PioNono

Also, as the number of random variables increases, so to does the probability that some will be correlated just by chance. Pure noise. Can’t post the reference right now, but the author Nassim Taleb has either a paper or blog post that shows this neatly using random matrices.

I take no joy in saying this, but I suspect that all else being equal, the result of this would be that people would just spend more time consuming media in isolation. Not basing this on feelings, but rather on having been up close with some (anonymized) wireless network datasets. People of all incomes and social strata spend absurd amounts of time in solipsistic media consumption.

I’ll share a use case where Rust specifically has been a godsend.

I write software for users who have strong engineering backgrounds but tend to know just enough about computers to be dangerous. They tend to know a smattering if Python, Perl, SQL, SAS, R, or Matlab, and will happily use a well-documented CLI tool, but cannot be relied upon to do basic sysadmin tasks effectively. They run a mix of windows and OSX, and some set up Linux VMs. They are hired for their expertise in their domain, not because they are great IMS technicians. They deal with large, heterogenous, difficult-to-schematize datasets and value speed, but it is a total waste of their time to troubleshoot environment/linking issues that frequently accompany building and using C/C++ utilities for many non-programmer users. I’ve found Rust to be hugely beneficial for writing programs to serve this user base (RF engineers in my case, but I’d imagine people who write software for ag/life science people, banking analysts, civil/environmental engineers and others have similar challenges).

* it’s also nice that it’s hard to segfault in Rust. Many existing tools in my domain are notoriously fragile in this regard.