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> Add to that the usage of AI. While I know I’m way more productive than during those first months, my thoughts are getting slower, less profound, lazier.

I have mostly stayed away from LLM usage, I think I am better for it. I use it just to offload things I wouldn't have had time for. I get more stuff done, but I am still doing what I did before.

> Plus, dopamine is available at just a tap on my phone. There’s a ton of content in shorts that interest me and require little to no investment on my end, both time and effort-wise.

If you have and Android phone, enable Developer Options and flick through to Simulated Color Space - set it to Monochrome. I only wish it was possible to automate colour space switching based on time, like is done for redshift.


You can do the same on iOS in the Accessibility settings. I have my phone set up so that I can toggle the monochrome filter by double tapping the back of the device. I keep it in black and white but can switch back to colour easily if I need to show someone a photo.

If you have an iPhone, you can configure it as an Accessibility shortcut (triple-press side button to switch to monochrome ans back).

for the time-based monochrome setting, check out DetoxDroid on F-Droid!

> The internet is designed to not go offline.

Only somewhat true, but the fundamental assumption is that it is operating during mostly peaceful times. You have hostile countries cutting or dragging anchors across deep sea fiber optics, you have attacks on energy suppliers, etc. The most effective attacks for denying service are to infrastructure.

> The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.

An attack is not just limited to internet infrastructure, but even if it was: You would just have to take out a significant part of the backbone. It could be the backbone routers, the DNS servers, distribution boxes, home routers, etc, etc. Once the capacity is reduced, you may find the people themselves end up DoS'ing the remaining capacity.


I'm not sure how assumed that is. From Wikipeda:

>According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who was deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975):

>The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making.

I note in practice it mostly still works in war zones unless one of the countries makes a major effort to block its own citizens from access.


> Systems well beyond what is publicly known are already circulating in Washington, he says: “They can basically hack just about anything. So you get this continuous attack surface just ramping up.” From that follows a simple budget calculation: “If you spend hundreds of millions, billions on a submarine, well, guess what, a frontier model costs a hundred million. You will see a diversion of defense capability towards defensive and offensive AI, towards drones and robots.”

Firstly, I think we need to stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being on there. There are literally millions of devices with little to no maintenance plan that are the weak parts of our networks. We can massively reduce the attack surface.

Secondly, everything needs to be robust against not having the internet. Russia for example purposefully turned off their external internet during peacetime to maintain robustness. I think the majority of the West would currently fall over instantly under such a situation. It becomes increasingly clear that all services are now under continuous attacks.

> He is equally blunt about the foundations underneath all of it: “Our infrastructure is held together by twigs. The internet is terrible.” A British power plant went down for days after a hack, he says, and Cloudflare and others have come under attack. “We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years. Maybe it’s good.”

The really concerning part is that we only hear about what is discussed publicly, i.e. the attacks that are unavoidable to declare. It's well known that countries will hide breaches under the guise of national security, and companies will also do what they can to hide breaches (including paying ransoms to attackers).

But nothing will happen until it is far too late - this is the same pattern I see over and over again. And then the reaction will be over the top and likely make our lives more difficult. "Ah yes, we keep getting attacked via the internet - now you need to have an interview, get a license and pay a license holder fee just to surf the web."


The title in the article is literally "Async Rust vs RTOS showdown!" and the article shows "Embassy/Rust against FreeRTOS/C". There should also be a (2022) appended.

You just need to read the Reddit comments to see why this is not a useful comparison [1] [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/sik3g0/async_rust_vs_...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/she3u9/async_rust...


> I feel the UK were wrong to leave [..]

Whether it was the correct decision or not, it was done via a democratic vote. Now the leaders of the UK look to entangle the UK into the EU structure that is evidently against their mandate.


The current UK government was also elected by democratic vote, so they have a mandate that postdates the referendum.

You can argue their mandate is invalid due to the first-past-the-post system, but in that case the original decision to hold a referendum, and all subsequent governments that negotiated the terms of the EU exit are also invalid, since they all derived from first-past-the-post elections.


The current UK government have a mandate with regards to running the UK more generally, but leaving the EU was its own very clear message. There was a vote in 1975 to continue EU membership, and again in 2016 [1]. It very much feels likely something that should only be undone on another vote.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_the_United_King...


The vote was to leave or stay - there was no mandate for or against a specific relationship to the EU before even considering how drastically opinions have shifted since.

And there was considerable debate prior to the referendum within the Leave camp as to whether to go for a "soft Brexit" (close regulatory alignment) or "hard Brexit" (what the final deal ended up being).

Indeed parts of the leave movement explicitly used as an argument that a soft Brexit was possible, including explicitly airing the possibility of a Norway-style EEA membership. Given how close the result was, it's highly unlikely that there wouldn't have been greater support for a very soft option than for what we got.

> no mandate for or against a specific relationship to the EU

Then do you not support another vote that provides this option?

> how drastically opinions have shifted since

There is a way to conduct a poll that represents the engaged electorate - have another vote.


I'd fully support a vote if rejoining was one of the options. It's pretty clear from polls that support to rejoin is far stronger than the support for Brexit was (in June, it was 55% for vs. 34% against, vs. 59% in support of a closer relationship and 20% against, and 29% supporting the current relationship).

But in the meantime it is also entirely unambiguous that there is a clear mandate for a closer relationship - the gap is so huge (much larger than the support for the current status quo ever was) that there's no real need for another vote for that and voters can punish parties that support it at the next general election.


> I'd fully support a vote if rejoining was one of the options.

Of course it would be, but people would need some kind of understanding on what basis that would be on.

> It's pretty clear from polls [..]

I think there is only one way to know for sure.

> But in the meantime it is also entirely unambiguous that there is a clear mandate for a closer relationship [..]

People of the UK do not hate Europe, but there is evidence to suggest that people of the EU do not view the people of the UK favorably [1]. But I think the point of sovereignty and cost is a big one.

[1] https://uk.news.yahoo.com/yougov-survey-eu-crisis-uk-1209146...


That mandate has quite changed, even more when you look at the non-retired cohorts. Reintegration with the EU will take plenty of time.

Has it? It would take another vote to show it for sure, and the current government is simply not wanting to ask the people.

The vote wasn’t binding and had a low turnout. Not really a good example to point to for democratic voting

It wasn't binding so the normal procedure and checks around a referendum could be ignored. Like disenfranchising the British citizens living in the EU.

Democratic indeed...


It was just an exercise in testing the mood of the nation, don't you see? Just like a general election, if the electorate vote the wrong party, it is perfectly fine to just ignore the result.

The vote was non-binding due to the sovereignty of parliament [1]. It means that if a war broke out or the economy crashed, they would not be forced to continue at great detriment to the UK. But it doesn't mean that the vote was a mere suggestion - anybody who suggests such doesn't understand democracy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_U...


Fair enough, the "advisory" nature of referendum in the UK does have clear reasoning that i wasn't fully aware of. However the idea of it being "advisory" was itself exploited, and used to make people think that Brexit would't happen anyway, even if the vote was to leave.

My suggestion was not that the referendum shouldn't stand because it was "advisory", but that there should have been rules applied around a referendum that could affect peoples lives so much. But, there are no such rules it seems, the majority in the Commons gets to decide that.

Which is why (almost a million?) British citizens in the EU were not allowed to vote, which doesn't seem very democratic.

And Europeans who were born in the UK and lived their entire life here.

It was a referendum of the the right sort of British citizen.


> However the idea of it being "advisory" was itself exploited, and used to make people think that Brexit would't happen anyway, even if the vote was to leave.

It could be argued also the other way, maybe people didn't engage or chose to continue because they were led to believe it wasn't possible to leave the UK.

> My suggestion was not that the referendum shouldn't stand because it was "advisory", but that there should have been rules applied around a referendum that could affect peoples lives so much. But, there are no such rules it seems, the majority in the Commons gets to decide that.

I think it was fumbled because nobody involved in enacting it were actually supportive of it, and the semi-permanent state (i.e. civil servants) were largely not in support.

> It was a referendum of the the right sort of British citizen.

I have more general thoughts about this, I think a country should be very careful about who or who can't vote.


Does that mean when a government is elected by a low turnout, that it is also not democratic? The current UK government was elected on a 59.7% electorate turnout [1], whereas Brexit was decided based on a 72.2% electorate turnout [2].

[1] https://closer.ac.uk/contextual-data/turnout-uk-general-elec...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_U...


Democratic isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum. And I said it’s not a good example of a democratic vote, not that it is undemocratic. It’s closer to the undemocratic end of the spectrum. Though that turnout number is actually way higher than I remember, 70% is actually very high!

I don't know how it can be argued towards the undemocratic end of the spectrum, it was possibly one of the most democratic processes the UK has undergone in a long time?

The majority of UK inhabitans wants to rejoin the EU. It is indeed democratically legitime.

If only there was a type of nation-wide poll that could be conducted to make such claims so strongly. Maybe we pick a single day, each side makes their cases to the people, and then they cast their choices to be counted. But I guess it can't be done.

Democratic vote which has since then been proved to be heavily influenced by the Cambridge Analytica campaign, so which probably did not reflect the actual opinion of the population. It was a manipulated vote.

I remember the UK government at the time spent £9.3 million of taxpayer's money to push a pro-EU leaflet out [1], not to mention a concerted effort from the news media. It's not as if there was not strong campaigning happening on both sides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-EU_leaflet


> Hardly seems to fit with the “we’re all in this together” argument.

It's a good job we offset all of our manufacturing to the likes of China, it's not like they have terrible environmental standards or share an atmosphere with us or anything. It's also a good job we closed our coking coal rich mines to import it from Japan instead [1].

I'm left in utter disbelief that any of this was allowed or condoned, it is nothing short of madness. The UK now finds itself in a position where it is incapable of doing absolutely anything.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp311nr7w34o


Asimov appeared to feel uncomfortable with those who thought they were better than others because of their Mensa status, and some he states were typically right-wing. I am entirely unclear though how the claimed racist ideology of John Campbell Jr is related.

> I miss Isaac Asimov, and I miss the America that created him.

An America with a typically right-wing Mensa bias (and likely upper class society)? That's the America that the author misses?


> This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers, around 3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-cor, are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.

I was under the impression that there was still a trade export from TSMC to China [1]? Not to mention a near complete ban on ASML devices [2]? Maybe they exfiltrated a few chips into a lab, but can they really source production quantities?

> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?

People using the same C1-Ultra core are struggling to get the same performance in applications where heat and power are important. It would be surprising if this is sustainable and not just a temporary boost.

> The Xring O3 will debut in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, the world's first foldable to use it, and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, both launching in China in September 2026. Xiaomi also unveiled the Xring O100 AI chip and the Xring D100 smart-driving chip, the latter built to run models with up to 200 billion parameters locally, with commercial use planned for 2027. Reuters reports TSMC is producing the chips.

I guess we will find out very soon when Chinese customers get their devices. I don't know how they will even source enough LPDDR6 at reasonable prices.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/creve4x8drgo

[2] https://www.trendforce.com/news/2026/08/25/news-u-s-may-push...


For an OLED low-powered system, I use exactly this approach [1] [2]. The trick is to wake up, do some tasks, then go back to sleep until either a timeout or triggered by an event. The best approach so far has been the light sleep [3] which keeps some things up and running, but just sipping at the current.

I'm taking these learnings and applying them to an 5 inch e-ink device with an ESP32 to be a modern-ish PDA device.

[1] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/smart-watch-v1.html

[2] https://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/smart-watch-v2.html

[3] https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/...


404 on the page, main page: "Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time." [1]. GitHub are you okay?

Edit: Known issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330597

[1] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/


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