You think it's nitpicking because you don't care much about truth when it comes to history, and that's perfectly fine. But it's weird to complain about other people's baloney while spreading your own, and I think in his position as a trusted science communicator he should have been more responsible about this stuff.
Of course human directed selection is a thing, when did I ever say otherwise? This is the problem with the Sagan types, you actually think that baloney is fine as long as it's sciencey-sounding baloney.
> I don't think it is? I think there's a difference between the plausible but wrong and the impossible.
I find that the word "magic" is very overused by smart people online as a sort of thought-terminating cliché. It's a vague concept and I'm not always sure what they mean by it.
It's often extremely hard, even for top minds, to tell apart magic and science ahead of time. Think of Einstein mocking quantum physicists for believing in "spooky action at a distance". Of course if you still don't believe in quantum entanglement today then you are being irrational, but that's only because science has (mostly) settled the question, nothing to do with how magical or plausible the concept may sound.
Someone defending astrology will tell you that the gravity of the moon affects their bloodstream like it affects the tides of the ocean. That doesn't hold water if you sit down and do the math of course, but the same is true if you bother to check the dates for events in ancient history.
I actually kinda like Sagan, Cosmos is seriously gorgeous (though Vangelis does a lot of the heavy lifting there). I'm just kinda tired of the whole "Library of Alexandria" myth that comes up constantly around nerdy forums such as this one.
> Believing silly nonsense which is still plausible isn't the same category of error as believing in magic.
Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not. Sagan's beliefs about the ancient world could have been fixed with a five minute conversation with an expert. He just didn't care enough to do that, and for some reason that attitude is common among so-called skeptics when it comes to history.
People like Sagan have a worldview in which we are all either rational robots that only believe in "science", or else silly magic-believers that can't think by themselves. Of course Sagan himself proves that this is wrong: you can be a great scientist while believing a lot of silly nonsense about the ancient world, and about crab evolution apparently.
I think "made up" is fair. I can't know what his process was and everybody makes mistakes, but almost every single thing he said about history was wrong in a way that was convenient to his narrative, and it's not like he ever retracted anything. Surely if he wrote a whole book about dealing with bullshit he could have used that opportunity for some reflection about his past mistakes, now that would have been interesting to read.
I wonder how well Sagan's own "baloney" holds up against his kit. Historians despise the guy for all the stuff he made up about the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, Eratosthenes, etc... People still repeat a lot of that to this day.
It won't be Lebesgue integrable because it won't be measurable. Your function is actually a good (though not rigorous) argument for the existence of non-measurable sets.
> yet its integral over any interval is exactly zero
That function doesn't actually have an integral in any sense that I know of. The Riemann integral doesn't work because, for every interval in every possible partition, the function's upper bound will be 1 and the lower bound will be -1.
That's for uniform distributions. We don't know the distribution here, that's part of the problem, but I would expect early cave art to be more sparse and worse preserved.
> And milk can get pretty expensive pretty fast in this country: It always come in 1 litre recipients, and the cheapest one (The one that is within the mentioned program) is right now at ~70 pesos (Some 73 dollar cents at the official dollar price, 40 cents at the current rate for the dollar in the back market... but foreigners can hardly get this price for their dollars).
That's actually extremely cheap by international standards, if this source[0] is to be trusted. Of course it seems expensive for most argentinians because wages are also terribly low.
Not sure why you are telling me this, I don't know anything about Apple's internal development process. I assume they did run a lot of tests. But I recall at least one serious bug early on too[0].
If you are thinking about rust, we don't have any data about it in the context of the kernel yet, not even for device drivers. It may prevent some exploitable bugs, but those aren't a big concern for filesystems - otherwise they wouldn't be put inside the kernel at all. The reality is, we don't know if it would help; and given how conservative we all are with our filesystem implementations (for good reasons), it's possible that we never will.
Shims in the kernel seem a bit anti-social, since all module developers are expected to contribute to the shared core code. Of course it can be done, and it has been done. But I think FUSE is better if all you care about is portability, and you don't mind the heavy performance cost. My module could be ported for FUSE of course, but it's a lot more work than it may seem, the kernel interfaces are too alien compared to a userland library.
> C being a shitty language that does not force or even encourage programmers to handle errors
I don't see where this is coming from. Most of the world's top filesystems are written in C, and they work just fine. Maybe other languages could get better results, but it's hard to say with so little data.
> implementation knowledge about file system technology is generally stuck in the 1990s
If you are talking about me, that might be true, I'm relatively new to this and still learning. But there's definitely people out there with some serious "implementation knowledge". And tools like xfstests did not exist in the 1990s, that makes a huge difference.