Neil Stephenson is predicting way too much of the future.

Tenses are hard. Again:

Stephenson predicted way too much of the present.

He has a knack for being scarily prescient. I didn't expect we would seriously be discussing geoengineering in the 2020's (I gave it until at least the early 2030's, given the technical complexity of building the actual delivery system for any planet-scale intervention), but here we are.

You forgot to bring your pump, spotter, and nail-tipped bat. If you had those I'm sure you would have been able to fight your way through and have your go juice in no more than 15 minutes.

Not in a line of hundreds of people waiting days.

This is a reasonable take.

Perfect security isn't a thing. Hardware/Software engineers are in the business of making compromise harder, but eyes are wide open about "perfection".

Confidential Computing is evolving, and it's steadily gotten much more difficult to bypass the security properties.

Google "intel sgx memory encryption engine". Intel's designers were fully aware of replay attacks, and early versions of SGX supported a hardware-based memory encryption engine with Merkle tree support.

Remember that everything in security (and computation) is a tradeoff. The MEE turned out to be a performance bottleneck, and support got dropped.

There are legitimate choices to be made here between threat models, and the resulting implications on the designs.

There's not much new under the sun when it comes to security/cryptography/whatever (tm), and I recommend approaching the choices designers make with an open mind.

I agree with the sentiment but I'm struggling to see how this qualifies as a legitimate tradeoff to make. I thought the entire point of this feature was to provide assurances to customers that cloud providers weren't snooping on their VMs. In which case physically interdicting RAM in this manner is probably the first approach a realistic adversary would attempt.

I can see where it prevents inadvertent data leaks but the feature was billed as protecting against motivated adversaries. (Or at least so I thought.)

Optimization: Doing nothing is faster than doing something.

Do smart thing make code go brr? No. Stop do dumb thing make code go brr.

Once, when I was a child, I remember the carefully engineered smoke stacks in Sudbury Ontario spilling out acrid smoke sideways, and then straight down into the town.

Back then, Sudbury looked like Mars.

So you're saying when not done properly, emissions have very direct negative impact on the surrounding community. Did I get that right?

No theyre saying that since that day everyone has given up and nothing matters anymore. We all collectively decided that it is OKAY and didnt change a single thing since.

It makes me think that we need more representations of humans on and in our cities, to remind us about who they are for. We can shift a small amount of architectural scale towards the human.

This is actually rather beautiful to look at, covering a full day/night cycle. Well done.

How far are you going to haul that dirt?

Trucks think only trucks can tow.

I tow a 24 foot boat with an Audi Q7. Reasonably frequently, truck guys say something like "You tow that, with THAT?"

Uh, yeah. 7700 pound tow capacity (nearly as much as a base F150). Tows really well.

This is the way.