I was born and raised in Vancouver, and have deep personal ties to the junior mining industry - I worked for two decades as an exploration geologist, and my Dad has been in the industry since the early 1970s.
Bre-X was brutal. I was barely into my teens, but I recall - and have spoken at length with my Dad and many others - about how he was out of work for several years after the scandal. Investment completely dried up. Industry recovery took years, and was accompanied by the implementation [1] of fairly stringent disclosure rules, which define reporting standards to this day. Nonetheless, scams are still commonplace, and pretty much everyone I know has a story or two of a shifty promoter pulling the rug out.
Mineral exploration is a tough business. You can't just sudo apt install a drill rig! The logistics and expense of even small exploration programs are a bit insane. Crews head out to some of the most remote corners the world has to offer, moving hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of heavy equipment, fuel, food, and camp gear on to site for just a few months of near-constant work, then moving (hopefully most of) it out again. Hundreds of tons of rock and soil samples are collected, by drilling, by walking the ground, by trenching; these samples are shipped out to processing and assay labs. Some properties have the benefit of road access - deep-wilderness, often decommissioned logging roads - but many are accessible by helicopter only. It's an adventure, but it is also very demanding and taxing. There is very little year-to-year consistency, even in bull markets.
Sixty to seventy years ago, the majors - mining companies with actual mines and annual revenue - did the lion's share of exploration work. Over the years, however, the majors have divested almost entirely from risky grassroots exploration, leaving it almost entirely up to junior explorers who must raise their capital from investors.
I disagree. This abstract is a mouthful, no doubt, but it's a highly information-dense mouthful, and it does its job well.
Along the spectrum between intra-disciplinary academic communication on one end and public-sphere science communication on the other, the abstract is and should be just above the level of the paper it's abstracting. It's meant to be a technical summary for academics, and should not be dialed down for the sake of non-technical consumption. This one - speaking as a geologist with a long academic history - reads quite well, I think.
In contrast, the sentence you propose should be the output of responsible and effective scientific communicators working closer to the public-sphere end of the spectrum, say, at the level of phys.org, here on hackernews, etc.
I can empathize with your take, but my sentiment is the polar opposite. I like the toolchain shuffle - exploring this, trying out that - but I always, always come back to Sublime specifically because they have not implemented major changes. I _deeply_ appreciate the fact that it has remained essentially the same for years, and I very sincerely hope that it doesn't change much going forward. This boringness is what keeps me coming back, and is what I'm paying for.
Sublime has become my refuge from the crap that other editors are trying to cram in to every available nook and cranny. Zed was pleasant at first blush, but the way that AI is central to the platform was a huge turn-off and disabling that (and a few other things) was not intuitive. Same goes for many other editors I've tried over the years.
I would like to see more activity in plugin development and maintenance, but always peripheral to the core Sublime experience. Give me a stable, quiet, boring platform and let me choose the features and noise!
I used the Runestone book How To Think Like A Computer Scientist (I don't see any difference between the linked book and the Runestone one); completed the full book front to back, and have a deep appreciation for it.
I didn't have any interest at all in programming or computers until my mid-30s, when a colleague in grad school showed me some Python tricks that completely replaced a set of absolutely hideous Excel spreadsheets. My interest was sparked, but I struggled - there was some kind of mental barrier I just couldn't hop over in order to make sense of programming language syntax. This book got me over that hump and sent me on my way. Several years later, I've switched careers and work with Python professionally, and in my spare/hobby time I work on a variety of C, Rust, and Zig projects.
What I liked: there is no barrier to entry. For a person with only the most basic/cursory understanding of, and no real interest in, computers, this was huge: no need to install, get an editor set up, no need to understand anything about the shell, PATH issues, or how to run a script or work with environments or anything like that. All of that came later. I liked the CodeLens diagrams a lot, the visualization was critical to that 'aha!' moment. I think the book is well organized; the flow from chapter to chapter, concept to concept, made a lot of sense to me. Overall, the book gave me a sense of 'making progress', challenging me while keeping things light and fun and interesting.
I don't have any complaints. This book got me to the point where I was just skilled enough to automate basic and useful things, and interested enough to start diving in properly and learn how computers really work. Since completing it, I've been learning pretty much nonstop.
Bre-X was brutal. I was barely into my teens, but I recall - and have spoken at length with my Dad and many others - about how he was out of work for several years after the scandal. Investment completely dried up. Industry recovery took years, and was accompanied by the implementation [1] of fairly stringent disclosure rules, which define reporting standards to this day. Nonetheless, scams are still commonplace, and pretty much everyone I know has a story or two of a shifty promoter pulling the rug out.
Mineral exploration is a tough business. You can't just sudo apt install a drill rig! The logistics and expense of even small exploration programs are a bit insane. Crews head out to some of the most remote corners the world has to offer, moving hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of heavy equipment, fuel, food, and camp gear on to site for just a few months of near-constant work, then moving (hopefully most of) it out again. Hundreds of tons of rock and soil samples are collected, by drilling, by walking the ground, by trenching; these samples are shipped out to processing and assay labs. Some properties have the benefit of road access - deep-wilderness, often decommissioned logging roads - but many are accessible by helicopter only. It's an adventure, but it is also very demanding and taxing. There is very little year-to-year consistency, even in bull markets.
Sixty to seventy years ago, the majors - mining companies with actual mines and annual revenue - did the lion's share of exploration work. Over the years, however, the majors have divested almost entirely from risky grassroots exploration, leaving it almost entirely up to junior explorers who must raise their capital from investors.
There are lots of fascinating tales:
- How to Get Rich in a Gold Rush: https://youtu.be/yW5iGLLgzRc?si=Pk_9eZF0vBEjF2f4 two-part youtube documentary on the VSE
- Gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_(2016_film) great movie starring Matthew McConaughey, loosely based on the Bre-X scandal
- The Big Score: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2370656) excellent book that covers the story of the Voisey's Bay discovery in Labrador
- Fire Into Ice: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1166624.Fire_into_Ice_Ch...
- Barren Lands: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22322947-barren-lands
[1] https://www.cim.org/news/2019/how-cim-helped-an-industry-roc...