Few people want war but ignoring reality by pretending there is no International threat is wilful ignorance deserving of punishment. These are our lives and the lives of our allies around the world that depend heavily upon advanced military technologies.
The only thing holding back Russia and China is U.S. military power and this is waning -- and this isn't working so well, as of late.. Russia now holds tanks with longer shooting and driving range, more speed, and greatly superior armor.. Russia holds exceptional surface to air defense capabilities. China seems to think it holds military comparability and is pushing the limits with its claim on control of the entire South China sea and the 1/3rd of the worlds commerce that flows through it..
North Korea continues and has recently expanding its production of nuclear ICBMs, under the cover of peace talks..
War -- even world war -- is closer than it has ever been since the end of the last one. The era of peace we've enjoyed for so long is likely to soon end. Keeping it depends on advancing capabilities rapidly... Not doing so is murder far greater than anything you've mentioned.
So many U.S. military systems make use of space-based resources that their destruction would have an immediate and profound effect on our ability to defend our own country or win in war elsewhere.
Furthermore, we are on the verge of launching a number of missions to the Moon, Mars, and Deep Space by a number of different commercial agencies. We need infrastructure up there and defensive capabilities. ESA is working on a permanent Moon base, ULA is working on a permanently manned space station for zero-G manufacturing and refueling. China is eyeing the very limited spaces with water-ice on the Moon and the harvesting of the Moon's helium-3 for nuclear reactors (Earth's uranium supplies are running low). And of course, there is Blue Origin and SpaceX and others pushing hard toward the Moon, Mars, and deep space in general.
However, I suggest this be done a little differently.
(1) The Air Force's Space Command should be made into a separate branch of the Air Force with its own independent budget. It's primary missions should be data collection and orbital asset protection. These assets are a cornerstone of U.S. survivability, in terms of communications, navigation, and threat identification. The Air Force's Space Command already performs this mission and the Air Force is best equipped to respond to identified threats in this area.
(2) The Department of Homeland Security should be given the additional mission of missile and infiltration defense. It needs its own independent budget and focus on the now vastly growing threat of medium range and cruise missiles with tactical nuclear warheads. This is a huge vulnerability that Russia is working very aggressively to exploit. The gap simply must be filled -- quickly. We need short/medium range missile defenses all around the country -- manned 24x7. They also need for develop capabilities to knock out hypersonic weapons. Russia has hypersonic weapons (early versions) and their bombers are capable of dropping dozens of tactical nuclear cruise missiles, at a time. These could be quite crippling in a surprise attack on U.S. based military command and control plus other pivotal resources.
(3) The Navy should be given the additional mission of deep space rescue and exploration. However, it does not yet need a new sub-agency with its own budget as we are only beginning commercial deep space ventures, today. Do we really want Moon colonies, Mars colonies, and deep space asteroid mining assets left defenseless with no ability to response to attack? Those space resources are likely to become essential economic resources in the decades to come. The Navy is by far the best for this mission as their core competency is in far away, self-reliant, missions amid small spaces and limited resources. Submarines are not unlike deep space vessels. The Navy knows how to keep up morale and professionalism, in addition to survival and mission preparedness.
On a side note, I also think the Navy and particularly U.S. Army aviation should seriously reconsider dirigible airships (Zeppelins). Not only has material sciences improved by leaps and bounds to make these ships safer, faster, and more survivable but recent advances in active armor and close range laser defenses should make them almost invulnerable to attack. The blimp that flew over Baghdad for years in Iraq was never shot down, even without active armor. Army Airships could absolutely take command as they sweep over enemy held territory or insurgents in the rear... with high tech sensors, armed drone dropships, and special operation commando forces.
Python has great appeal to academics but it's a very poor choice for any hardcore engineering. It's just inherently slow and, although very readable in small snippets and as glue-code, it's not the best for more complex solutions.
I am not advocating for a whole new language but really think the best bang for the buck would be in simply to better develop the various ML related tools for JavaScript. JavaScript is today clearly what C was back in the 1980's, as Python is what Pascal was. Or like Verilog (industry) verses VHDL (academia). JavaScript (such as V8-based Node.js) compiles to very fast and memory efficient code. Conventional Object-Orientation is inherently slow and memory consuming as it requires an instance factory added to every program and massive memory allocations for each instantiation (using more memory and lots of CPU usage for the OS kernel's memory defragmentation).. JavaScript corrects these errors with its model for Object-Orientation and now also provides a syntax largely identical to that of conventional Object-orientation.
We need to clean up Tensorflow.js and build out data science tools for JavaScript, such as paging data editor to work on ultra-large files piece by piece without having to load them completely into memory.
JavaScript is very well suited for Machine Learning. And it may not hide the underlying machine as do languages like Pascal, Java, and Python (they academics seem to prefer) but there is so much benefit in being true to computation, as it really is.. That is a long discussion on its own.
I do, however, strongly advocate one very important enhancement to JavaScript to greatly simplify asynchrony and to make possible a method of "bug free" programming. Enable the setting of hooks on variable values such that, when modified, will execution a logical condition expression and, if true, execute a code block with a given variable scope... One little bit hook will not slow down execution. For example:// Establishes that, any time x, y, or z values are changed, the expression is evaluation and,// if true, the provided function is executed and the data object "scope" is passed to it. var scope = {... }; var condition = when( x { doSomething() } ); condition = undefined;// kills the "when" hook
This could GREATLY reduce the complexity of things like business logic based on multiple async data queries. It could also make possible, "bug free" programming when using purely for stateful programming between "when" conditions. That is, only syntax errors, system errors, and errors in requirements could go wrong, if all your programming is conditions on states changing states. Overall, software would be vastly more robust than the tendencies today.
Sure, let the national space agencies build settlements on the Moon. There is no commercial viability in those places. Commercial organizations will go where the money is -- deep space asteroids and Mars.
The Moon will be very costly to maintain humans on. The "plentiful" water on the Moon is in very relative terms. It's likely to take days of work for a glass full enough to drink. And the extremely abrasive regolith and pitch-black-only shadows plus zero protection for radiation is all going to add risks and work.
Still, I do think some inflatable habitats on the Moon, once buried in regolith will have their uses, in terms of science and long term commercial uses.
On Mars, north and south of the equator hold hundreds of large, fresh water glaciers more than 2 km deep. The soil elsewhere holds about two liters of water per square meter of regolith. And the regolith is very soft and less abrasive than soil on Earth. Metals in Martian rock are all the same as Earth except about twice as much, in proportion. Martian Basal is near ore-grade for iron. Waving a magnet over the surface is all you need to do to collect very rich iron ore. And the atmosphere and gravity make it easy to launch this stuff into orbit on single-stage rockets.
Although the Moon is closer and therefore easier to send help from Earth, it's also far more likely that help will be needed. It won't take much to become self-sufficient on Mars.
However -- I would prioritize exploration of lunar lava tubes. It's reasonable to think that larger concentrations of water ice might exist in them. If that's the case then settlements in lava tubes on the Moon could be very profitable.
I think perhaps we need to work on these... In my opinion, everybody needs to keep a sense of humor. And it's best to have a few people who can play some kind of musical instrument, like a violin.
Personally, I'd like a large pipe organ in my spaceship.
Also, the U.S. Army's (that also using singing heavily (Cadences) research shows that food has the greatest impact of all--quality and quantity. Actually NASA's research show that its the place of eating that people find their sanity and most happiness.
First and foremost, these platforms allow too many things to happen too easily by accident. Second, they make it too easy for apps to post ads, most annoyingly each time I pull it up. And it's very difficult to find which app did it and remove it.
Next, they just poorly designed for phone use. There are WAY too many steps to make stinking phone call or to start navigation with a map. It's likely caused accidents all the time on the roads.
Next, Java was a terrible choice for Android. No matter what Java-lovers tell you, it is inherently slower by design because it enforces a high granularity of object-orientation. Classical object-orientation consumes a lot of extra memory and CPU-time, in addition to adding a lot of code to one's software. Why? Because it requires a good deal of code to provide that functionality -- code you don't write but is added for you, and because it has to allocate new memory for every instantiation (each property and method), and because these each of these CPU-intensive task an operating system has to perform -- defragmenting memory. Also, the automatic garbage collection makes for sudden uncontrollable pauses at random times.
iOS's Objective-C is much better in those terms. OO can be accomplished in a smarter way, such as how JavaScript does it. However, iOS is extremely proprietary. Apple has not been an advocate of freedom.
If he is criticizing Mozilla then that is back on him. It's standards compliance that is important -- no necessarily working from a common code base. Having alternatives will keep that alive and could spur innovation. For HTML rendering, I still prefer KHTML. It is lighter, simpler, standards compliant. On the other hand, Chromium's rendered is actually a descendant of khtml...
However, if he is talking about the wisdom of such a move for Mozilla then I could almost agree. Firefox is built on XUL, which was an innovative idea and is still unique. Entire applications may be built on XUL. I personally hate XML but otherwise the idea of this has enormous untapped potential that Chromium lacks. I don't know if this will ever be tapped, though. It seems unlikely.
If I were Mozilla, I might build a successor to XUL based on JavaScript data structures (perhaps calling it JUL). And in this yes, I would probably move to the Chromium HTML renderer. JUL code be a node.js npm package -- although I can understand the argument they'd probably make for going with SpiderMonkey, instead.
JUL could be declarative, like XUL. However, why not simultaneous simplify the difficulties of asynchronous programming in Node.js with JUL? You could do away with software bugs entirely in JUL, using a system of stateful logic. How does that work? In short, you register conditions. If after each asynchronous call, any variables are modified that are used in a condition's logical test expression then test the condition and if true, execute its registered state changes.
So the only bugs possible are in your software requirements. There could be no bugs in your programming itself. There could be syntax errors and system errors outside the scope of your program. Furthermore, such a system would typically work properly under various conditions you did not even anticipate.
You'd specify what your interface looks like. You'd specify what pattern of states cause specific state changes. And you could use JSON or JavaScript object notation to define this.
The window of opportunity for us software engineers to solve the global problem of misinformation is rapidly closing -- and the problem is about to intensify with deep fakes. Particularly Russia but also various other states are pushing misinformation very hard but so are various political and commercial interests around the world.
As Net Neutrality is lost and not only misinformation flourishes but conspiracies about media organizations like Youtube degrading the searches on conspiracy theories are also likely to flourish. The world is aiming strongly toward an era of ruthless darkness.
The suggestions to solve this problem so far, have been petty.
I have developed the plan for a comprehensive solution. I am calling it Solinova (latin for -- new sun). It's a mesh network that hides personal identities while retaining consistency of identity and earning reputation for interactions with others. Research into microloans demonstrated that giving loans on the basis of research into the personal reputation of individuals among those they know, was very successful. I believe the same can be applied for more than just monetary credibility.
Solinova includes a currency called "promise" that is more secure than blockchains and much faster. It also integrates inherent insurance for everything and greatly reduced risk of transactions. I will publish this soon. I am working through simulations to verify the validity and comprehensiveness of the philosophy.
From all my experience as a software developer since 1984 to the present day at many different companies, I will argue strongly that the combination of less experienced developers and healthy team dynamics make for the highest quality and more successful software with users. They design software that is easier to read and more intuitive for users, even if not super fancy and stylish. This is important because the real key to commercial success in software is:
** it must be very practical and useful **
-- practical means quick and easy to learn and use.
-- useful means readily applicable to some clear and obvious use by users
Why? Experienced software developers have the following bad tendencies:
1. They are assholes. They hold strong opinions on technological choices, methods, and philosophies.
2. They loose user perspective. What they see as simple and intuitive is often not so much so for users. Furthermore, they will often put technical perfection over usability or the interests of stake holders.
3. They don't really learn. Once a person feels they know, they become incredulous to teach. They become more likely to criticize new tools than learn them and use them, or methods, or philosophies.
That said, every generation of new tools seems to lack any notion of most of the lessons learned in the past. Why Slack, for example? It does nothing more than has IRC, which has been around for decades. The reason is simple: the new generation of developers don't know what IRC is. It remains vibrant with experts of all kinds active on it but this latest generation just doesn't know it exists.
New software development stacks like node + express + react + redux lack most of the focuses of importance in the past like, maintainability and performance in huge ways. However, the new generation of developers see it as doing the opposite. They argue how react's virtual DOM is faster to work with than the real DOM, and therefore react is faster. In truth, it depends on how to use the real DOM and many people had been using it very poorly. Another truth is that react's server-side rendering makes it even slower, regardless. And one more thing on this -- diffing between a virtual DOM before and after modifications is also not a very efficient way to do this.
Calculators also calculate far faster and more accurately than do humans. Still, it's a machine -- not a mind.
The difference between a machine and a mind is that a machine is driven by a set of mechanical/logical rules strictly, without exception. In contrast, a mind is driven by free will judgements. Free will is the ability to derive options, weigh them between each other, and select the option with the highest sum of desirability and likelihood.
Both can be programmed (after all, our minds are the result of biological machines). However, anything that follows any set of rules will always, in the natural world, come to usurp the intent of those rules. But a mind creates its own intents -- accomplishment of what is desirable in the options it chooses, such as fulfillment of hunger, pleasure, avoidance of pain, etc. A safe mind (what I would call a "person") would have its highest values: mutual freedom and well-being of persons.
Logic is illogical in its own terms, as proven by Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. In fact, logic is not fundamental in the universe. Looking through microscopes or telescopes, the smallest and largest things are arranged in oscillation patterns -- like linear math, not logic. Logical conditions seems to exist only in relative perspectives, which explains why it is always inherently incomplete. For example, whether the Moon is moving toward us or away from us, one direction or the other. Truths are always relative to the observer.
Our loss of privacy was handed away gleefully, as if we were kids given candy.
Since early on, I advocated that whatever the level of transparency, it should be mutual. If government can read my conversations then I should be able to read theirs, as it pertains to mine. The same for commercial organizations. Of course, some level should be set. I mean regardless, I don't want them watching me poop. But then again, if it's my doctor and I can see that my doctor is doing this to monitor my health then I could be leanient even on that. So it's not a trade between privacy and security -- it's a balance of mutual privacy that we need.
On the other hand, I think the issues of fake information, information overload, and relationship destroying social media comments are all bigger issues.
Just the mixing of included with Prime and "buy now" on Amazon is highly detracting to me on Prime. I left cable to escape the constant barrage of brain damaging commercials. Netflix is the only refuge. Even DVD's sometimes have commercials.
Netflix's big price hikes are also a bad way to go. They could, instead, add a broader mix of titles for higher prices. That would earn them more money without pissing off their existing customers. It's really sad if they are thinking that the lack of commercial free alternatives enables them to make sudden big price hikes. It's utterly absurd to think they are going to add commercials and stay in business.
The ultimate and best solution by far would be a free and open mesh network for streamed moves, not controlled by any one company. That is, studios could market their movies and series over this mesh network directly to customers. Customer could pay for each, individually, or build a rationing plan. Movie rationing would work like this:
1. Decide how much you want to pay, per week (unlike months, a week is always exactly 7 days). 2. Select filtering criteria (e.g. percentage for each genre, minimum ratings, etc). 3. As each payment is received, a new selection is made (as far as the rental prices fall within your monthly payment), excluding those you've already watched (unless you mark to specifically keep).
You'd have a true free market in movies with earnings going directly to the studios that produce or own them -- no overhead loss, either increasing their ability to produce and/or reduces your prices to watch them. Also, free movies could be unlimited.
Customers have far more power and choice... freedom. Everybody wins except for middlemen.
Open Source systems, such as the Desktop systems Gnome and KDE have consistently illustrated that governance beyond minimum essential for interoperability has never worked as well. With no road map, people met in common standards by natural consensus. In KDE, all decisions required 100% consensus which of course, was followed. With Gnome, leadership tried to establish standards and road maps that were seldom followed.
Also take for example Gentoo before and after it's founder. When he left to work at Microsoft, he established a hierarchical leadership structure that utterly collapsed the project. Gentoo had been a system that worked with minimal requirements of the one trying to install or maintain it. Then, it required increasingly more work month after month until more and more was breaking and many people left.
Non-governance -- software development by consensus has always worked far better than governed processes, in my experience, even in commercial software. The flat organizational structure did exactly the same thing -- caused peers to come together with common solutions by consensus. Leadership is seldom met with full support, be it leadership from individuals or from committees.
I think people like to cooperate but they do not like being told what someone else thinks is how they should do things.
In particular, if it's an air taxi service, those issues are addressable. The issues really are:
* Noisy * Propellers will blow small rocks and sticks and such around. * People peering into private backyards is unkind.
The air taxi solution is:
* To reduce noise and wind issues: longer but slower propellers and drop carriage by cables from the ends of long propeller arms.
Note: this also solves the problem of requiring landing zones. And longer arms give exact precision. * To solve the privacy issue: put broad ledges just outside under the windows so occupants cannot see nearby neighboring places.
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To solve these problems for personal flying cars will require infrastructure under the Department of Transportation. Neighborhoods and/or places along highways could half lifting and landing zones created. So you'd drive to one, fly up, and then follow air avenues.
The air avenues would be routes through which you are allowed to fly (all under 700 feet -- to avoid conventional aircraft). I would suggest keeping them high, such as about 600 feet. With electric multicopters, you have sub-millimeter precision.
1. The speed limits of microprocessors are relevant because microprocessors process serial threads of instructions. Parallelizing multiplies effective performance. This is why GPU's are used so much more today, even in addition to multi-core processors. 2. Neuromorphic chips provide many magnitudes better performance than CPU's and GPU's. They do solidify the activation functions possible -- as those cannot be modified or added to once burned into a chip. This is a downside but the tensor-based model for neural simulations has its own limitations on what kinds of processing can be done even in GPU's. 3. Usually where fluid dynamic processing is required in a specific way (as with neural nets), there are tricks specific to the type of processing that can greatly enhance performance even when serially processed. This was the case particularly in astrophysics, such as with galaxy collision simulations and simulations of the early expansion of the universe. Using GPU's is really a lazy way out, in cognitive terms.
In fact I have a method that I call "Maxerial" (for maximum serial) processing method that show excellent performance even on a Raspberry pi with no GPU at all.
And furthermore, I suspect one day we may have analog computers and/or quantum computers that provide extraordinary performance and capacity.
I use WSL with so-called Debian every day. It's useful for programming but very limited and not production quality. Microsoft explicitly states that WSL is not intended or recommended for production applications.
One issue I ran into was writing to the end of an r+ open file. Explicitly placing a new record at the end by byte-number is inconsistent between openings of the file. I found that the exact positioning is a byte off via the Linux VFS verses the NTFS. If you check environment, your code can thus account for this. However, when using WSL, it's inconsistent between each time you open the file. Open once and read/write all you want. Close and re-open and it's scewed by one byte position.
I imagine there are other issues. Overall, I am happy that WSL exists but yes, they did not name it properly. It's not Linux at all. And the Debian for it, is not Debian, either.. Also, it would be so nice if they could make Xorg work...
If I were a Microsoft executive, I would have created Microsoft Linux a long time ago... Build in.Net and PowerShell. Give Red Hat a run for its money.
The U.S. government is not perfect but I think a great deal not as bad as the Chinese government, in so many ways. And China has been particularly aggressive in its spying, using technology and human assets in the United States and Europe. Chinese aggression against its weaker neighbors is legendary, pushing them around in the the South China sea and other places -- even Chinese fishermen boarding other nation's boats and attacking them with clubs.
Furthermore, the "disappearances" of people in all regions but particularly minority regions has been vast and relentless for decades. Chinese denials of shooting Tibetans crossing the border on foot toward Nepal, for example, was shut down after European mountain climbers video recorded it. China has led the world and the predominant supplier of human organs. The company that builds its "death mobiles" was bragging about growing production demand for them, about 5 years ago when production rates were 1000 per year. Those bodies exhibits, each holding around 200 bodies, in various cities around the U.S. simultaneously were interestingly stocked with Chinese youth, roughly in their 20's (almost exclusively). And of course, there are the camps with millions of minorities for re-education. How many Tibetan monks taken have every been seen again? At one time, over 8,000 were taken never to be seen again.
Our country (the United States) has all kinds of problems but I really think we need to not lose perspective.
As a software developer, I've long argued that the multitude of disjoined apps are a problem. I suggested that operating systems or desktop systems (like KDE and Gnome) provide a framework for services -- not applications -- so users can put together their own working environments, in whatever manners is most efficient for them.
When you open up a desktop like KDE or Gnome, not only do they work differently but the tools all have cryptic names that tell you little to nothing of what they are useful for. Each tool or app is an education in itself. The same goes for various Windows applications or phone apps.
What we REALLY want is not XYZ text editor (and 50 different editors in various programs) and PQR video editor, ZQY messenger, etc. We want services like: - a text editor (to plugin everywhere we need to edit text so we don't have to learn different ones in every app) - a spell checker (to work everywhere we want to check spelling) - a grammar checker - a sound recorder etc..
And we want to use them in any activity in which they might come up -- not each application having its own implementation of each.
Implement them as transportable micro-services and let us put together our own workspaces with the tools accessible where we'd like them to be.
Pushing ads in faces is not free. It comes at the cost of wasting time and pissing people off. It may be their website but luring people in with enticing videos only to shove ads in their faces is rude as hell. Having to pay off every individual website you use to avoid this is epidemic.. a disease..This is the reason many of us left cable television. In the 1980's, it was ads between and at intermission of a show. Now its more ads than show... brain damage inducing.
The Internet was designed for information and resource sharing -- a cooperative endeavor. The web enhanced this. However now instead of cooperative sharing, we have others taking control of our computers and, using our computation resources for their own desires, and shoving things we don't want in our faces. And we have to pay them off, each individually, to get them to stop.... and that often only partially works.
We need something to replace the web. We need a decentralized mesh network into which we can share files, videos, programs, etc. without the need for some big company's servers. As it is, they are using our computers in order to get money -- with absolutely no regard for what they do to us.
The argument that we shouldn't use them is obviously negated by the fact that those who will, will thereby have a huge advantage over those who do not.
His argument that we can use the technology only defensively, such as to counter those who use it offensively, was brilliant. Think of Wikipedia. There are those who abuse the system but there are far more who correct it. In a world of seemingly little hope, this truly helps redeemed humanity. If there is far more effort into the use of AI in defense, perhaps we could actually one day end war.
I disagree with his concerns that the military is not to be trusted to make morale use of such technologies. Formerly a soldier of 9 years and having worked with officers of many ranks in many situations in the U.S. military, I know this to be false (as least of the U.S military--it is certainly true of some others, like Russian who spent two weeks bombing nothing but hospitals in Aleppo (among other atrocities)). The U.S. military has thus far strongly rebuked the idea of AI making any kill decisions. There is a great deal of morality in the U.S. military and competence in the Department of Defense. There seems to be less in political leadership. You should have seen the officers in the Tactical Operations Centers trying to prevent massacres unfolding in satellite images, as I have. Most soldiers really do care (and there is an even split between Republican and Democrat in the Army). They are human. It was always the political leadership that blocked us.
As with wikipedia, if people are good and they have a means to block or correct the damage attempted those who are wilfully malicious then we will. The good can and does often win, even if it takes a while to get there. Think of what the world would be like if we did not.
Agreed. NASA's role is to pioneer that way so commercial industry can take over.. They've done that with space launch, long ago. Sadly, it was government rules keeping industry out of space, not capabilities or even incentives.
Areas in which NASA could help today include, developing technologies for long last missions and colonization of space and other worlds. Even for this, most of the know-how is already there. They need to test and refine them to make them more practical and safe. Most the competencies for space launch were in the aerospace industry. Most of the competencies for deep space are in the maritime industry, such as submarines and ships on long voyages -- especially naval vessel that must be fully self-sufficient under extremely hostile conditions. It's called "expeditionary technologies", a term long retired but who's time has come again.
BUT SERIOUS NASA -- stop worrying about microgravity and cosmic rays/solar flares -- we know how to solve both so we don't have to live with them. Just rotate for gravity and use regolith or ice that's already in space for shielding (and plants). Collect regolith from the moon. Collect ice from one mission into deep space where it is plentiful. One such mission should provide the shielding more many more.. as well as materials and fuel.
These expeditionary technologies include:
-- Air quality (submarines use rechargeable carbon filters; spraying mist (simulated rain) can clean everything activated carbon filters miss; plants to exchange CO2 for oxygen/carbon; burning off excess oxygen can solve oxygen toxification threat.
-- water treatment; usually three-stage: microbe eating tank, tank filtered into, and sterilization tank. These just require time and energy. Easily made reliable.
-- Food and organic materials -- IAW Plants. Hydroponics are very efficient but volatile. Technologies like Farm Daddy's are nearly as efficient and far more reliable.
I am really glad that you call him out like that. It is properly in the nature of a scientist to be critical but they should not be condescending or critical toward people but give critical analysis to a problem or a suggestion. In contract, it is in the nature of an engineer to be be optimistic. She/He doesn't ask if some can or can't be done but how it can be done.. He/she works around known problems and around the unknown.
It is impossible for those languages with "safe" memory access to exist without underlying languages that can openly access memory and that don't hide the truth of the machine beneath them. It is impossible to build an operating system in Java or Python -- they are made-up realities. They are designed to make computer pretend to work in ways they actually don't... in ways humans find easier to view and work with programming logic.
C and C++ do not hide the underlying machine because they are made to build the layers that actually allow software to work with the machine. The machine is instruction sequences in memory that manipulate memory -- memory is a singular long sequence of bytes. At the lowest level in any computer, that's what's there. Definitely not Python or Java. Python and Java must be written in either assembly language or a "true to the machine" language like C or C++. I am quite sure without checking that they are both written in C++. In fact C was specifically created to write the first UNIX... It's core is the core of POSIX of which even Windows shares... as DOS was written in C.
It's truly absurd to blame C and C++ memory unsafety. This illustrates a lack of fundamental understand of how computers work.
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Few people want war but ignoring reality by pretending there is no International threat is wilful ignorance deserving of punishment. These are our lives and the lives of our allies around the world that depend heavily upon advanced military technologies.
The only thing holding back Russia and China is U.S. military power and this is waning -- and this isn't working so well, as of late.. Russia now holds tanks with longer shooting and driving range, more speed, and greatly superior armor.. Russia holds exceptional surface to air defense capabilities. China seems to think it holds military comparability and is pushing the limits with its claim on control of the entire South China sea and the 1/3rd of the worlds commerce that flows through it..
North Korea continues and has recently expanding its production of nuclear ICBMs, under the cover of peace talks..
War -- even world war -- is closer than it has ever been since the end of the last one. The era of peace we've enjoyed for so long is likely to soon end. Keeping it depends on advancing capabilities rapidly... Not doing so is murder far greater than anything you've mentioned.
So many U.S. military systems make use of space-based resources that their destruction would have an immediate and profound effect on our ability to defend our own country or win in war elsewhere.
Furthermore, we are on the verge of launching a number of missions to the Moon, Mars, and Deep Space by a number of different commercial agencies. We need infrastructure up there and defensive capabilities. ESA is working on a permanent Moon base, ULA is working on a permanently manned space station for zero-G manufacturing and refueling. China is eyeing the very limited spaces with water-ice on the Moon and the harvesting of the Moon's helium-3 for nuclear reactors (Earth's uranium supplies are running low). And of course, there is Blue Origin and SpaceX and others pushing hard toward the Moon, Mars, and deep space in general.
However, I suggest this be done a little differently.
(1) The Air Force's Space Command should be made into a separate branch of the Air Force with its own independent budget. It's primary missions should be data collection and orbital asset protection. These assets are a cornerstone of U.S. survivability, in terms of communications, navigation, and threat identification. The Air Force's Space Command already performs this mission and the Air Force is best equipped to respond to identified threats in this area.
(2) The Department of Homeland Security should be given the additional mission of missile and infiltration defense. It needs its own independent budget and focus on the now vastly growing threat of medium range and cruise missiles with tactical nuclear warheads. This is a huge vulnerability that Russia is working very aggressively to exploit. The gap simply must be filled -- quickly. We need short/medium range missile defenses all around the country -- manned 24x7. They also need for develop capabilities to knock out hypersonic weapons. Russia has hypersonic weapons (early versions) and their bombers are capable of dropping dozens of tactical nuclear cruise missiles, at a time. These could be quite crippling in a surprise attack on U.S. based military command and control plus other pivotal resources.
(3) The Navy should be given the additional mission of deep space rescue and exploration. However, it does not yet need a new sub-agency with its own budget as we are only beginning commercial deep space ventures, today. Do we really want Moon colonies, Mars colonies, and deep space asteroid mining assets left defenseless with no ability to response to attack? Those space resources are likely to become essential economic resources in the decades to come. The Navy is by far the best for this mission as their core competency is in far away, self-reliant, missions amid small spaces and limited resources. Submarines are not unlike deep space vessels. The Navy knows how to keep up morale and professionalism, in addition to survival and mission preparedness.
On a side note, I also think the Navy and particularly U.S. Army aviation should seriously reconsider dirigible airships (Zeppelins). Not only has material sciences improved by leaps and bounds to make these ships safer, faster, and more survivable but recent advances in active armor and close range laser defenses should make them almost invulnerable to attack. The blimp that flew over Baghdad for years in Iraq was never shot down, even without active armor. Army Airships could absolutely take command as they sweep over enemy held territory or insurgents in the rear... with high tech sensors, armed drone dropships, and special operation commando forces.
Python has great appeal to academics but it's a very poor choice for any hardcore engineering. It's just inherently slow and, although very readable in small snippets and as glue-code, it's not the best for more complex solutions.
I am not advocating for a whole new language but really think the best bang for the buck would be in simply to better develop the various ML related tools for JavaScript. JavaScript is today clearly what C was back in the 1980's, as Python is what Pascal was. Or like Verilog (industry) verses VHDL (academia). JavaScript (such as V8-based Node.js) compiles to very fast and memory efficient code. Conventional Object-Orientation is inherently slow and memory consuming as it requires an instance factory added to every program and massive memory allocations for each instantiation (using more memory and lots of CPU usage for the OS kernel's memory defragmentation).. JavaScript corrects these errors with its model for Object-Orientation and now also provides a syntax largely identical to that of conventional Object-orientation.
We need to clean up Tensorflow.js and build out data science tools for JavaScript, such as paging data editor to work on ultra-large files piece by piece without having to load them completely into memory.
JavaScript is very well suited for Machine Learning. And it may not hide the underlying machine as do languages like Pascal, Java, and Python (they academics seem to prefer) but there is so much benefit in being true to computation, as it really is.. That is a long discussion on its own.
I do, however, strongly advocate one very important enhancement to JavaScript to greatly simplify asynchrony and to make possible a method of "bug free" programming. Enable the setting of hooks on variable values such that, when modified, will execution a logical condition expression and, if true, execute a code block with a given variable scope... One little bit hook will not slow down execution. For example: // Establishes that, any time x, y, or z values are changed, the expression is evaluation and, // if true, the provided function is executed and the data object "scope" is passed to it. ... }; // kills the "when" hook
var scope = {
var condition = when( x { doSomething() } );
condition = undefined;
This could GREATLY reduce the complexity of things like business logic based on multiple async data queries. It could also make possible, "bug free" programming when using purely for stateful programming between "when" conditions. That is, only syntax errors, system errors, and errors in requirements could go wrong, if all your programming is conditions on states changing states. Overall, software would be vastly more robust than the tendencies today.
Matthew
Sure, let the national space agencies build settlements on the Moon. There is no commercial viability in those places. Commercial organizations will go where the money is -- deep space asteroids and Mars.
The Moon will be very costly to maintain humans on. The "plentiful" water on the Moon is in very relative terms. It's likely to take days of work for a glass full enough to drink. And the extremely abrasive regolith and pitch-black-only shadows plus zero protection for radiation is all going to add risks and work.
Still, I do think some inflatable habitats on the Moon, once buried in regolith will have their uses, in terms of science and long term commercial uses.
On Mars, north and south of the equator hold hundreds of large, fresh water glaciers more than 2 km deep. The soil elsewhere holds about two liters of water per square meter of regolith. And the regolith is very soft and less abrasive than soil on Earth. Metals in Martian rock are all the same as Earth except about twice as much, in proportion. Martian Basal is near ore-grade for iron. Waving a magnet over the surface is all you need to do to collect very rich iron ore. And the atmosphere and gravity make it easy to launch this stuff into orbit on single-stage rockets.
Although the Moon is closer and therefore easier to send help from Earth, it's also far more likely that help will be needed. It won't take much to become self-sufficient on Mars.
However -- I would prioritize exploration of lunar lava tubes. It's reasonable to think that larger concentrations of water ice might exist in them. If that's the case then settlements in lava tubes on the Moon could be very profitable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDXfQTD_rgQ
I think perhaps we need to work on these... In my opinion, everybody needs to keep a sense of humor. And it's best to have a few people who can play some kind of musical instrument, like a violin.
Personally, I'd like a large pipe organ in my spaceship.
Music. Singing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CuyLbC2TZo
Also, the U.S. Army's (that also using singing heavily (Cadences) research shows that food has the greatest impact of all--quality and quantity. Actually NASA's research show that its the place of eating that people find their sanity and most happiness.
First and foremost, these platforms allow too many things to happen too easily by accident. Second, they make it too easy for apps to post ads, most annoyingly each time I pull it up. And it's very difficult to find which app did it and remove it.
Next, they just poorly designed for phone use. There are WAY too many steps to make stinking phone call or to start navigation with a map. It's likely caused accidents all the time on the roads.
Next, Java was a terrible choice for Android. No matter what Java-lovers tell you, it is inherently slower by design because it enforces a high granularity of object-orientation. Classical object-orientation consumes a lot of extra memory and CPU-time, in addition to adding a lot of code to one's software. Why? Because it requires a good deal of code to provide that functionality -- code you don't write but is added for you, and because it has to allocate new memory for every instantiation (each property and method), and because these each of these CPU-intensive task an operating system has to perform -- defragmenting memory. Also, the automatic garbage collection makes for sudden uncontrollable pauses at random times.
iOS's Objective-C is much better in those terms. OO can be accomplished in a smarter way, such as how JavaScript does it. However, iOS is extremely proprietary. Apple has not been an advocate of freedom.
If he is criticizing Mozilla then that is back on him. It's standards compliance that is important -- no necessarily working from a common code base. Having alternatives will keep that alive and could spur innovation. For HTML rendering, I still prefer KHTML. It is lighter, simpler, standards compliant. On the other hand, Chromium's rendered is actually a descendant of khtml...
However, if he is talking about the wisdom of such a move for Mozilla then I could almost agree. Firefox is built on XUL, which was an innovative idea and is still unique. Entire applications may be built on XUL. I personally hate XML but otherwise the idea of this has enormous untapped potential that Chromium lacks. I don't know if this will ever be tapped, though. It seems unlikely.
If I were Mozilla, I might build a successor to XUL based on JavaScript data structures (perhaps calling it JUL). And in this yes, I would probably move to the Chromium HTML renderer. JUL code be a node.js npm package -- although I can understand the argument they'd probably make for going with SpiderMonkey, instead.
JUL could be declarative, like XUL. However, why not simultaneous simplify the difficulties of asynchronous programming in Node.js with JUL? You could do away with software bugs entirely in JUL, using a system of stateful logic. How does that work? In short, you register conditions. If after each asynchronous call, any variables are modified that are used in a condition's logical test expression then test the condition and if true, execute its registered state changes.
So the only bugs possible are in your software requirements. There could be no bugs in your programming itself. There could be syntax errors and system errors outside the scope of your program. Furthermore, such a system would typically work properly under various conditions you did not even anticipate.
You'd specify what your interface looks like. You'd specify what pattern of states cause specific state changes. And you could use JSON or JavaScript object notation to define this.
The window of opportunity for us software engineers to solve the global problem of misinformation is rapidly closing -- and the problem is about to intensify with deep fakes. Particularly Russia but also various other states are pushing misinformation very hard but so are various political and commercial interests around the world.
As Net Neutrality is lost and not only misinformation flourishes but conspiracies about media organizations like Youtube degrading the searches on conspiracy theories are also likely to flourish. The world is aiming strongly toward an era of ruthless darkness.
The suggestions to solve this problem so far, have been petty.
I have developed the plan for a comprehensive solution. I am calling it Solinova (latin for -- new sun). It's a mesh network that hides personal identities while retaining consistency of identity and earning reputation for interactions with others. Research into microloans demonstrated that giving loans on the basis of research into the personal reputation of individuals among those they know, was very successful. I believe the same can be applied for more than just monetary credibility.
Solinova includes a currency called "promise" that is more secure than blockchains and much faster. It also integrates inherent insurance for everything and greatly reduced risk of transactions. I will publish this soon. I am working through simulations to verify the validity and comprehensiveness of the philosophy.
From all my experience as a software developer since 1984 to the present day at many different companies, I will argue strongly that the combination of less experienced developers and healthy team dynamics make for the highest quality and more successful software with users. They design software that is easier to read and more intuitive for users, even if not super fancy and stylish. This is important because the real key to commercial success in software is:
** it must be very practical and useful **
-- practical means quick and easy to learn and use.
-- useful means readily applicable to some clear and obvious use by users
Why? Experienced software developers have the following bad tendencies:
1. They are assholes. They hold strong opinions on technological choices, methods, and philosophies.
2. They loose user perspective. What they see as simple and intuitive is often not so much so for users. Furthermore, they will often put technical perfection over usability or the interests of stake holders.
3. They don't really learn. Once a person feels they know, they become incredulous to teach. They become more likely to criticize new tools than learn them and use them, or methods, or philosophies.
That said, every generation of new tools seems to lack any notion of most of the lessons learned in the past. Why Slack, for example? It does nothing more than has IRC, which has been around for decades. The reason is simple: the new generation of developers don't know what IRC is. It remains vibrant with experts of all kinds active on it but this latest generation just doesn't know it exists.
New software development stacks like node + express + react + redux lack most of the focuses of importance in the past like, maintainability and performance in huge ways. However, the new generation of developers see it as doing the opposite. They argue how react's virtual DOM is faster to work with than the real DOM, and therefore react is faster. In truth, it depends on how to use the real DOM and many people had been using it very poorly. Another truth is that react's server-side rendering makes it even slower, regardless. And one more thing on this -- diffing between a virtual DOM before and after modifications is also not a very efficient way to do this.
Calculators also calculate far faster and more accurately than do humans. Still, it's a machine -- not a mind.
The difference between a machine and a mind is that a machine is driven by a set of mechanical/logical rules strictly, without exception. In contrast, a mind is driven by free will judgements. Free will is the ability to derive options, weigh them between each other, and select the option with the highest sum of desirability and likelihood.
Both can be programmed (after all, our minds are the result of biological machines). However, anything that follows any set of rules will always, in the natural world, come to usurp the intent of those rules. But a mind creates its own intents -- accomplishment of what is desirable in the options it chooses, such as fulfillment of hunger, pleasure, avoidance of pain, etc. A safe mind (what I would call a "person") would have its highest values: mutual freedom and well-being of persons.
Logic is illogical in its own terms, as proven by Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. In fact, logic is not fundamental in the universe. Looking through microscopes or telescopes, the smallest and largest things are arranged in oscillation patterns -- like linear math, not logic. Logical conditions seems to exist only in relative perspectives, which explains why it is always inherently incomplete. For example, whether the Moon is moving toward us or away from us, one direction or the other. Truths are always relative to the observer.
Our loss of privacy was handed away gleefully, as if we were kids given candy.
Since early on, I advocated that whatever the level of transparency, it should be mutual. If government can read my conversations then I should be able to read theirs, as it pertains to mine. The same for commercial organizations. Of course, some level should be set. I mean regardless, I don't want them watching me poop. But then again, if it's my doctor and I can see that my doctor is doing this to monitor my health then I could be leanient even on that. So it's not a trade between privacy and security -- it's a balance of mutual privacy that we need.
On the other hand, I think the issues of fake information, information overload, and relationship destroying social media comments are all bigger issues.
Just the mixing of included with Prime and "buy now" on Amazon is highly detracting to me on Prime. I left cable to escape the constant barrage of brain damaging commercials. Netflix is the only refuge. Even DVD's sometimes have commercials.
Netflix's big price hikes are also a bad way to go. They could, instead, add a broader mix of titles for higher prices. That would earn them more money without pissing off their existing customers. It's really sad if they are thinking that the lack of commercial free alternatives enables them to make sudden big price hikes. It's utterly absurd to think they are going to add commercials and stay in business.
The ultimate and best solution by far would be a free and open mesh network for streamed moves, not controlled by any one company. That is, studios could market their movies and series over this mesh network directly to customers. Customer could pay for each, individually, or build a rationing plan. Movie rationing would work like this:
1. Decide how much you want to pay, per week (unlike months, a week is always exactly 7 days).
2. Select filtering criteria (e.g. percentage for each genre, minimum ratings, etc).
3. As each payment is received, a new selection is made (as far as the rental prices fall within your monthly payment), excluding those you've already watched (unless you mark to specifically keep).
You'd have a true free market in movies with earnings going directly to the studios that produce or own them -- no overhead loss, either increasing their ability to produce and/or reduces your prices to watch them. Also, free movies could be unlimited.
Customers have far more power and choice... freedom. Everybody wins except for middlemen.
Open Source systems, such as the Desktop systems Gnome and KDE have consistently illustrated that governance beyond minimum essential for interoperability has never worked as well. With no road map, people met in common standards by natural consensus. In KDE, all decisions required 100% consensus which of course, was followed. With Gnome, leadership tried to establish standards and road maps that were seldom followed.
Also take for example Gentoo before and after it's founder. When he left to work at Microsoft, he established a hierarchical leadership structure that utterly collapsed the project. Gentoo had been a system that worked with minimal requirements of the one trying to install or maintain it. Then, it required increasingly more work month after month until more and more was breaking and many people left.
Non-governance -- software development by consensus has always worked far better than governed processes, in my experience, even in commercial software. The flat organizational structure did exactly the same thing -- caused peers to come together with common solutions by consensus. Leadership is seldom met with full support, be it leadership from individuals or from committees.
I think people like to cooperate but they do not like being told what someone else thinks is how they should do things.
In particular, if it's an air taxi service, those issues are addressable. The issues really are:
* Noisy
* Propellers will blow small rocks and sticks and such around.
* People peering into private backyards is unkind.
The air taxi solution is:
* To reduce noise and wind issues: longer but slower propellers and drop carriage by cables from the ends of long propeller arms.
Note: this also solves the problem of requiring landing zones. And longer arms give exact precision.
* To solve the privacy issue: put broad ledges just outside under the windows so occupants cannot see nearby neighboring places.
----
To solve these problems for personal flying cars will require infrastructure under the Department of Transportation. Neighborhoods and/or places along highways could half lifting and landing zones created. So you'd drive to one, fly up, and then follow air avenues.
The air avenues would be routes through which you are allowed to fly (all under 700 feet -- to avoid conventional aircraft). I would suggest keeping them high, such as about 600 feet. With electric multicopters, you have sub-millimeter precision.
1. The speed limits of microprocessors are relevant because microprocessors process serial threads of instructions. Parallelizing multiplies effective performance. This is why GPU's are used so much more today, even in addition to multi-core processors.
2. Neuromorphic chips provide many magnitudes better performance than CPU's and GPU's. They do solidify the activation functions possible -- as those cannot be modified or added to once burned into a chip. This is a downside but the tensor-based model for neural simulations has its own limitations on what kinds of processing can be done even in GPU's.
3. Usually where fluid dynamic processing is required in a specific way (as with neural nets), there are tricks specific to the type of processing that can greatly enhance performance even when serially processed. This was the case particularly in astrophysics, such as with galaxy collision simulations and simulations of the early expansion of the universe. Using GPU's is really a lazy way out, in cognitive terms.
In fact I have a method that I call "Maxerial" (for maximum serial) processing method that show excellent performance even on a Raspberry pi with no GPU at all.
And furthermore, I suspect one day we may have analog computers and/or quantum computers that provide extraordinary performance and capacity.
I use WSL with so-called Debian every day. It's useful for programming but very limited and not production quality. Microsoft explicitly states that WSL is not intended or recommended for production applications.
One issue I ran into was writing to the end of an r+ open file. Explicitly placing a new record at the end by byte-number is inconsistent between openings of the file. I found that the exact positioning is a byte off via the Linux VFS verses the NTFS. If you check environment, your code can thus account for this. However, when using WSL, it's inconsistent between each time you open the file. Open once and read/write all you want. Close and re-open and it's scewed by one byte position.
I imagine there are other issues. Overall, I am happy that WSL exists but yes, they did not name it properly. It's not Linux at all. And the Debian for it, is not Debian, either.. Also, it would be so nice if they could make Xorg work...
If I were a Microsoft executive, I would have created Microsoft Linux a long time ago... Build in .Net and PowerShell. Give Red Hat a run for its money.
I am still hoping for 8-bit support one day for the M6809 processor... Dang.
Honestly -- I don't know why there ever was so much movement toward x64 -- everything takes more memory..
The U.S. government is not perfect but I think a great deal not as bad as the Chinese government, in so many ways. And China has been particularly aggressive in its spying, using technology and human assets in the United States and Europe. Chinese aggression against its weaker neighbors is legendary, pushing them around in the the South China sea and other places -- even Chinese fishermen boarding other nation's boats and attacking them with clubs.
Furthermore, the "disappearances" of people in all regions but particularly minority regions has been vast and relentless for decades. Chinese denials of shooting Tibetans crossing the border on foot toward Nepal, for example, was shut down after European mountain climbers video recorded it. China has led the world and the predominant supplier of human organs. The company that builds its "death mobiles" was bragging about growing production demand for them, about 5 years ago when production rates were 1000 per year. Those bodies exhibits, each holding around 200 bodies, in various cities around the U.S. simultaneously were interestingly stocked with Chinese youth, roughly in their 20's (almost exclusively). And of course, there are the camps with millions of minorities for re-education. How many Tibetan monks taken have every been seen again? At one time, over 8,000 were taken never to be seen again.
Our country (the United States) has all kinds of problems but I really think we need to not lose perspective.
As a software developer, I've long argued that the multitude of disjoined apps are a problem. I suggested that operating systems or desktop systems (like KDE and Gnome) provide a framework for services -- not applications -- so users can put together their own working environments, in whatever manners is most efficient for them.
When you open up a desktop like KDE or Gnome, not only do they work differently but the tools all have cryptic names that tell you little to nothing of what they are useful for. Each tool or app is an education in itself. The same goes for various Windows applications or phone apps.
What we REALLY want is not XYZ text editor (and 50 different editors in various programs) and PQR video editor, ZQY messenger, etc. We want services like:
- a text editor (to plugin everywhere we need to edit text so we don't have to learn different ones in every app)
- a spell checker (to work everywhere we want to check spelling)
- a grammar checker
- a sound recorder
etc..
And we want to use them in any activity in which they might come up -- not each application having its own implementation of each.
Implement them as transportable micro-services and let us put together our own workspaces with the tools accessible where we'd like them to be.
Similarly, if we want a video streamer... etc..
Pushing ads in faces is not free. It comes at the cost of wasting time and pissing people off. It may be their website but luring people in with enticing videos only to shove ads in their faces is rude as hell. Having to pay off every individual website you use to avoid this is epidemic.. a disease..This is the reason many of us left cable television. In the 1980's, it was ads between and at intermission of a show. Now its more ads than show... brain damage inducing.
The Internet was designed for information and resource sharing -- a cooperative endeavor. The web enhanced this. However now instead of cooperative sharing, we have others taking control of our computers and, using our computation resources for their own desires, and shoving things we don't want in our faces. And we have to pay them off, each individually, to get them to stop.... and that often only partially works.
We need something to replace the web. We need a decentralized mesh network into which we can share files, videos, programs, etc. without the need for some big company's servers. As it is, they are using our computers in order to get money -- with absolutely no regard for what they do to us.
The argument that we shouldn't use them is obviously negated by the fact that those who will, will thereby have a huge advantage over those who do not.
His argument that we can use the technology only defensively, such as to counter those who use it offensively, was brilliant. Think of Wikipedia. There are those who abuse the system but there are far more who correct it. In a world of seemingly little hope, this truly helps redeemed humanity. If there is far more effort into the use of AI in defense, perhaps we could actually one day end war.
I disagree with his concerns that the military is not to be trusted to make morale use of such technologies. Formerly a soldier of 9 years and having worked with officers of many ranks in many situations in the U.S. military, I know this to be false (as least of the U.S military--it is certainly true of some others, like Russian who spent two weeks bombing nothing but hospitals in Aleppo (among other atrocities)). The U.S. military has thus far strongly rebuked the idea of AI making any kill decisions. There is a great deal of morality in the U.S. military and competence in the Department of Defense. There seems to be less in political leadership. You should have seen the officers in the Tactical Operations Centers trying to prevent massacres unfolding in satellite images, as I have. Most soldiers really do care (and there is an even split between Republican and Democrat in the Army). They are human. It was always the political leadership that blocked us.
As with wikipedia, if people are good and they have a means to block or correct the damage attempted those who are wilfully malicious then we will. The good can and does often win, even if it takes a while to get there. Think of what the world would be like if we did not.
Agreed. NASA's role is to pioneer that way so commercial industry can take over.. They've done that with space launch, long ago. Sadly, it was government rules keeping industry out of space, not capabilities or even incentives.
Areas in which NASA could help today include, developing technologies for long last missions and colonization of space and other worlds. Even for this, most of the know-how is already there. They need to test and refine them to make them more practical and safe. Most the competencies for space launch were in the aerospace industry. Most of the competencies for deep space are in the maritime industry, such as submarines and ships on long voyages -- especially naval vessel that must be fully self-sufficient under extremely hostile conditions. It's called "expeditionary technologies", a term long retired but who's time has come again.
BUT SERIOUS NASA -- stop worrying about microgravity and cosmic rays/solar flares -- we know how to solve both so we don't have to live with them. Just rotate for gravity and use regolith or ice that's already in space for shielding (and plants). Collect regolith from the moon. Collect ice from one mission into deep space where it is plentiful. One such mission should provide the shielding more many more.. as well as materials and fuel.
These expeditionary technologies include:
-- Air quality (submarines use rechargeable carbon filters; spraying mist (simulated rain) can clean everything activated carbon filters miss; plants to exchange CO2 for oxygen/carbon; burning off excess oxygen can solve oxygen toxification threat.
-- water treatment; usually three-stage: microbe eating tank, tank filtered into, and sterilization tank. These just require time and energy. Easily made reliable.
-- Food and organic materials -- IAW Plants. Hydroponics are very efficient but volatile. Technologies like Farm Daddy's are nearly as efficient and far more reliable.
I am really glad that you call him out like that. It is properly in the nature of a scientist to be critical but they should not be condescending or critical toward people but give critical analysis to a problem or a suggestion. In contract, it is in the nature of an engineer to be be optimistic. She/He doesn't ask if some can or can't be done but how it can be done.. He/she works around known problems and around the unknown.
It is impossible for those languages with "safe" memory access to exist without underlying languages that can openly access memory and that don't hide the truth of the machine beneath them. It is impossible to build an operating system in Java or Python -- they are made-up realities. They are designed to make computer pretend to work in ways they actually don't... in ways humans find easier to view and work with programming logic.
C and C++ do not hide the underlying machine because they are made to build the layers that actually allow software to work with the machine. The machine is instruction sequences in memory that manipulate memory -- memory is a singular long sequence of bytes. At the lowest level in any computer, that's what's there. Definitely not Python or Java. Python and Java must be written in either assembly language or a "true to the machine" language like C or C++. I am quite sure without checking that they are both written in C++. In fact C was specifically created to write the first UNIX... It's core is the core of POSIX of which even Windows shares... as DOS was written in C.
It's truly absurd to blame C and C++ memory unsafety. This illustrates a lack of fundamental understand of how computers work.