That is an exhilarating yet bewildering yet funny read. I’m not sure it’s enough to make me check Bloomberg repeatedly, however I’m shocked at how hip postmodern and stuff they went here. I suppose it’s just op-Ed and they can afford a little silliness now and again, probably by running the opposite of this piece, whatever the hello that would be, an elephant toaster mug singing fígaro?
I don’t know the product, but you could certainly make a “secure iot “ device with C.
Formal verification is again the search term you seek. System states. State machines being a good metaphor.
Array bound checking doesn’t really matter if it’s a statically allocated array of a fixed known size.
Arguably dynamic code vs static code is a bigger issue than language choice, and you see static code here in Hubris, and they explain why, so it’s not just about Rust but about the system design
They picked c++ because it’s a low level capable language that has a reasonably familiar syntax, and their primary training wheels are these simplified arruino libraries.
The actual runtime framework with its “setup” and “loop” methods is a reasonable proxy for an RTOS or the framework an experienced embedded developer would have built as a general runtime system.
There’s nothing wrong with Arduino, except that its SPI SD card library won’t give you good bandwidth but that’s because they wanted it to be an understandable simple access library for SD cards, and you will need to go further if you want reasonable performance.
Your metaphor that “python is the new basic” stems from desktop computers use of BASIC to teach beginning programming skills on largely 8 bit machines.
Once you started with BASIC you presumably moved to learning assembly language, as many of these machines gained c compilers, you might have tried to obtain one.
The entire point of micropython is a friendly introduction or friendly prototype platform or learning platform.
In no way does micro python take advantage of the hardware nor could it ever directly talk to hardware.
One should not treat all programming languages the same as they have different purposes and python is not fit for the purposes a c or c++ is fit for, aka memory allocation etc.
The number one lesson a beginning embedded programmer should take away from arduino is that controlling hardware is about writing specific bit patterns to memory locations. Sorry, this is not something python can do or was designed for.
Deeply embedded means “embedded Linux won’t suffice”
Your car braking system had better not be a micropython program.
There are actual safety proofing systems in which code is proven, and the python interpreter itself will not come close to passing as the complexity is too large.
(Formal verification is the Search term you seek (
Yeah when somebody says something like 'deeply embedded' the platform that comes to my mind is the Dreamcast VMU, which has a cpu that doesn't (AFAICT) yet even have a C compiler. ("C compiler....the idea was abandoned."--https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=25.%20VMU%20Hacking) I doubt something written in Rust would be adequate for such a CPU.
> Once you started with BASIC you presumably moved to learning assembly language, as many of these machines gained c compilers, you might have tried to obtain one.
I would have guessed quite a lot of people went from BASIC to Turbo Pascal. But you're talking 8-bit machines; maybe that was only available for 16-bit and up?
This was a great toilet read, not too long, not too short, although I’m somewhat of a speed reader. Now where did that sea sponge on the end of a stick go? No wait, that’s the toilet brush.
Well, I suppose you can examine gun crime statistics in the rest of the world and see that the US gun death numbers per capita cause of death are higher than anywhere except failed states and war zones. Do I need to cite this obvious state of affairs? I can if this part is really in doubt.
Control is largely possible where there is a political will, case in point being Australia and their rather sudden shift and it’s rather obvious results. Deaths from all guns, legal and otherwise, are down, due to concerted efforts to remove guns from circulation.
I propose that groups like the NRA have fetishized an absurd interpretation of the second amendment.
Here is the second amendment in its entirety:
“ A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”
This in no way establishes a uncontrollable right for every citizen to own an arm. The phrase “well regulated militia” can be argued to death but there is no denying the well regulated part.
We live in a time where fancy legal experts and corrupt Supreme Court justices feel inclined to ignore the literal text of our constitution and insist upon erudite legal interpretations that make a mockery of language itself. That some dare to call themselves conservative is a slap in the face to our heritage.
What to say, legalese was always intended first and foremost as clear precise language, not as a gatekeeper hurdle or occupational shibboleth.
> We live in a time where fancy legal experts and corrupt Supreme Court justices feel inclined to ignore the literal text of our constitution and insist upon erudite legal interpretations that make a mockery of language itself. That some dare to call themselves conservative is a slap in the face to our heritage.
Hear, hear! Anyone with a lick of sense can see that, although the Second Amendment literally says "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", only an NRA stooge could torture those words into meaning the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Why can't they get in line, and King's English with some respect?
The real, common sense approach is to recognize that the prefatory phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State", clearly indicates that the people have no right to keep and bear weapons of war. Can you imagine? And the words 'well regulated' clearly mean that the work of "ensuring the security of a free state" should occur under the watchful eye of the State! You see the founders, always suspicious of the people, wanted to ensure that the State had the means to alter or abolish them, should they become destructive to their true purpose, which is paying taxes. Hence the militias.
Sometimes I lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling and saying the prefatory phrase aloud to myself, again and again. If I do it for long enough, the syllables begin to meld together, and words and their meanings mix and change, and at those times the one, true meaning of the Second Amendment becomes clear--it's clearly all about hunting.
Any other interpretation is a slap in the face to our heritage!
> Well, I suppose you can examine gun crime statistics in the rest of the world and see that the US gun death numbers per capita cause of death are higher than anywhere except failed states and war zones. Do I need to cite this obvious state of affairs? I can if this part is really in doubt.
Interestingly, some of the most violent countries are in South America. Where on earth is the largest diaspora of southern American people located outside of southern America?
> Control is largely possible where there is a political will, case in point being Australia and their rather sudden shift and it’s rather obvious results. Deaths from all guns, legal and otherwise, are down, due to concerted efforts to remove guns from circulation.
Why did the US see the same crime rate drop in the same period despite doing nothing?
> What to say, legalese was always intended first and foremost as clear precise language, not as a gatekeeper hurdle or occupational shibboleth.
Indeed. "Shall not be infringed" is clearly understood in plain English.
And precisely in places like these, such as Niagara Falls, you see coin mining displacing tangible goods production due to both needing cheap electricity and one being more profitable than the other. In this case the market is not thinking very clearly in long term priorities, nor is infinite development of hydro and geothermal possible. Actually, this is about realizing that we live on a finite planet with finite resources that a finite amount of humans can finitely exploit finite parts of before the whole thing goes catawumpus.
POW and current cryptocurrency systems are thoughtlessly and needlessly wasteful and represent inelegant architecture and brute force hackery like lightnig to correct what ultimately isn’t scalable: blockchain ledgers and fast transaction speeds vs centralization and speed. Look at DNS, for example, and how slow that is, and it’s architecture amd full vs partial copies of ledgers and jeiraexhical canonical lookups etc.
Bitcoin proof-of-work difficulty must always increase, the electrical needs are always ever-growing.
While you claim that incentivizing electrical production is what POW does, in reality it is a large drain of electricity on a finite electrical grids capacity and it DOES take away from other uses of electricity LIKE aluminum smelting or running hospitals. It is an active and actual source of pollution and uses more electricity than most countries. You can’t handwave this away or insist upon your rhetorical framework when. The apparent physical real world consequences of POW cryptocurrency cannot be evaded or ignored.
The difficulty does and has (in the short term) decreased when the amount of hashpower being used goes down.
Presumably if the price went down by a substantial chunk and stayed down for a while, the hashpower would also decrease, and so the difficulty would also decrease.
Also, if electricity prices went up, or if CO2 emissions were taxed, then hashpower would decrease, and the difficulty would go down in turn.
Bitcoin difficulty does not always increase and needs not always increase.
As for the rest... so what? It uses a lot of electricity and there is some pollution---but a lot of bitcoin mining is done with hydro or geothermal (and will be nuclear if bitcoin continues to grow), so, so what about some pollution?
Some mining is powered sustainably. And for some of THAT power it is true that it wouldn't be used for residential anyway. But for the majority of BTC's power needs the sources are not renewable.
So there's a simple question: how much value do we get out of this tech per CO2e it emits and per ton of e-waste it creates. And AFAICT the answer is: not enough to keep tolerating it in a time where humanity as a whole is seriously worried about climate change for the first time ever.
If you can magically move _all_ the miners to sites with excess renewable electricity and permanently slash the hash rate by 99.9% then maybe it can be tolerated. Until then I would welcome more China-style crackdowns on mining activity across the world.
I can't tolerate the global exploitation of non-ruling people in every nation by their rulers via fiat money manipulation. (And every nation calling itself a "democracy" is actually a "bureaucracy.")
If you aren't upset about this, you probably haven't studied it. I say that in a spirit of helpfulness. Fiat money grossly distorts all of humanity's economic output and therefore retards our progress on all things, including fixing climate problems. Just one example: The US is becoming a nation of renters because enormous funds are buying up the houses with fiat money they borrow nearly for free.
Fortunately, with bitcoin, we can do something about that, without (eventually) harming the environment.
