Ancient Rome had libraries already, I'm pretty sure their "ethos" wasn't about inclusivity and safe spaces. Somewhere along the line from then to now, it got subverted.

Ancient Rome also had slavery.

Pirating is basically unlicensed use.

> The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.

Is there any evidence of this claim being true?

Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.

Toyota is (was?), all by their lonesome selves, almost 100% bet-the-farm on hydrogen vehicles instead of electric.

Is that supposed to be an example of a good decision? Outside the US hybrids are quickly becoming irrelevant. The decision is looking like it will cost Toyota the crown

Worldwide outside the US BEVs are about 16% of new car sales (BEVs + PHEVs are about 25%). Hybrids are still going to be relevant worldwide for quite a while.

The peak of ICE car sales (which includes hybrids) was in 2017 and it’s been downhill since then, and it’s going to plummet from here as EV share keeps growing rapidly. Bev share is growing significantly faster than hybrid. I personally wouldn’t be betting my company on a rapidly shrinking market

Toyota made un-Toyota like mistakes on the new v6 twin turbo. They are not immune anymore.

Uhm, seems to me the companies that are spearheading the rollout of electric vehicles will be still existing in the future.

BYD will dominate, not GM.

> Military technology will produce innovation in wartime but in peacetime it is a backwater.

The Internet and GPS were directly invented as a military technology with civilian usage allowed only much later. Integrated circuits's invention and development was largely done on military's dime as well.

Machiabelli was a big Florence patriot and was writing his advice specifically to help a prince better govern Florence and hence increase the chance that Florence will not be annihilated in the constant wars that raged on the Italian Peninsula at the time.

Maybe they must be so loud because people wear hearing protection?

Lack of support for type-safe containers (need to be hack toghether via macros) and overreliance on macros in general (which are not IDE and debugger friendly) are two aspects of C that are off-putting for majority of people in 2026. That's even assuming you're willing to forego pointer/memory safety.

> Lack of support for type-safe containers (need to be hack toghether via macros)

Are templates really so much better than macros that the latter deserve to be called a "hack"? The following two examples are both type-safe and have roughly the same semantics and #LoC:

Macros:

  // pair.h
  struct id(pair) { T a, b; };
  static inline struct id(pair) id(make_pair)(T a, T b){
    return (struct id(pair)){ .a = a, .b = b };
  }
  #undef id
  #undef T

  // main.c
  #include <stdio.h>
  #define T int
  #define id(n) n ## _int
  #include "pair.h"
  int main(void){
    struct pair_int p = make_pair_int(12, 13);
    printf("%d %d\n", p.a, p.b);
  }

Templates:

  //pair.h
  template<typename T>
  struct pair { T a, b; };
  template<typename T>
  pair<T> make_pair(T a, T b){
    return (pair<T>){ .a = a, .b = b };
  }

  //main.cpp
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include "pair.h"
  int main(void){
    pair<int> p = make_pair(12, 13);
    printf("%d %d\n", p.a, p.b);
  }

Indeed, picking C doesn't make sense when you actually want to write C++ code in C ;)

What's the shakedown?

Pay for my stadium or I move the team.