Why are we running python on microcontrollers, exactly? It's the wrong thing in production, so why is it the right thing for education? Training upcoming engineers to use the right thing for the job is pretty fundamental; running an interpreted language on bare-metal hardware flies in the face of building that intuition.

Today's microcontrollers may be more powerful than you realize. It's not just the 8-bit processors running at 2MHz anymore. An ESP32 is a dual core processor running at 200 or 400MHz. They don't run a high level OS (just FreeRTOS).

And the RPi Zeros are really powerful 32-bit ARM or RISC-V processors running at several hundred MHz as well.

Python is perfectly fine for these processors. And you might think it's overkill, but so what? Most of these tasks are one-offs. Perhaps someone doing a bit of cosplay wants to have some lights on their costume, or drive an LCD. You expect them to contract out someone to do the software which is likely just displaying a bunch of graphics or cycling some LEDs?

Heck, some things in the maker world have become ubiquitous - like a CYD. It stands for "Cheap Yellow Display" because it's a stupidly cheap 2" LCD (in a yellow frame) that can be hooked up to a ESP32 board and with a few libraries you're drawing graphics on it with a total spend of under $10. One off projects.

The high end microcontrollers are pushing out the old 8-bit AVRs and PICs (which mainly hang around for legacy use nowadays), and the RPi Zero ones RP3050 and 2050 processors are pushing down the ceiling of 16-bit and even 32-bit ARM microcontrollers.

Heck, you mourn the day because it's easier to blink an LED with a 3 cent Chinese microcontroller than it is using "traditional" methods (e.g., a 555).

There are thousands of barrels of nuclear waste rotting away on the floor of the ocean just off the coast of southern California near Catalina island. That was the previous plan for disposing of nuclear waste: just dump it in the sea.

The barrels have decayed to the point where attempting to collect them would almost certainly cause them to rupture and spill their contents. They will rupture and leak if left as they are -just not all at once.

Water is actually a really radiation shield. It's why it's used as a moderator in nuclear reactors. Contrary to popular belief, water is required for the reaction to continue. It's a moderator, because what happens is the two neutrons emitted during fission of uranium come out too fast to be properly captured by other uranium atoms to spur ongoing fission. Water is used to slow down those neutrons to where they are more readily absorbed by uranium. The problem is, water is also used to cool the reactor, so while the reaction stops or slows down significantly, a tremendous amount of heat is still generated from the remaining reactions. Thus a "meltdown" refers to the fuel rods exceeding the melting point of uranium and it melting and pooling at the bottom of the reactor.

That said, the casks at the bottom of the ocean, as long as they stay there, will actually be fairly safe even if they rupture. Even the wildlife can get fairly close (inches) before it becomes dangerous to them.

So sadly, no three-eyed Simpsons fish is likely to happen.

More like 99.99%. Maybe need some more nines in there. Large C codebases without regular critical CVEs are basically nonexistent.

What bankruptcy-prevention actions are they asking for?

15-25 kWh drawn by the utility is quite a bit! I hope they're paying him well for that.

I think you responded to someone else's comment.

They're bringing outside scrutiny into their processes; that's going to slow them down, too.

Not "at the same time". You're conflating what AI can do now with what it will likely be able to do in a year or five, or 20.

Amodei and others are worried about what AI that doesn't yet exist may do, not about what current-generation AI can do. AI is getting better, very quickly, and unless there's some blocking obstacle that no one has been able to identify will at some point become far, far smarter than humans, individually or collectively. So before that happens, we need to figure out how to make sure that superintelligent AI wants to help us, and wants to do it in the right way.

Not in any way trying to diminish work developers put into this effort, but with all due respect, how difficult can it be to re-write utilities such as cp, mv and rm?

To do basic functionality? Not hard. Busybox and toybox implement the "90%" use cases of those utilities inside them.

To achieve POSIX compliance requires more work - you're adding stuff that handles edge cases and little used functionality.

To achieve GNU coreutils functionality with GNU extensions is a bit more work on top of that.

Uutils though achieves full GNU compatibility AND GNU bug compatibility. That is, odd quirks and stuff in GNU coreutils are replicated in Uutils as well.

The goal is 100% compatibility so you can take out GNU coreutils and replace it with Uutils and not notice a difference. There were plenty of edge cases where the default scripts Ubuntu used didn't work under Uutils in odd cases.

GPLv3 is an issue for some - especially embedded systems. Most use a form of busybox or toybox as a result even if size is not a consideration, so Uutils can fill that role as well (there has been a openembedded recipe for Uutils for a while now as a supported replacement for coreutils).

It should also be noted that many of the utilities also run faster than their GNU counterparts

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

Is this actually a substantial amount of energy? I'm in Utah (Rocky Mountain Power) and RMP also pays me to use my batteries... but the amount of energy they draw is tiny. 8-10 times per week they draw on my batteries, but it's like 4 kW peak draw (my batteries can sustain 20 kW), and generally for less than 30 seconds, so in any given week I'm only contributing like 0.2 kWh. As I understand it, this is because RMP uses my batteries not really to "serve loads", per se, but just as grid stabilization; brief backfill to keep the voltage from sagging.

Obviously my batteries do serve *my* loads, which reduces the load on the grid, but that's not what RMP pays me for.

Does CA make heavier use of residential batteries to feed the grid?

Is it true though? I was watching a series of documentaries on the Ultima games, and it seemed their best work came out of the worst conditions. When Origin was small and the devs basically lived out of the office (and smelled like it), they were at their peak.

Or maybe it's that people have different views on and requirements for contentment.

Back in the 90s id was a small company of a handful of people who worked late. When Doom got released they all made out like bandits - the id parking lot was famous for the number of Ferraris that were parked in it.

Origin in the early days I could see being the same - they were pushing the frontier of computing in the early 90s and people in general were excited about computers. Heck, the company probably gave them pretty nice machines to work on, and if you were a computer geek in the 90s being handed a top end system to work on, it would be a form of contentment to just be there working it and pushing it hard.

But these were the pioneer days - like the early days of the dot-com era where similar things happened. The fact that people were getting stupid rich quick only served to provide the excitement going into it.

These days though, videogames are old hat, there's no quick money anymore and it's basically a mature industry. Back in the startup culture where you literally could get-rich-quick things were different.

You might compare it with the AI boom going on where money is being thrown around. I'm sure the people jumping between OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic getting those million dollar signing bonuses are working in pretty terrible conditions, but hey, if you're getting paid a million dollars a year with a million dollar signing bonus in a field that's booming, well, you don't really complain - you ride the gravy train.

Because when the bubble pops and the salary for AI developers plummets, if you managed your money right you can be set for life after the layoffs.

Contentment for many people is more than just money. Job satisfaction comes into play as well - and money can help with this, but also things like responsibility and other things. A small game development team might be fun to work with when you come up with an idea and everyone gets excited to add it to the game. Usually a sure sign of contentment is people that inadvertently work long hours because they're so excited at what they do they forget time exists. Contrast with someone who watches the clock and the interminable wait for 5pm.

It's one reason why WFH was popular and companies found their workers worked more - they were able to work, then deal with family business the work more to the point where they put in extra hours just because. You can take a smoke break at the office, but that doesn't compare to being able to spend quality time with your kid for 15 minutes during a break.

And JD Vance called him Hitler. Trump accepts changes of heart as long as they include sufficient groveling and self-humiliation. SBF's problem is he doesn't currently have any money, and doesn't have a lot of friends to put up cash for him either. If SCOTUS will overturn his fine on a technicality and he can get some or all of that money back, then he'll have the cash to buy a pardon. Obviously he needs to get it done in the next 2 years, four months.

Unionizing takes several steps. First, you have to sign enough interest cards to even begin the process. 30% is about right - you show there's a significant interest in people joining the union. Then you have the certification push - that is, a general vote on if you want to join the union or not. That takes a simple majority - if it fails, then no union. It's basically 30% of people saying they're interested in joining a union.

As for a "monopoly on labor" you have to realize the power mismatch that's going on here. Basically gig workers are disposable - they have no power at all the employment relationship. It's take it or leave it. (This applies to most other workplaces as well). The company holds all the power and your option is to either starve or work at whatever the company says they'll pay you.

Unions basically try to combat that power inequity. Progressives aren't against monopolies, they're against unfairness. The key is fairness - everyone has a fair shot at getting a job. The fact you're about to be homeless shouldn't be a determining factor in what you'll accept for a job.

Trump's vision of how the 50s and 60s were - that was the era of the strong union where the C-suite was paid less than 20 times the janitor. Where even the janitor was paid enough to own a home.

Of course, that's why we're never going to return to those times unless the politicians start reversing course on greed and start giving workers power through unions. Union busting is basically why they make up only 10% of the workforce in the US today through right to work laws and other things.

Progressives aren't generally in favor of monopolies because they generally lead to unfairness. But in the unbalanced power dynamic of employer-employee relations where for most employees they have little to no power to dictate working conditions, a monopoly on labor suddenly becomes a powerful thing to equalize the power dynamic and strike a fairer deal.