Bell labs was pushed aside because Bell Telephone was broken up by the courts. (It's currently a part of Nokia of all things - yeah, despite your storytelling here, it's actually still around :-)

TCC supports 32 (and I think 64?) bit chips, SDCC only targets 8 and 16, so their use cases don't overlap at all as far as I can tell from their homepages...

Anyone else too news-aware and parsed "drone strike" as a verb the first time?

Yeah, "Amazon drone strikes North Texas" definitely evokes a different image.

The solution space of maximum engagement and easily misinterpreted headlines overlaps quite a bit.

“delivery above recommended speed”

Back in the 90s gcc did a three-stage build to isolate the result from weakness in the vendor native compiler (so, vendor builds gcc0, gcc0 builds gcc1, gcc1 builds gcc2 - and you compare gcc2 to gcc1 to look for problems.) It was popularly considered a "self test suite" until someone did some actual profiling and concluded that gcc only needed about 20% of gcc to compile itself :-)

part of why rexec is "historical" is that Guido was looking at some lockdown work and asked (twitter, probably?) the community to come up with attack ideas (on a specific more-locked-down-than-default proposed version.) After a couple of hours, it was clear that "patching the problems" was entirely doomed given how flexible python is and it was better to do something else entirely and stop pretending...

Is it really creeping, though? Pretty sure I first saw the EBNF in the man page more than 20 years ago, it's just how that generation learned to write and discuss parsers. (What I'm getting at is that even if it is, that isn't a sign of it.)

Of course, 20+ years ago a big feature was platform compatibility, and since then we've gone from 10+ to 2ish, so if it's not explicitly enabling retrocomputing, it should be getting simpler, right?

Wasn't the sudo-rs (rust version) already reducing that leverage even further? (and finding interesting bugs, but that's not the point here)

I've committed "--i-meant-that" (for a destroy-the-remote-machine command that normally (without the arg) gives you a message and 10s to hit ^C if you're not sure, for some particularly impatient coworkers. Never ended up being used inappropriately, which is luck (but we never quantified how much luck :-)

I like the timer idea. I do something kinda similar by prompting the user to enter some short random code to continue.

I guess the goal for both is to give the user a chance to get out of autopilot, and avoid up-arrowing and re-executing.

"high friction landing" :)

"lithobraking"

They mention spacex rideshare by name in the article but neglected to link to it: https://www.spacex.com/rideshare advertises really cheap delivery... the lowest price they brag about is "$350k for 50kg to SSO with additional mass at $7k/kg"