if you have some purported improvement to a codebase that would make it inconsistent, then it's a matter of taste, not fact, whether it is actually an improvement.
You seem to have misunderstood the point being made in the section you quoted. The items are not on the list because it is a list of benefits that accrue to the company from work being legible. "Making money" is not a direct outcome of legibility, although it is a second or third-order effect.
What I am saying is that “making money” is one factor most of legibility processes directly revolve around in any modern company. Not a second-order side effect, as original article implies.
> Imagine if you brain had to be consciously aware of every breath you take, every time you move a finger, etc... you'd get nothing done. Same deal if a CEO has to be aware of and approve accelerating your unit tests with parallelism or whatever.
This is a strawman. No competent CEO thinks they need to be on top of your unit testing practices. The levels of legibility that companies actually aim for are much more defensible.
> The levels of legibility that companies actually aim for are much more defensible
Many companies run in such a way that there is no bucket for "engineers get to do stuff they know is important x% of the time." So what happens is that things that executives don't understand the significance of all get 0 time allocation. Other teams may be told they aren't allowed to work on something owned by the CI team (again often for legibility reasons).
This is how I work at a "startup" that has just a single test environment that everyone has to share after 10 years of existence.
I worked at a small startup-ish company like this: No bug tracking, no source control, no dedicated build machines (builds were published off of a random engineer's laptop, based on whatever code he had on it currently), no tests, no documentation. None of these were seen as important by the CEO (he was not a software guy). He just wanted engineers cramming features all day. When you started talking to him about development process, toolchains, infrastructure, best practices, his eyes would glaze over and ask how this helps him deal with his 5 screaming customers right now.
The CEO definitely felt he needed to be involved with these practices, to forbid them.
The most legible metric in the vicinity of responsible, high-quality software engineering practice is unit test coverage. It's practically guaranteed that VPs of Engineering are reporting on test coverage to the CTO, and not implausible that he's reporting on that in aggregate to the CEO.
It is not. I once had the misfortune of glancing at the metrics that went into an "executive dashboard" for the CEO/CTO at a startup, and started paying close attention to what they talked about during the weekly all-hands. Other more recent, and widely experienced examples of micro-management by CEOs are forced RTOs and diktats forcing employees to "leverage AI" in some form or fashion, with little care about how this impacts individual teams.
> No competent CEO thinks they need to be on top of your unit testing practices.
You seem to be acknowledging that such CEOs exist, but you built an escape hatch by labeling them as not competent. Your second sentence appears to follow the first, but it doesn't, and is a an unfalsifiable tautology.
Such optimizations may be forbidden by the fact that floating point addition is not associative unless you tell the compiler not to worry about that (I believe)
I doubt they have achieved any fusion reactions. They don't state any numbers on density or temperature so it's impossible to know. But in general plasma is never "caused by" fusion. Creating a plasma is quite easy compared to getting it hot and dense enough to fuse.
Which do you suppose comes first in a gravitational confinement scenario, plasma or fusion? It sorta seems like a chicken/egg scenario. I mean you gotta get those electrons out of the way, but where does he heat come from to do that, if not fusion?
Definitely plasma. Look at star formation in nebulae. Most of the hydrogen in them are in glow mode plasma. It takes a very small amount of energy to ionize plasma and a a huge amount to fuse it. So when stars are forming they might start as cold hydrogen, but they get progressively warmer and more dense until they ionize, then get even warmer and more dense, until they're burning.
They likely can have some fusion reactions (if they use fusible fuel, like D-D). Fusion is not that hard to achieve, you can do that on a table-top scale (Farnsworth Fusion).
I think the burden of explanation is on the great great grandparent post which proposed an accelerometer "entirely made out of the same magnetic field" which would let it satisfy an equivalence principle for "magnetic force".
It means nothing for ITER unfortunately. Changing the toroidal field strength implies a totally different plasma size, density, temperature, everything. ITER isn't designed for this strong of fields and the plasma they would confine.
The author of the article is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars Trilogy and novel 2312 include all of the possible in-solar system alternatives you mention and more.
And? Because he wrote several science fiction books on the colonization of the solar system, his word is law on what we can and can't achieve in space?
To be fair, you'd have to make an argument. Like KSR does, with facts and such. Simple Pollyanna optimism isn't an argument.
I hope its such as the optimists predict - a great bright future for us all. Still it's worrisome that each time somebody researches it, they get depressed and won't talk about it any more. Or writes a depressing book.
