> Would any of these reveals actually be "stunning", frankly I've assumed the worst for so long that the response will be more like "wow, that all they're doing?"

You’re far more cynical than the typical citizen, who Ryder is addressing.

> If you can't move things via water in wartime, you don't have an empire.

Exactly, the feeble American shipbuilding industry has been an existential risk waiting to explode for a generation. But corruption and profits speak louder than national security here.

This tracks with my experience and seems reasonable, yes. I tend to SoA all the things, sometimes to my coworkers’ amusement/annoyance.

I don’t know much about raytracing but it’s probably tricky to orchestrate all those asin calls so that the input and output memory is aligned and contiguous. My uneducated intuition is that there’s little regularity as to which pixels will take which branches and will end up requiring which asin calls, but I might be wrong.

Historically, the Protestant and Catholic churches invested very heavily in liberal arts education in America; initially, more than the state did. The university (and even the liberal arts college) as an institution isn’t fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.