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Related (another TEDx talk by the same person): Why renewables can’t save the planet

Main points:

  • Nature sets a limit on how much you can do with wind turbines and solar panels (not to mention hydroelectric plants), as you do not have infinite land to build on.
  • The risks stemming from the possibility of nuclear power disasters are generally overstated. Far fewer people (and I mean several orders of magnitude fewer) have died from nuclear catastrophes than from air pollution; and even wind-energy-related accidents have killed more people per unit of energy up to this point.
  • While nuclear plants aren’t completely safe, renewable energy sources aren’t necessarily so either – starting from the hazards posed by wind turbines and continuing to the batteries needed to store highly fluctuating renewable energy.
  • The more land you need, the more of a problem it is for the environment. Wind turbines in particular are killing hundreds of thousands of birds and millions of bats every year. Solar plants need so much space that wildlife has to be cleared out, killing desert tortoises and other native creatures.
  • Similarly, while the waste from nuclear plants is really bad, the waste from used solar panels is pretty bad, too (lead and other heavy metals come to mind) and takes up more volume to boot.

Apparently, linear types are landing in GHC 9. I’m sure they’re useful for resource management. I wonder what else they might do that makes a difference in practice.

Takeaways:

  • Use collection types judiciously. They have overhead.
  • Look out for empty collections. They are pure overhead. Sometimes, null can be a good alternative.
  • Collection types have default sizes that are all over the place. Sometimes it can be worth specifying the capacity at instance creation time.
  • Objects come with overhead. Use primitives where you can.

I’m suddenly experiencing a craving for inline types and generics specialization

A Rust crate that helps you implement the output part of a vt100-compatible terminal emulator.

The specification of the .editorconfig file, which you can put into your source code repository to configure a wide range of text editors and IDEs with consistent style settings.

A probe.rs-based Cargo runner that lets you run embedded Rust programs just like native ones. Logs to stdout as normal and prints stack traces on error as normal.

A kit with all the basics you need to do embedded programming in Rust: a debugging bridge, a way to flash and run binaries, and text editor integration.

Strives to support many different embedded targets (currently RISC-V, STM32, and other ARM targets) and debug probes (currently CMSIS-DAP, ST-Link, and J-Link).

An efficient Rust logging library for embedded devices. Logs in binary, formats on the host.

A java.time extension library. Things like Julian and Coptic calendars, quarters, and time intervals.

Computers today react less promptly to input than did computers from the 70s and 80s. After a period of really bad latency, we are getting close again, though.

The Asian giant hornet (‘murder hornet’), dangerous to both people and other insects, has arrived in the United States.

The hornet is known to kill whole beehives without resistance, chopping off bees’ heads and taking their thoraxes to feed their own young. While Japanese bees appear to have evolved a defense against them where they swarm each individual hornet and cook it alive by flexing their muscles to generate heat, American and European bees are defenseless, putting them in danger of extinction.

A programming language for the Cloud, they say. I have no idea what it means.

A small, but effective JIT compiler in C. Very new and not production-ready yet.

Organizations with loose or nonexistent formal structures tend to favor the strong and oppress the weak, who generally benefit from formal structure and bureaucracy. Informal structures and cliques are less transparent and harder to control than formal hierarchies.

A very small compiler back end in portable C. Only targets unixoid AMD64 ABIs at this time.

Verschwörungstheorien leben davon, daß die Menschen ein bißchen Arbeit in ihre Recherche stecken müssen (kognitive Dissonanz bzw. genauer der Aufnahmeritualeffekt). Das war schon bei den Protokollen der Weisen von Zion so und ist auch heute in der Google- und YouTube-Welt so.

Type systems are undecidable more often than not — even in relatively simple cases like Java. A collection of papers.

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