logicchop

If I can autoport my C++ to Rust, and the port is confirmed identical, and the Rust is confirmed safe, can't I use that to reason about the safety of my C++? Is safe C++ just a matter of proving it has a safe Rust equivalent?

Hard to say. Most of the uses probably predated the custom operator new and so nobody thought about it. Not to mention the places you cannot sneak into to switch to std::nothrow.

I suspect that windows still has a subtle FP restoration bug. We do large scale validation of floating point data and occasionally get ever so subtly different results.

This is likely your answer. C++ story. I worked at a large company that had a "no exceptions" policy and a custom operator new. If a new expression failed it would return nullptr instead of throwing. So lots of people wrote "checking" code to make sure the result wasn't nullptr, except that the compiler would always just elide that code since the standard mandates that the result cannot be nullptr. Many weird crashes ensued.

I think this is worrying too much about a particular interpretation of "10x" and ignores the subterranean fact that people are trying to convey. There just are super-valuable devs. Everyone knows this. They stick out. And they are productive in a myriad of ways. Some are leetcode superstars, sure. But some are simply masters of unblocking the rest of the team. It's hard to even associate a particular skillset with it. But I'm sure most of you have a list in your head of the people you would absolutely want to poach if you were starting up something new.

I think it does exactly that, which is supposes a one-time exception to get out of infinite regress. But, I mean, if God exists, that's how it is. So the story doesn't seem incoherent. As for asking why is God necessary, I think that is a misplaced question. God's necessity wouldn't derive from something else, because then it wouldn't be necessity (just another derived contingency). The starting point is that something necessary has to be the basis of the rest of the stuff, that's it.

I don't see what the infinite sequence of contingency buys you. Seems you might as well say there is fundamentally no reason why anything is (though I think that's untenable).

Maybe, but the capacity for "something" to "stop something else from existing" seems to depend on laws, and the laws themselves seem pretty contingent. Why are the laws sustained? If the laws changed and things themselves caused their own demise, things couldn't just go on existing. So what keeps the current laws on the books?

You probably have to assume there is a necessary substrate. What else can you possibly think? Contingency means being contingent on something else. You could suppose that the "something else" is itself contingent, but then you have another contingency. At some point you will likely take it for granted that there must be something that is itself not contingent and that the rest of the stuff downstream turns on it being the way it is.

It doesn't really have anything to do with time. The "sustainment" question is different from the "causal" question. Causal questions are typically temporal and past-looking. Sustainment is a question about "now", always.

Depends on if you mean direct-dependence or some ancestral-dependence. Contingent things can depend on other contingent things in some narrow scope. But a complete answer to "why X?" (e.g., "because Y") should avoid begging the question (e.g., "ok, why Y?").

That is the whole point of God as an explanation. God is where the buck stops on contingency. God is necessary.

One row of that, two colors, has 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 permutations. Now do it for 63 more rows. Now write that to disk.

I should clarify: I don't mean that you shouldn't be worried when you get the "let's talk" message. What I mean is, it shouldn't come across as "spooky"; that is, when they say it, it shouldn't leave you with the utterly baffling sensation of not knowing whether they are about to tell you something utterly horrible or something utterly trivial.

If you are in a new relationship with management and they are already hitting you with vague "let's talk" statements, you are pretty much guaranteed that they are bad communicators and that you won't be able to glean much of anything from what they say to you.