Of course on my Linux laptop Chrome wouldn’t update automatically either through the browser or from the command line

Can you be more specific? What are you running on the command line and what is the result? Normally, you would install Chrome via a package manager, and that package manager would be responsible for updating it.

Using memory efficiently can give you a 10-100x win.

Yes, it can. But why is this exclusive to assembly? What are you planning to do with your memory use in assembly that is not achievable in C++ or other languages? Memory optimizations are largely about data structures and access patterns. This is available to you in C++.

Also, if you don’t want 90% of the craziness of C++ then why not just code in C++ without 90% of the craziness? As far as I know what’s what a lot of performance-critical projects do. They operate with a feature whitelist/blacklist. Don’t tell me you have the discipline to work entirely in assembly and the knowledge to beat the compiler at the low level stuff that is not available to you in C++ but you can’t manage avoiding the costly abstractions.

I think it speaks volumes how rarely you hear about programs being programmed in assembly. It’s always this one game and never any meaningful way to prove that it would gain performance by not being written in C++ when using a modern compiler.

You are very unlikely to write assembly that is more optimized than what a modern compiler could produce for anything longer than a trivial program. I don’t know if it made sense at the time of the original RCT, but OpenRCT would definitely not benefit from being written in assembly.

Not even close. The paper is questioning LLMs ability to reason. The article talks about fundamental flaws of LLMs and how we might need different approaches to achieve reasoning. The benchmark is only used to prove the point. It is definitely not the headline.

You would still not be allowed to to redistribute it though. Others would not be able to build your code and distribute binaries either. Just the act of creating a fork is not enough to create a viable project.

systemd is insecure, bloated, etc

[Citation needed]

If a distro that doesn’t use systemd ends up booting much faster or being much easier to configure, maybe those are features you care about. But switching away from systemd in this case is merely an implementation detail. What you’re really doing is moving from a distro to another one that serves you better.

Otherwise, the choice of init system has very little impact to the average user. Maybe it’s worth it to switch init systems if you hate the syntax of unit files and/or the interface of systemctl/journalctl and you use them often enough to warrant the effort. The people who want to use alternatives to systemd without having such a practical issue with it are doing so for philosophical reasons.