TreeRingCounter

Notice that I used the word "should", not "does". And, in fact, I am deeply concerned about the war on general purpose computing.

Governments hijacking infrastructure is not remotely the same as governments hijacking personal devices.

My devices should absolutely work on my behalf, and only my behalf, i.e. "do the fighting for me".

My device should serve me, not the EU. If I choose to violate EU emergency alert laws, that's on me.

> On-device scanning is desirable

My own devices should not snitch on me to the government. Obviously this mandatory snooping of all private data is not going to stop at the single most politically salable application; that's just the starting point.

> The best place for tsmc to expand is actually china.

The chinese are vastly worse at fab than americans. Why do you point out that american workers are worse than TW, but neglect to mention that Chinese are even worse?

Not trying to make a judgment about people from USA, CN, TW as a whole - mostly just a function of experience.

I'm not rich and I also want to reduce the amount of taxes I pay to university PMCs.

> nobody really seems to care about locking you out of your own (non-mobile) device

The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices.

> I ask that you care about republicans banning actual physical books from schools as least as much

This seems like a total non-sequitur. Why do you bring this up? In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum. There are also some at-least-as-severe "bans" from the left, like removing Huckleberry Finn due to racial designators that are considered offensive. The pressure to ban these books does not come from republicans.

No, there is an asymmetry you are missing. The "well the dollar has an army behind it" is only extremely narrowly relevant to anything, in that the US can force dollar settlement with the military. This is only necessary because people either don't trust the issuer or don't want to pay seigniorage fees to the US. Neither of these is relevant for btc.

Bitcoin doesn't need petrodollar warfare like the dollar does.

The majority of large institutions are effectively captured by the state, and to a large extent the converse is true as well. Despotic actions (censorship, surveillance, etc) performed on behalf of the state by megacorps cannot be meaningfully distinguished by despotic actions performed by the state itself under the current legal regime.

Absolutely not! Apple's hardware keeps getting better, but their software reliability has been quite bad over the last 10-ish years. A dive computer is a safety-critical machine - an apple watch is not suitable as a primary unit. Maybe if you're doing only very casual dives and you don't mind the risk of having to do an emergency surface, it is fine.

For those curious, 40m is a standard cutoff for rec diving because

A) oxygen partial pressure with compressed air reaches 1.05atm, with 1.2-1.4atm posing a serious risk of oxygen-induced seizures (extremely dangerous)

B) nitrogen partial pressure becomes high enough that it becomes narcotic (every gas gets you high at enough pressure, even noble gasses).

We've gotten to the point where a small 32-bit ARM core IC is cheaper than an 8-bit atmel core IC. I've stopped using 8-bit chips entirely in my designs.

> ISO is basically a linear gain that's done on the sensor.

It's usually not done on the sensor - it's usually done by the ADC that performs sensor readout.

Some cameras use a technology like Aptina-DRPix to dynamically change the capacitance of the sensor FETs, but (as far as I'm aware) this only exists in a simple binary form right now. E.g. one of my cameras reduces sensor gate capacitance when the ISO exceeds 800, but otherwise any ISO changes only affect off-sensor hardware.