strong cultural component that before was totally unfamiliar to me.
When looking at some German Epidemiologist blog I found something like: "Next thing on the list is to proof that government measures worked"
I would have expected something like: "I'm looking at data - and want to find out what helps"
I once took one of these online-tests for spotting deep fakes.
By marking anything that has reflections in the eyes as fake I got only 1 answer wrong (the real guy there looked really strange).
And still nobody bothered to check what kind of trend-changes are visible in the epidemiological curves around the time of masking.
People never look at "date of death" or "infection date" all they care about is "reporting date" - and every newspaper out there will show you the effects of government measures on "reporting".
I don't really know what those people in physics do, but as a mathematician my definition of a time-crystal would be a 4-dimensional discrete structure. You have some 4-dimensional symmetries.
Just rotating in 3D is a bit boring. Interesting symmetries would be where you get the time-axis involved.
4D is most likely a bit boring - having more dimensions and more time-dimensions helps greatly to get more symmetries to work with...
I'm not very optimistic about avoiding a "Dark Age".
Rational thinking and the idea to look at data seems to be completely foreign to most people I know. Higher educated people seem to absorb and repeat dogmas and propaganda unfiltered even faster.
Some patterns I have come across:
Alpha-Rational:
Claiming that ideas that come from authority (dogma) or self (narcissism) are rational - rejecting to look at any data.
Anti-Rational: Reject the idea to look at data "life is uncertain", "data is garbage", "it's immoral to look at data" - although there is a lot of good data and drawing conclusions is not even difficult.
Malicious rational: Know your science and cherry-pick data for profit to support the highest bidder.
A few patterns about rationality I have seen a lot recently:
False rationality - People claim to be rational while touting some dogma they learned somewhere. Not even looking at any data. And when given data or counter-examples they just ignore it.
Anti-Rational - People claim that life is uncertain and data is garbage - while in fact there is a lot of good data available - and drawing conclusions is not even difficult.
I don't think the problem is with rationality. It feels more like rationality is going down because psychological pathologies (narcissm, cargo-cults, dogmas) are taking over.