I would argue that the ending of the book is optimistic despite the event that precedes it. An imperfect father wants the best for his child, and does the best he can with the hand he's dealt. In a dying world of cannibals and worse, there are people who are good, and whose surroundings don't poison their view on what it means to be good. "Do you carry the fire?" is, to my mind, an incredibly optimistic sentiment.
The ending is definitely the most optimistic part of the book, but on balance I think the overall picture is still excruciatingly bleak. It gives me the impression that any optimism of the part of the characters is likely unwarranted. They're still doomed.
The point is that everyone is doomed (even if you imagine we can survive the civilization-murdering tools we've cobbled up, we can't outrun physics), but that even at our most vulnerable, since the book occurs during a period directly after Armageddon, it is possible for some goodness in us to persist.
I don't want to spoil, but the optimism isn't for the characters, it's for we the reader, and the species.
The thimble of fire joins the wider flame. Goodness survives even there, and even then.
I’ve had a lot of experience in developing on QNX over the years, and with each successive year, the call to migrate to Linux got stronger. The day to day developer experience is great, you can very easily setup a CMake toolchain and bypass the need for QNX’s Momentics, which if you’re just developing for QNX is something you will want to do. But, in my experience the driver support simply isn’t there, and that became painful. A fair few major board manufacturers treat QNX integration as a complete afterthought, and at a point you start to feel that this is directly related to RIM’s decision to shutdown source access to QNX. I’ve since left that company, but I imagine there is still a call to use Linux.
I work with embedded DSPs, and there are certainly points where the maths gets incredibly dense and hard to intuitively parse. Your last point has proven true for me many times. Luckily, with the exception one block of code, the maths is detailed plainly above the implementation. So, while there might be an occasion where I might not fully understand what's going on, I can see where the original author of the code was coming from, and can follow the following code accordingly. Indeed, I believe one of the comment blocks does start with "Here be dragons".
There's a strong argument for the fact that Japan was effectively on its last legs by the time the bombs dropped. Indeed, the fire bombings that preceded dealt far more damage to Japan than both bombs, in real terms. Nuclear intervention wasn't a requirement for ending the war, the war was effectively over, and a sustained bombing campaign could have seen the end without the atomic bomb.
Now, the argument I find the most interesting in the case for using the bomb is public, and national and international political opinion. It is arguable that Truman saw very little options other than use the bomb at the time. They had spent millions on the project, politicians knew that something was being developed, and the Cold War was already on the horizon. Further if not used, and the existence of the bomb post war would come to light for the public, there might well be questions as to why it wasn't dropped, and, exactly the line you used, if it could have ended the war early.
Ultimately, I think a combination of international clout spun into national pride in total victory sealed the decision (although this conclusion was probably made by FDR before him as well). I will say, that the post-Hiroshima speech by Truman is also one of the most powerful speeches by a US president ever made.
> It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.
This is a material argument that is totally undercut by the fact that the bomb gave japan an excuse to surrender that they needed and otherwise would not have had. The bomb was directly referenced in Hirohito's surrender speech:
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
Correct. The incentives for individuals rarely align with the incentives of polities (and it can be argued those entities only exist in history books).
The bombs and their awesome power served to align the incentives of individuals in decision making positions with the incentives ascribed to the polity named Japan to issue surrender.
> Indeed, the fire bombings that preceded dealt far more damage to Japan than both bombs, in real terms.
That is a better anti-fire-bomb argument than an anti-nuclear one. But I suspect the feeling in Japanese command would have been something like "agh, we're becoming a weapons testing range and we don't like that" and that surely contributed to a quick surrnder.
American Prometheus revealed the most compelling reason for using both bombs I’ve seen to date:
Truman had extracted a promise from Stalin that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan by August 15—an event that he and many of his military planners thought would be decisive. “He’ll [Stalin] be in the Jap war on August 15,” Truman wrote in his diary on July 17. “Fini Japs when that comes about.”
Even more than avoiding a bloody island-hopping invasion of Japan, Truman wanted to avoid having to divide East Asia with the USSR as they had done Europe. The Soviets declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria on August 7, one day after Hiroshima and two days before Nagasaki. By August 15, the Japanese had surrendered, largely limiting the Soviet sphere of influence to mainland Asia.
The German had just shown that they would fight to the last minute, enrolling cripples, children and old men in the Volkssturm. It was perfectly rational and reasonable for the US leadership to believe the Japanese were going to be just as stubborn and fanatical. In fact it would have been simply naive for them to believe otherwise.
Bitter was the one thing in the UK that I wish I could get here (Australia). You can get London Pride in Melbourne, but they keep it refrigerated like a standard lager, so the flavour is off. There really is nothing quite like it.
That's the point. It finishes the last bit of fermentation in the cask in the pub, so what you get served is at absolute top condition. At least initially. That, with the low CO2 and the relative warmth, makes for an experience that's completely superior to cold, carbonated beer. But you have to get used to it.
I was once asked how I got to where I am, where others in my situation might not have, my response was: “Parents that gave a damn”. It wasn’t about pressuring me, it was about recognising my interest in computers, and fostering that interest as much as was financially possible given our circumstances (which were often dire). My parents aren’t technical, but they did what they could, and I wouldn’t be the engineer I am without that.
I grew up with a foster mother that actively "suppressed" what I did on the computer, banning me for a month if I didn't get changed immediately after school.
Now I've become a senior engineer, but I'm kinda shotty at it, chaotic good in solving problems, but issues with authority and process.
Who knows, maybe I would've became a "run of the mill" engineer if she helped.
I check in on this project every year or so, and I'm happy to see that their support for AS3 is creeping towards completion. I, like many, wasted so many hours in flash games while in school that it was sad to see an element of gaming history fall by the wayside. At least Ruffle can pick up some of the pieces. It does remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG on iOS. I have an old iPod that I bought in 2010 almost exclusively to play it, but that battery won't last forever. But for now, I think I'll go and play some Adrenaline Challenge.
About 18 months ago I recall hearing Ruffle had virtually no AS3 support, and that was a show stopper for me. I wasn't expecting them to get much done on this front for years. So in that time I simply installed the last version of Flash without the time bomb. Thankfully I am wrong :)
Just to clarify: we already had a ton of work towards AS3 done before that, there was just nothing to show for it until we added some final missing pieces. It’s not like we did everything from scratch in 18 months.
Rust's type system encodes more information than most languages, and so you can offload more work to it. That becomes more and more valuable as the project grows.
Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than the average language certainly.
> Rust's type system encodes more information than most languages, and so you can offload more work to it.
I suspect at least one of the developers would argue with you as I have listened to his rants. :)
Rust is a remarkably poor match to implementing Flash because Flash has lots of object orientation with child and parent pointers--which Rust really hates.
> Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than the average language certainly.
More specifically (assuming we’re talking about the same thing), the issue is with reproducing a standard C++ inheritance hierarchy (used for both the AS2/3 native objects and for the „DOM” tree nodes), while keeping its overhead characteristics, devirtualisation opportunities, having it interact with our GC and borrow checker and still have a convenient, safe Rust API on top. Our current solution works, but has deficiencies in most of these aspects.
I suspect that it's two things: (1) the relatively good support for Wasm in Rust; (2) the Cargo ecosystem. In the case of Ruffle, the combination of the two seems particularly effective.
Couldn’t you just have a global object table and make your pointers indexes into this, using Rc::Refcells throughout? Rust is still fast with runtime GC.
> Rust also attracts good developers in general, moreso than the average language certainly.
Could you elaborate more on this? I don't think programmers that primarily use a particular language would be anymore skilled than programmers that rely on another language.
I am not going to make the claim that Rust devs are better, but when most people on this website make these sorts of claims, they are often referring to http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Having watched the announcement the (literally) singular question that was presented was essentially "Why should the man on the street care about AGI now?", to which the answer was "They shouldn't". But key to that answer was Carmack's assertion that Keen will probably never release a "product" like ChatGPT that aims to specifically wow people, that's not Keen's goal.
I've been looking for a decent replacement for milk for a long time, I've tried them all. Oat Milk is what I've finally settled on. Specifically the brand Oatly (which I believe is broadly available) for me has solved the overly oaty taste with their Barista Edition milk. I will say that it is still notably worse than cows milk, but to a degree I can personally live with. But I'd recommend maybe ordering an oat milk latte one day when you're feeling particularly adventurous and just seeing if the downgrade in taste is tenable for you.
Cheese is a whole other kettle of fish, they're all awful.
Boursin's dairy-free cheese spread is a great alternative to cream cheese IMO (although you're kind of stuck with garlic & herbs flavor). Haven't quite found good alternatives to melty cheeses like cheddar though.
