> Note: The Python runtime does not enforce function and variable type annotations. They can be used by third party tools such as type checkers, IDEs, linters, etc.
Then yes, Django model definitions are more like Java types in that they error if you try to use an incorrect type. You can't just ignore them like with type hints.
They also try to be 1:1 with database types, so for the most part any additional validation added on top of Django would be something you had to do anyway.
FWIW, one python project I'm working on uses an obscure Framework, and ORM. I was contemplating to convert it to FastAPI+Pydantic, however the amount of effort needed was no different than rewriting the whole project.
I already use type annotations with Python for use within my IDE. It's just all tiring garbage. Java is already almost a scripting language and I can actually use a shared heap, etc. also I have some core code in java I use in the desktop app I want to reuse in the server. Right now I transpile that core code to TS and then JS to use client side, but I'd rather just have everything in Java.
Or they are shocked. Most companies I’ve been at, iOS version support is N-1. After that, we wouldn’t lock you out unless there was technical reason but no testing or support was done.
iOS ecosystem has always been like this since Apple supports phones for a long time.
Yea, I have no problem with them no longer issuing updates supporting iOS 15. It’s an old OS on an old device, and I get it: devs gotta move on. But don’t deliberately cause existing apps to stop working. No other app on my device behaves this way, and this is almost unheard of in the iOS ecosystem. This is where they went overboard. I looked and I’m surprised I couldn’t find an AppStore guideline prohibiting this.
My guess is technical reason drove decision not “Lolz, no more iOS 15”. Looking at our telemetry data, less then 1% of devices that run our B2B app are iOS 15 or older. If we ran into iOS 15 issue, we would lock them out as well.
It amazes me the money that brick and mortar businesses would spend to increase customers by a tenth of a percent, yet online businesses have no problem simply deciding that 1% of their clients are disposable. They would rather develop some new shiny feature that won't bring any new clients, than continue supporting a device that was sold new three years ago.
Break? It's practically enshrined in the law, seeing as any given bank can only have one credit card affiliated with it. So if I'm e.g. a normal National Bank client, I get to have a Visa card or no card at all.
I suppose online banks could change things a bit, but without that, introducing a new credit card provider is practically impossible.
> any given bank can only have one credit card affiliated with it.
Is that true? Is that an actual law, or some anticompetitive terms&conditions from Visa and Mastercard? If anything feels like the law should ban this kind of anti competitive behavior.
It doesn't appear to be true if you check websites of Canadian banks (e.g. CIBC, RBC, BMO, Scotia…) they all offer Visa and Mastercard, and Scotia even also offers Amex as well.
Onedrive is not a core windows component. It’s not a dependency of other applications. It’s just a Dropbox replacement.
Windows works, and has always worked, just fine without onedrive. Microsoft just doesn’t want you to know that, because they are obsessed with the idea of upselling you on subscription based cloud services.
There’s actually a few different glibc replacements available for Linux.
And if you think OneDrive is essential for Windows then I’d suggest you do a little reading on the history of Microsoft and how they falsely claim dependencies on their own software stacks. Especially the court cases around debundling IE4 with Win98, and DR-DOS vs Windows 95.
Well, "technically" - it wasn't a false claim. It WAS dependent on IE and other things. It didn't have to be dependent - MS made it that way on purpose, so things would stop working without (even though the dependency didn't need to be baked in).
It's akin to adding webview to your application to display a text file, even though you never would display an HTML file. It could have been done another way, but it wasn't.
Except that it was demonstrated that IE could be removed from Windows 98. So Microsoft then claimed that Windows ran slower without IE. A judge (because this whole saga went to court) argued that Microsofts video evidence proving that point was falsified and so Microsoft later also dropped their slowness claim too.
No, it wasn't. There was w98lite and such where you could replace WIndows 98's (i)explore.exe/shell32.dll with a Windows 95 one and yet the rest of the software just ran like nothing, while being able to run IE in a standalone way.
Ignoring the fact that you're comparing a cloud storage client to what is essentially a kernel wrapper that all software depends on, you actually can remove glibc without breaking things. You just also have to install another libc (say, musl) and replace your software that targets glibc with software that targets musl, or install a glibc -> musl compatibility layer (gcompat).
So, yeah. If you actually know enough about libcs to want to get rid of glibc for a real reason, you can do it without breaking things. If you just want to go around and start deleting core system dependencies (which I think is very silly to put a cloud storage client in that bucket, regardless of the brand of cloud storage) without replacing them, then chaos seems to be the goal, and maybe order is the "broken" state for that machine :P
It seems you've taken a roundabout way to arrive at innovation.
It's interesting because this is something that makes programming feel like a "bullshit job" to some: I'm not creating anything, I'm just assembling libraries/tools/framework. It certainly doesn't feel as rewarding, though the economic consensus (based on the salaries we get) is that value most definitely is being generated. But you could say the same of lumberjacks, potters, even the person doing QA on an assembly line, all in all it's not very innovative.
That's the thing with innovation though, once you've done it, it's done. We don't need to write assembly to make games, thanks to the sequential innovation of game engines (and everything they are built on).
Samme with LLMs and Bitcoin: now that they exist, we can (and did) build up on them. But that'll never make a whole new paradigm, at least not rapidly.
I think our economic system simply doesn't give the vast majority of people the chance to innovate. All the examples you've given (and others I can think of) represented big risks (usually in time invested) for big rewards. Give people UBI (or decent social safety nets) and you'll find that many more people can afford to innovate, some of which will do so in CS.
I have to go back to work now, some libraries need stitched together.
Skill required near zero? I'm approaching 15 years as a developer and React is still completely foreign to me. I'd need days full-time just to learn one version of it, not to mention every prerequisite skill.
And what do you mean by "real" value? Carrots have value because we can eat them, React apps have value because they communicate information (or do other things app do).
Or do you mean artistic value? We can agree, if you like, that SPAs are not as much "art" as RCT. But... who cares?
I know it's not your main point, but I think most of us big sci-fi fans agree that "soft" vs "hard" sci-fi is a false dichotomy. Who knows what is and what will be possible? Just because the technology is wrong doesn't mean the idea is not interesting.
I am a big sci-fi fan and I disagree here. I think there is a difference between soft and hard sci-fi, but that difference is more about how consistency with the rules is treated. Soft sci-fi can be thought of as fantasy with a future setting, while hard scifi sticks to it's own world rules tightly, and often explores the consequences of these rules and the characters are just a means for that. (Relatedly, I think there can be hard and soft fantasy as well)
Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi. His novels explore some very far out ideas in terms of how the world may work, but he sticks to the consistency and really explores the politics and consequences of that universe.
Clarke also does this, but to a somewhat lesser extent. In many of his stories, the world and its rules are the main character, and the actual beings are the supporting characters.
> Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi.
I'd also suggest a good look at Baxter's books and Robert L Forward's too.
I've jokingly called Forward's books science papers with a plot. Timemaster starts out with:
> There exist semieducated but obstinate people who have raised the concept of strict local causality to godhead, and attempt to use such words as "obviously" and "it only makes sense that ..." in an attempt to "prove" that their version of causality cannot be violated, and that any sort of time machine is logically impossible. From my reading of the scientific literature, they are wrong. If I receive a letter from this sort of person complaining about the "impossibility" of the time machines in this novel, I will throw the letter in the nearest wastebasket... unless the letter is accompanied by a reprint of a scientific paper published in Physical Review (or any other reputable, refereed scientific journal), written by the person writing the letter, which proves that the paper "Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves" by Friedman, Morris, Novikov, Echeverria, Klinkhammer, Thorne, and Yurtsever, is erroneous.
My take on it is more of a "what is the focus of the story?" Is it the soft sciences? Psychology and sociology and politics ... and the Foundation.
Or is it one more of challenges met with the STEM disciplines of physics and astronomy and biology?
It's also not a "it is either a this or that." Some books can be both and I think that Clarke is a prime example of this. 2001 is as much of a story of psychology as it is about astronomical distances and the ship needed to accomplish that goal. The Songs of Distant Earth is about two cultures clashing ... with the real problems of engineering a ship to travel (it's a softer story than it is hard).
Protector by Niven likewise scores high on both the soft and hard scales.
Foster tends to higher on the 'soft' side of the scale, though sometimes it edges up there with some real biology and the limits of technology are sometimes real limits.
And so, it is "are the challenges that the characters surmount solved with tools developed from the soft or hard sciences?"
"Use the Force Luke" is not a hard science solution.
I share a similar view to you on what is hard or soft science fiction, but it can be tricky to pin down. Star Trek to me is somewhat firm (in between) as the technology may as well be magic (Heisenberg compensators), but it tries to be consistent with the scientific rules within the show for the most part. Revelation Space more or less feels like a universe operating off the same principles as ours with a more reasonable assumption about the future (hard). Then you have things like Star Wars that are fun, but so ridiculous as to very much be on the soft side.
ST:TOS and ST:TNG era seemed to deal with some hard sci-fi ideas. Nothing I've watched in the last 20 years seemed hard sci-fi. Most of them seem to be "how can we work some action sequence into this story". Admittedly I haven't watched them all and I'm sure there are moments of hard sci-fi but my impression is it's devolved into space opera.
Star Trek was always meant to be space opera, but yes... ironically TOS, considered the campy black sheep of the franchise now, is the one series that at least attempted to be harder than others would, with input from actual engineers and science fiction writers of the time. The episode with the introduction of the Romulan cloaking device, for instance, hinged on the actual laws of thermodynamics (a perfect cloak is impossible - it must be radiating something somewhere.) In modern Trek, they'd just something something subspace some bullshit.
It helped that Gene Roddenberry was in the Navy and that Trek was basically The Cold War In Space which is actually more of an interesting dynamic to me than Starfleet being basically invincible and everything running on space magic.
Lewis Carroll, writing as Charles Dodgson, in a review of a new university belfry tower described it as best viewed from such distance that perspective dwindled it to a point.
I agree that there's a clear difference between hard and soft science fiction. But in my mind, it's "hard" science fiction if the world is entirely consistent with physical reality as we know it.
There's basically little to no truly hard sci fi under that definition. Even the Martian fudges things to make the storm happen as the plot needs it to. I can't think of any other recent movies or books that fit your criteria, though I'm sure there are some books at least.
There has always been a lot less hard sci-fi than soft, true, and it used to be more common than it is now.
But the real dividing line in my mind isn't quite as stark as I made it sound. There's still a gray area. Unusual events that exist purely for plot purposes don't disqualify anything, for instance.
The differentiator I have in mind is more basic: if the story involves things that are simply not possible, it's not hard sci-fi. If it involves things that are very unlikely, but still within the realm of possibility, it can certainly still be "hard". Same if it involves things/effects that don't (as far as we know) exist, but wouldn't break the laws of physics if they did.
Off the top of my head, I'd count Asimov's Foundation, Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, Niven's Ringworld, Gibson's Neuromancer, Bear's Darwin's Radio, and Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Those are literally just morality plays with no scientific grounding whatsoever. The "positronic brains" behind the robots only exist because Asimov thought it sounded cool and futuristic.
Your understanding of the terminology sounds a lot different than mine. I always interpreted "hard" and "soft" to simply be references to "hard science" and "soft science."
In other words, I thought "hard sci-fi" means fiction that deals mostly with fictional facts in fields like physics, astronomy, geology, and biology, while "soft sci-fi" means fiction that deals mostly with fictional facts in fields like psychology, economics, and political science.
Yes this is a reasonable way to misunderstand given the way we refer to “hard sciences” and “soft sciences”, but it does not map to the terms “hard scifi” and “soft scifi” in common usage.
It’s not exactly about rules consistency either as stated by the GP, though that’s part of it. It’s more about strong consistent application of scientific principles even theoretical or untested principles.
This is in contrast to futuristic fantasy with no real focus on the science. But futuristic or space fantasy can be very consistent just like magical systems in fantasy can be very consistent. Hard scifi has to be constrained by plausible consistent science and that science is typically a main character in the story, or even THE main character.
I don't know if it's a misunderstanding, or if usage is just very mixed and inconsistent. Both Wikipedia articles provide both definitions, and both claim that usage is sometimes contradictory and not at all rigorous.
> The complementary term soft science fiction, formed by analogy to the popular distinction between the "hard" (natural) and "soft" (social) sciences,[6] first appeared in the late 1970s. Though there are examples generally considered as "hard" science fiction such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, built on mathematical sociology,[7] science fiction critic Gary Westfahl argues that while neither term is part of a rigorous taxonomy, they are approximate ways of characterizing stories that reviewers and commentators have found useful.[8]
> The term soft science fiction was formed as the complement of the earlier term hard science fiction.
> The earliest known citation for the term is in "1975: The Year in Science Fiction" by Peter Nicholls, in Nebula Award Stories 11 (1976). He wrote "The same list reveals that an already established shift from hard sf (chemistry, physics, astronomy, technology) to soft sf (psychology, biology, anthropology, sociology, and even [...] linguistics) is continuing more strongly than ever."
I'll throw out one I expect I'll get lots of disagreement over. Firefly (the series, not the movie) seemed pretty "soft sci-fi" to me. They could have changed the setting to people in a Winnebago towing a trailer going from city to city on Earth and nothing would really have changed in at least the first 7 episodes.
Good one. I think it's generally considered a Western in a sci-fi setting. They did try to stick to self-consistent rules and a realistic "feel" with the technology, physics, special effects and so on (no sound in space, etc) which would put it on the harder side of the spectrum perhaps. But since the sci-fi elements barely interact with the story, and so there's no deeply-considered exploration of how those sci-fi elements are consequential to the story / characters / society of that world, it could also be considered soft.
> I think it's generally considered a Western in a sci-fi setting.
This is how I think of it as well. I actually don't really consider it science fiction, it just uses the scenery. Although I equally wouldn't say anyone who calls it "science fiction" is wrong.
That brings up another thing: I think a story can be science fiction without involving anything futuristic or space-related at all.
For me it’s soft sci-fi because the show was about the people. Space was just the backdrop.
Whereas something like Foundation is about the exploring the concept of psycho-history and galactic civilisations and the people are there to move that story forward.
It looks to me like both definitions are widely used. The first paragraph on Wikipedia claims that the term "hard sci-fi" was coined first, then "soft science fiction" was coined specifically to make the distinction between hard science and soft science. That paragraph also notes that there is no rigorous distinction, and mentions Foundation as a classic example.
I strongly disagree, I don't think the "soft-science fiction" and "hard-science fiction" meanings are widely used; if you use these meanings often then you'll probaby very frequently cause confusion and prompt discussions like this one. Almost everybody is using the other meanings, at least in recent years.
I think this is a vast oversimplification of how knowledge works. Like yes, no one knows with perfect certainty what the laws of physics or whatever else are, but that hardly means _anything_ is plausible or worth entertaining.
I amuse myself with the foundations of physics and I'm so sure that FTL is impossible that I find science fiction that uses the idea almost tragically silly, simply unwilling to grapple with the limitations imposed on us by the vastness of space.
I agree, but also, it's really hard to have sci-fi without FTL. I feel that necessitates it being somewhat soft, but having every other character die when someone travels to another planet means you're basically tied to a space story without space travel.
I think you mean solar system. While nobody has traveled to Mars, it is reasonable to suggest that is only because we haven't tried hard enough yet. There are problems in the way, but they seem like engineering things that we will figure out if we try. It is debatable if we can make a self supporting colony on Mars, but it getting there seems perfectly possible in reach. Venus is harder (getting there is easier, but reaching the surface is questionable), but we could probably do it.
Getting just the farthest planet in our solar system though is getting close to a lifetime. The nearest star to earth is 4 light years away, we have no hope of reaching it in a lifetime with any technology we know works (there are nuclear options that seem promising but we don't know if they work)
The milky way is 100k lightyears. Not possible to cross without FTL.
Its really not hard! I am with GP in that most scifi with FTL comes off as silly, perhaps fun and well written but not to be taken seriously in the sense of its worldbuilding being immersive or intriguing.
Almost all my favorite books almost exclusively occupy settings with laws of physics that are internally consistent and believable and therefore have no FTL. See "The Expanse", "Three Body", "Blindsight", "The Sunflower Cycle", "Rendezvous with Rama" and too many others to name.
Mild spoilers for The Expanse:
It does have FTL travel, but it is presented as alien and has a limited impact on the day-to-day lives of characters. I get the feeling this was done for narrative reasons primarily, but it helps with "sci-fi hardness".
Generally I think the impact of instant communication and near-instant travel (or lack thereof) is not talked about enough. Most sci-fi stories derive from the present day, and keep this aspect of today (as do many fantasy stories, interestingly), but it's a narrative choice with large impacts.
Yeah I guess it has FTL but its not really FTL in the same way I think GP meant. It could just as easily be simulation or something else. Its not warp or hyperdrive and it doesnt really violate the internal consistency of the world building since its totally alien clarketech
Does it? The sophons are capped at light speed though they communicate FTL. The whole curvature propulsion I thought had the ships moving at light speed, not exceeding it. Three Body has plenty of clarketech but most of the drama comes from it being grounded in something kind of like actual the laws of physics.
It is largely the premise for at least the beginning of Speaker for the Dead where the main character lives essentially a digital nomadic life traveling at almost light speed planet-to-planet. He knows he can never go back to any place he's been as everyone died of old age as soon as he left. It has FTL communication though.
See, I find this to be the core of what is wrong with the idea of "hard" sci-fi. The technology we have today is magic to a medieval peasant. Just because the explanation of how something works gets disproven, doesn't mean the invention itself won't happen.
Take FTL travel for instance. Sure, lightspeed is a hard limit, but we don't know yet whether wormholes are possible, which meanns warp drives are not impossible too.
But more than that, it's the effect that tech has on people that makes good sci-fi, not the tech itself. In this sense, even the technically impossible remains relevant. For instance, we'll (likely) never meet aliens, but most of us will one day be confronted with the themes of aliens stories, e.g. understanding people beyond our culture, dealing with the unfathomable, grieving our place in the universe, etc. "Hard"ness is just aesthetics.
A major part of the hard soft dichotomy is how the tech is treated and talked about in the story too though, not just the level of the tech. You could make a hard-scifi version of Star Wars, you'd just be expected to provide more justification and narrative around hyperdrives than you get in the current soft scifi version.
When I was making the list above, I actually went and looked at my bookshelf of ancient sci-fi paperbacks. C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy is a nominally “science fiction” work that I excluded and would consider soft sci-fi. It’s set in space with aliens, but is really a fantastic story (in this case an allegory) that makes basically no attempt to extrapolate or connect with hard science as we understand it today.
A funny one is the Pern series, which starts out as a sword and dragon fantasy series, but then like 10 books in we find out it is actually hard sci-fi (!) with space ships, orbits, genetic engineering, computers, etc. But there is still that telepathic connection with the dragons…
>I think most of us big sci-fi fans agree that "soft" vs "hard" sci-fi is a false dichotomy. Who knows what is and what will be possible?
It isn't about whether a technology is possible. "Soft SF" is SF where the actual scientific details don't matter. It is about people, their cultures, and their emotions. And really, just a metaphor for our own society. For example a story about how a future VR technology is addictive and causes people to interact less in real life could be just a metaphor for real life smartphone/Internet addiction. The story doesn't need to (and probably doesn't) explain how the VR tech works because it doesn't matter. "Hard SF" actually is based on actual science, and that is the focus of the story. It isn't that one is better than another, but they are different.
I'm currently starting a publishing company in a niche Canadian market.
What people in these comments (and really, most places on the internet) fail to grasp is the role of the publisher as a curator and editor.
Unlike your friends, the editor is not your friend. They don't have a stake in your ego, they won't sugarcoat it beyond the veneer of professionalism. You need an editor who is not your friend, too say no to you. No, you shouldn't start your book with this cliché. No, you shouldn't have your character meandering aimlessly. No, you shouldn't use whedonisms. Exceptions apply, of course, but when the editor is your publisher and not your friend, "shouldn't" becomes "can't". Usually that involves saying no to 99% of manuscripts coming through the door. And this is how an okay story becomes a great book. Your editor, having read more books than you in their segment, knows the difference... usually.
All manuscripts are at least a little bit bad, some books aren't. As you can tell, I'm no fan of self-publishing, I just don't believe anyone can be objective enough with their own baby.
Now... I've read my fair share of bad books, especially recently. The publisher/editor is to blame 95% of the time. My theory is that being rigorous takes time, which is always in short supply, and skill. I believe people tend not to stay in the same role for too long anymore, lest they lose out financially. Which is totally fair, but skill (and the chutzpah to say "no") takes a while to develop, years really. And no one has "years" for anything.
Except, of course, all the people in the industry who don't mind being poor. And people making bank, I suppose, but these are so few as to be statistically insignificant.
> Unlike your friends, the editor is not your friend.
It is true. I would like to qualify it by saying "At the beginning, the editor is not your friend." A friendship, even very strong one, can be developed along the time, based on mutual respect and appreciation, temperament match, etc. Even then, a good editor will still be professional and be honest when they edit the writer's draft.
A good book may not be a "successful" book, especially in literary fiction, since the post talks about novels. The reverse can be true as well. It happens often that the editor tells the author it is a good book, and the publisher allocates resources to marketing it, schedules book tours, etc. while at the same time both the writer's agent and the editor/publisher expect the book may sell only ~2,000 copies. The target audience are expected to be other writers, a subset of avid literature readers, etc. They don't expect it will earn back the advance paid to the author. The publishers have portfolios and long term visions. Of course, this doesn't apply to small publishers, most of which cannot afford it.
It's funny because I expect most of us do it for the art, but artistic merit doesn't pay the rent. This is why many smaller publishers have "locomotives" that are guaranteed to sell so they can publish "good" literature books that won't sell. Don't know about the big American ones, seeing as they're flooding the market I assume they're just playing a numbers game, let God sort them out...
True, I guess most artistic industries must work this way, since we all know that about 95% of all art is terrible (and that was before AI).
I feel like there's a difference between a company and an industry, though in the end I suppose it's all a sort of natural selection. Good (or rather, "fit") authors publish second books and third books, while good companies get to exist into second, third years etc.
If I were writing a book I’d definitely consider a real publisher but before that I’d be tempted to pay someone independent to be an editor and be bad cop. A student or remote worker with literary chops would do that as a first pass. Pay them to tell me what about my book sucks before wasting an editors time with a submission.
I'm not sure to what degree I'd trust a student or random online gig worker to give a really useful editorial option. Copy-editing or maybe technical edit? Possibly. I used an intern who worked for a magazine editor I knew to copyedit a book once and that worked fine. But I wasn't looking for substantive structural work. In fairness, I didn't really get that when I went through a publisher either. The second edition was IMO a lot better but that was because I personally came to see where the first edition was stronger and weaker.
The idea would be to get feedback from someone who isn’t partial to you and who hopefully has an eye for decent writing. You wouldn’t take what they say as gospel but it’d be enlightening.
It’s like letting someone tech savvy but not partial try the UI/UX of an app. They’ll see things you don’t and get confused in places you don’t.
This reminds me of some of the "cold war scares" that I've read about:
> "If MAD happens (ie USA/RU nuclear bombing each other), then the axis of the earth would permanently be altered and every human on the planet would not be able to survive"
I guess the modern era can look at that with some scrutiny; but 40, 50 years ago, that could've been a real fear?
Not really, the answer you are referring to is for completely stopping the moon by delivering enough energy to cancel out its current kinetic energy, of the entire moon!
We don't need to stop the moon to change its orbit. With careful and deliberate adjustments via bombing and letting Earth gravity do its job, we could alter its orbit by adding to its force vector instead of trying to negate it.
Applying millions of nuclear bombs to either slow down or speed up the Moon by the same amount will change its orbit by a similar magnitude in terms of the sheer change in energy.
The energy required to achieve a specific Δv is the same whether you are accelerating or decelerating. This is because energy change associated with velocity (ΔE) in a conservative system is dependent on the square of the velocity change (Δv^2), regardless of direction.
Potential energy is twice the kinetic energy in a stable orbit. Changing the orbit by epsilon/r would require roughly U*epsilon/r energy. Which means that a tsar bomb would only move the moon distance to earth by 10^-10
We are already doing that. A orbital mechanics maneuver used in deep space spaceflight called a gravity assist or slinghshot trades a cosmic object's kinetic energy to change a spacecraft's flight path. Since that takes a large amount of energy at the speeds spacecraft go, an equal amount of energy must get subtracted from that object. Of course, the same amount of energy that's very significant for a spacecraft is meaninglessly small for an object such as a natural satellite like the Moon or a planet as Jupiter. So if you slingshot around Jupiter you are altering Jupiter's orbit around the sun an almost infinitesimally small amount, but you are altering it.
But of course, the question was asking for a significantly altered orbit, which this most definitely isn't.
Solar-powered railgun accelerating rocks to lunar escape velocity in directions chosen to make the desired delta-v. Speed the moon up or slow it down or change whatever other orbital elements you please.
This would work better to change the orbit of a small asteroid. For the moon it would take (a lot) longer.
