meekrohprocess

Interrupts and exceptions can happen at any point in a program's execution on a microcontroller, and they are free to modify memory and peripheral registers.

>Load <register>

>Modify register in memory

>>Interrupt happens and changes <register>

>Write incorrect value back to <register>.

These sorts of bugs can be pernicious to debug, and they are easy for novice developers to create.

Nice. The XTensa cores always felt weird.

Too bad they only included the I/M/C extensions - no floats, vectors, or atomics. And USB would be nice (nevermind, it has USB :D).

But it's still very exciting. Maybe there'll be less conflict between ARM/XTensa/PIC32/etc. cores in the coming years.

Eh, it's an investment.

Debugging your first segfault will also make you cry, but it's good for you. It builds character, and prepares you for the more insidious segfaults that are lurking out in the tall grasses.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this article makes it sound like WSL might be taking notes from WINE. It's Not an Emulator, because that would be slow and error-prone. Instead, it finds a way to abstract the appropriate functionality within the existing system.

Talk about irony. But I share the author's desire to see WSL share resources transparently between the W and the L. USB serial devices are a good example: it took forever for WSL1 to sort of support them, and it's still spotty with WSL2.

This is an area where WSL could be very appealing: many embedded workflows rely on one or two legacy Windows applications, but most of the core tooling works fine in Linux. But if you can't easily pass your USB debugger between OSes, you can't easily split your workflow across OSes.

Ah, Wodehouse. Everything from his writing style to his most popular characters to his name captured the same sense of whimsical negligence that characterizes an aristocracy.

We often hesitate to use words like "aristocrat" in post-Victorian settings, but Jeeves showed us that wealthy industrialists weren't all that different from barons or princesses or dukes.

It doesn't seem terribly out of character for him to 'cheerfully write a book about crooks' in a prison camp. Stiff upper lip and all that, don't you know.

It was sort of a "working vacation" for everyone involved. The people working on the product were taken off their normal duties, and the CS mentors didn't exactly get a full day's work done.

But it was worth it.

I once worked at a company that did something like that. It was optional, but once a year you could spend 3 days working in first-line customer service. A CS rep oversaw your responses, but you got an ordinary account in the customer service system and dealt with real customers.

The first two days you spent replying to customers, and the third day you spent prototyping or writing up some way that you thought common complaints could be addressed by making changes to the product.

It was a nearly unmitigated boon to the company. Sure, the company saw it as paying for a few extra vacation days. But the program stuck around because it generated a lot of good ideas, and the direct communication between CS and product development teams was valuable.

You might run into the problem that it can be toxic at high doses.

In my anecdotal experience, there seems to be a huge variance in the amount of butter that people eat, among people who regularly eat butter.

Also, does it survive the heat of cooking?

Yeah, they're huge. I love the place. You can travel for miles and miles through remote forest, then pass through a main street that looks like the center of any other large town. You can get lost following the meandering pavement, or get in trouble following a dirt track too far. Dirt bikes share the roads with sport car rallies (and logging trucks). Expansive overlooks appear out of nowhere, and you can find backpacking trails by looking for cairns along the roads. There are equestrian camp sites. It's not really possible to describe in a short text comment.

Oh, for sure - we can debate whether it's misguided or not, but it's definitely nice that the city is putting so much effort into this sort of outreach, and they seem to be serious about the program. People poo-poo the $10k number, but that must have been hard to sell to a city council.

I'm more curious about how many of the applications are serious, and how many are reactive to the current situation. There's nothing wrong with seeking stability over excitement, but I sort of worry about people envisioning the whole "Great Plains" idyll.

Oh, I only got warnings. Including some for going under the speed limit.

The state is full of small-town cops who want to throw their weight around, but they're harmless if you play their game and (sadly) if you're the right color. That's another important consideration for potential applicants.

Hehehe, Tulsa Oklahoma. I wonder how many of them visited before applying.

I don't mean to knock the city, but it is a very different place, and SF residents might chafe at the lack of interesting nature in the surrounding area. Probably the closest large park-ish area would be the Ozarks over in Arkansas. It's a lovely forest, but still about a 2.5-hour drive away. And OK's state highways are absolutely littered with aggressive speed traps.

Much respect to these people for continuing the project even after it became clear that ventilators aren't uniquely useful for treating covid.

If they can get the relevant certifications and work out how to handle reliable servicing, it could be a significant boon to the medical community, especially in areas where cost is an issue.

Better yet, it could show people that it is possible to develop critical medical devices without relying on a heavy veil of secrecy and NDAs, and give a much-needed leg up to projects developing devices like ultrasound imagers or EKGs/EEGs/etc.

Here's hoping they can clear the regulatory hurdles without much difficulty and let people buy them without MIT-style license disclaimers, but it looks like those problems will likely fall on local manufacturers.

Which raises an interesting question: is it smart to be the first company to start mass-producing an open-source medical device? You would need to foot the heavy certification bill as a large capital investment, while any future competitors wouldn't.

Thank you, I should have included a source for that statement.

Well, Brin left a little while ago, and his reported habit of screwing his employees in the company massage room might make it seem a bit tone-deaf to invite him back.

Sounds like the marketers might smell money in the water with covid accelerating the amount of entertainment that people consume at home and online.

Without any functioning oversight bodies to look out for consumers' interests, why not unleash the sharks?

It must be tough to work in an industry where your livelihood depends on an entity which you have no meaningful relationship with.

Amazon sellers, Youtube vloggers, Twitch streamers, Instagram dropshippers, etc etc. You can run those businesses on other platforms, like eBay and Vimeo, but they will almost certainly fail if you do.

But if you don't, you might wake up one morning without a business. Too stressful for me: maybe a start would be expecting contracts rather than EULAs for people who pay 3rd-parties to run a business on their platform.

Most cars use separate buses for the critical control systems and the infotainment/GPS/etc. They learned that lesson after the infamous demonstration of hacking a Jeep on the highway several years ago.

It's conceivable that someone could push bad updates to Tesla autopilot software, or briefly stop peoples' radios from working, but quiet OTA systems like that are the exception rather than the rule.

It's probably both. One big predictor of near-term all-cause mortality is the simple question, "can the person comfortably walk for a mile or two at a brisk pace?" (Barring existing mobility issues ofc)

Exercise helps to keep your body less stressed in many ways during its normal day-to-day life. It's good for your immune system, your circulatory system, your digestive system, and even your brain.

A few extra pounds probably won't cut your life short, but chronic heart disease or blood clots or being bedridden in old age definitely can.

Yeah, it's tough when that happens. But that is kind of how things go: part of the d20 system's charm is that it successfully approximates the absurd range and randomness inherent in ordinary life.

Sometimes you get a company that gets offended at the prospect of negotiation - that's a 1, although if you get an offer rescinded like that it's probably good for you in the long run.

Sometimes you throw out a ridiculous number for whatever reason and the other side says, "mmmm...yeah, okay." That's a 20. But it's not exactly uncommon to gain or lose 5+ figures because of a random person's random whims at a random time.

It can be hard to reconcile that with the notion of a meritocratic society, but cognitive dissonance is the spice of life.

Excellent - it's never fun dealing with a tragedy of the commons, and conserving a wild and endemic species of cash crop is definitely worthwhile.

The cultural and medicinal history of ginseng around the globe is also fascinating. This is only tangentially related, but here's a slightly exaggerated account of the reverence which people used to view it with:

>The legends are quite marvelous. Ginseng hunters refer to the plant as chang-diang shen, “the root of lightning,” because it is believed that it appears only on the spot where a small mountain spring has been dried up by a lightning bolt. After a life of three hundred years the green juice turns white and the plant acquires a soul. It is then able to take on human form, but it never becomes truly human because ginseng does not know the meaning of selfishness.

>It is totally good, and will happily sacrifice itself to aid the pure in heart. In human form it can appear as a man or as a beautiful woman, but more often it takes the form of a child, plump and brown, with red cheeks and laughing eyes. Long ago, evil men discovered that a ginseng child can be captured by tying it with a red ribbon, and that is why the plant is now so hard to find, the hunters say. It has been forced to run away from evil men, and it is for that reason that ginseng hunting has become one of the most hazardous occupations upon the face of the earth.

>The ginseng hunter must display the purity of his intentions right from the start, so he carries no weapons. [...H]is quest takes him into the wildest mountains where no men have dared to pass before. Tigers and bears are his companions, and the hunter fears strange creatures that are even more dangerous than tigers—such as the tiny owls that will call him by name and lead him into the Forest of Oblivion from which no man returns, and the bandits that are more brutal than savage bears and who crouch beside the few paths in order to murder an unarmed hunter and steal his roots.

Hopefully things don't get that bad in the misty mountains. The book that's from, Bridge of Birds, is a uniquely charming (but not very subtle) picaresque.

Makes you wonder how much of life "happens" in the UV and infrared spectrums that we can't see.

Does this let squirrels recognize each other in a dark forest without alerting predators? If so, did the predators adapt to that? It doesn't sound too uncommon from the other comments, but how much do the fluorescing wavelengths change? Is this another dimension of camoflauge and/or advertisement that we literally don't see?

Or is it just one of those weird things?

There was a movie that took these policies to their logical conclusion: Repo Men.

"In the near future, you can buy artificial organs on credit. But you had better make those payments..."

When so many people don't have a way of accessing the internet besides of their phones, and internet access is essential to meaningfully participate in our society and economy, these sorts of actions become less defensible. It's all about context.

On the bright side for Google/Apple/etc, they have wormed their way into our collective lives to the point where "phone culture" might start to drive legislative decisions in the same way that "car culture" did in the past decades.

There's been a general trend of companies being unwilling to invest in workers over the past decades. And after seeing their parents get knifed in the back by believing in the "job for life" concept that worked for their grandparents, the two-way loyalty of that system is completely absent in the current generation. It's been replaced with cynicism and mistrust.

So it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma. If you're a company and you invest heavily in junior talent, they'll probably leave for greener pastures ASAP. And if you're an employee who stands by an employer who gave you an initial leg up, you'll probably get fired after an aquisition/re-org/etc, and you'll find yourself with very narrow work experience.

FAANG companies manage this with "golden handcuff" stock vesting schedules, where you'll leave 6-7 figures on the table if you ever walk, but that's kind of the problem. It's hard for small orgs to compete for decades on pure cash compensation, and they can't be trusted to provide stability for decades.

It is quite embarrassing for them; Flash write endurance is something that most new graduates are aware of.

There's an NHTSA investigation into the incident, but on the bright side, Tesla did remediate it in newer models...by using chips with twice as much eMMC memory to push the failures farther out.

Teachers don't go into teaching for the money or fame, and you'll know they provide a quality service when your bridges stay up and your cars don't explode.

Their unions might be overly cautious right now, but we should treat them like essential workers if we want them to act like it.

There are certainly exceptions, and I have a lot of respect for successful EU tech companies!

But I really dislike rat-races, so I tend to avoid areas with loads of competition. The US tech market is like a bottomless money pool, and it's hard to justify putting a lot of effort into moving somewhere that would tie you to a few well-paying employers.

I like working on and learning about things that benefit the people around me! But I also like relaxing and not starving. C'est la vie: it's not perfect.

Yes, it's mostly about purchasing power. Rent/property tax/insurance is expensive, but everything else is cheap and there's no VAT. Some states don't even have income taxes. We have insanely painful income inequality, but as shameful as it is, you can usually clear the hurdle prices with a 6-figure income.

I'm not an aristocrat and I oscillate between working hard and going off into nature for random periods of time, so I'd sure like to live somewhere with a stable safety net. But for now, the US seems cheaper even with its ridiculous baseline CoL expenses. I can buy vehicles on a whim and mess with them and bum around for years on 5-10hr/week gigs even after $Nk monthly expenses, which would be difficult in the EU. And if you can pay the exorbitant health insurance rates, the medical care is actually quite good.

I do feel bad sometimes, but it's not exactly easy to change your citizenship, and the whole political situation sure isn't my fault.

I am less concerned with the taxes, and more concerned that Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary. It's literally an order of magnitude difference, and contracting hourly rates seems like a similar story.

I would happily pay 3-5x the taxes for a similar salary to emigrate, but if you offer me 1/10 the pay? That's tough. It makes me feel like there isn't a big market for my services across the pond.

It's a shame, because I love tech and I lean heavily left. But this has been the case for at least the past decade, and it shows no sign of stopping.

Most tests that I took in college were essentially open-book. Not all of them, but definitely more than half. They could have been take-home if(f) the professors trusted students not to use the internet during an exam.

In the math and computing classes, professors structured the questions in layers that tested different concepts. You could always have a double-sided "cheat sheet", and some professors let students bring in the whole textbook for time-constrained exams. It took far too long to "brute-force" more than one or two questions.

In the liberal arts classes, you were tested more on critical thinking and contextual questions. You needed to understand concepts at more than a surface level to make compelling arguments about how they related to each other, and you wouldn't be able to develop that understanding for many topics over the course of an hour, even if you have the primary material in front of you.

We weren't allowed to bring anything with a radio, but forcing students to take exams in complete isolation always felt odd to me. It's pretty rare to need to do actual work in a "clean-room" environment.