They can try making more of what people want and charging for it with ads. People liked The Office, Mr Bean, Doctor Who. The BBC can produce perfectly good telly if they want to be competitive. Don't be Canada and subsidize mediocrity and bad art with public money. Soft power should be earned, not bought and paid by public coffers.
They need to get rid of the concept of weed out courses. It's bad for learning. If you are paying 30-50K a year for an education, course availability should be a given. Don't use the bell curve as an excuse to deny students an education, or if you are going to use a threshold, use a fixed one, not one that limits by percentage of students. The fat cat admins and professors need to be fired. Too many schools take the students' money and plow it into research and other areas, with zero regard for undergraduate education. "You are in university now, it's sink or swim. Can't make it? Too bad." This attitude is especially prevalent in the state/public unis, especially places like Berkeley where demands exceeds supply. Your traditional private colleges like Dartmouth and Harvard don't have this problem.
That's rich considering Python is routinely criticized here for lack of proper dependency management until recently. Just because Racket is a cute Lisp/academic language does not mean it should be held to lower standards especially considering their recent efforts in relicensing and marketing to be regarded as a "serious" production language.
Rent the runway is a billion dollar company. A bigger issue is the danger of deplatforming and corporate terms of services when it comes to fundamental transport infrastructure.
I thought when they said they use existing wireless communication technology, they meant something like Microsoft's distributed signal processing arrays:
Perhaps using 4G and GSM signal quality as an ad-hoc doppler or metric for precipitation. Is their landing page inaccurate? Are they no different from other companies (besides the good at sales and marketing bit)? They seem to have a lot of big names on their customer list.
Because dependency management for anything C/C++/Python related has often been a massive cluster* * * *. Rust's npm style package management is probably the greatest innovation to have hit low level programming in a long time. Not to mention anything Nvidia related is often closed sourced so you are programming against a black box API by a vendor infamous for their bad driver quality on non-Windows systems.
There isn't enough officially supported first class tooling. Most things that are a given for Rust/JavaScript/Go are community maintained with only one maintainer in Clojure, development is slow and features take a long time to roll out. (Let's not delude ourselves that Webpack level of donations is even possible here) This is a problem with every language that is small but it is particularly problematic with Clojure as it has a commercial company behind it but you get the feeling that they are disinterested in promoting the language and ecosystem beyond selling their database software. Go also espouses "frameworks bad, libraries good" but the biggest difference is that they actually have a strong robust ecosystem of solid libraries while pretty much every Lisp claims to have production-ready libraries but expect you to cobble together the entire kitchen sink from scratch.