I sure wish this quiet street was filled with lively motor traffic :)

I would like to see a life expectancy number that excludes deaths in childhood.

A frequency distribution of life span for those born in year X would be a helpful visual.

Effect Systems are the answer to cross-cutting concerns in 2026.

Google has so much influence over the hardware manufacturers. They should do more.

Does anyone in the industry know why so much firmware is proprietary?

I've worked with manufacturers who shipped us binary blobs for their hardware. They are often willing to customize the software for you, but they want to own the modifications, which they can use for other customers. A big part of many contracts is a services component where they provide features or advanced functionality, and this lets them mark up their bill substantially. They're existentially scared of their hardware being cloned or their customers building in-house solutions, so they have to stay competitive on that front.

It's also a huge pain in the ass for them to release software as open source. They would need to track all the different forks and modifications in an organized manner (they often do a lot of copy paste and one-off nonsense). They run pretty light staffing on a lot of these components and doing all of that is just another chore for their overworked devs.

Lastly, I've heard they sometimes use other commercial, closed-source software components which they can't easily relicense.

Is this all bullshit? Yes absolutely. I'm not defending them but these are the excuses they give.

Reproducible builds reduce the need for trusted parties.

Have many organizations produce the binaries independently and post the arifacts.

Once n of m parties agree on the arifact hash, take that as the trusted build.

If every party reaches a different hash then we cannot build consensus.

To move away from organizational dependence, there should be an installable project for debian where I can dedicate some configurable small percentage of my compute when idle to reproducibly building debian components to make a robust verification system, starting with the most critical code.

Obviously, it would be a ton of work to make such a system resistant to gaming by malicious actors (see GNU Guix for useful efforts), but it would provide valuable diversity in architecture and (political or other) control.

It would be even cooler if we could have independent projects that could run on various distros and OS, and build packages for any of them. Having packages for bsd verified on linux and vice-versa with statistical logging (this code has been verified x times on y OSes) would be reassuring.

I don't know of anything Ubuntu is doing that is significantly beyond what Debian is doing in this regard, nor that they have a distributed reproduction system set up???

Building Ubuntu does not produce identical binaries to Debian, so no, that's not what they're asking for

Probably easiest way is to use Bazel to leverage the effort that has gone in there

Over-eating is not strictly a choice. Corporations spend billions on manipulating the public because it works. Regulation is needed, not willpower.

I don't believe regulation is the answer. As I get older, I've become increasingly skeptical of any information coming from the government.

But somehow information from corporations is good and we should let me do whatever?

Your inference does not follow.

Python has a reputation for being good for beginners so it's taught to beginners so it has a reputation for being good for beginners.

Success rate in that era was very low. There are thousands of movies from that time that no one cares about today.

Do you know of anything like AoC but that feels less contrived? I often spend the most time understanding the problem requirements because they are so arbitrary - like the worst kind of boardgame! Maybe I should go pick up some OSS tickets...

Take a look at Everybody Codes. It occurs in November instead of December, so this year is wrapping up. Like AoC, it is story based but maybe you'll find the problem extraction more to your liking.

https://everybody.codes/events

Being contrived, with puns or other weirdness is kinda on par for this kind of problems. Almost every programming competition I've ever been to have those kind of jokes.

Just a random example: https://open.kattis.com/problems/magicallights

But the Kattis website is great. The program runs on their server without you getting to know the input (you just get right/wrong back), so a bit different. But also then gives you memory and time constraints which you for the more difficult problems must find your way out of.