ta8594505930

Presumably there is benefit in reducing trust in a party with mixed or unknown incentives to increase trust in a party whose incentives align with your own. For a critical piece of software I could imagine a schema where a user pays one or more independent verifiers to validate the software. That would allow the user to control the incentives of the entities telling them the software is safe.

In this scenario would you be relying on a proprietary extension to interact with GCP developed by Microsoft? Surely you would want to use a Google or Third-party developed extension to do that right? And in that case the developer of that extension would have a vested interest in making it available to you again, potentially in a forked version of VS Code. As long as the editor is open source extension developers can just fork it and create a new public directory of extensions. The only thing you potentially lose is Microsoft's proprietary extensions which are likely to always work well with Microsoft products and you really shouldn't use them to interact with Microsoft's competitors.

The mars rover does have a spectrometer. It's called ChemCam [1], it uses a laser to vaporize a small amount of matter and them captures the spectrographs of the resulting plasma with a camera. That doesn't take away from your point, but it is a cool piece of equipment.

[1] https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/chemcam/