It’s great that there are new languages coming along that strike a balance between performance and safety. However, there’s always going to be a need for unsafe, low-level code. I work in semiconductors and occasionally have to write firmware and drivers for our devices. There’s no avoiding C in those environments.
What this administration fails to understand is that the USA currently lacks the workforce to be self-sufficient in semiconductors. Cutting off the supply of chips via tariffs and constricting federal funds to foundries isn’t going to magically make the country a semiconductor powerhouse. We’ve got the capability to build fabrication sites, sure. What we need is a workforce—people with graduate degrees in electrical and computer engineering. And that’s going to take time. This whole ordeal is sloppy and embarrassing
It’ll be interesting to see what people have to say about this new Pi when it ships. I would think most people looking to use a Pi as a desktop would go for the 400/500 series.
In general I agree with the sentiment of the article, but I think the broader issue is media literacy. When the Internet came about, people had similar reservations about the quality of information, and most of us learned in school how to find quality information online.
LLMs are a tool, and people need to learn how to use them correctly and responsibly. I’ve been using Perplexity.AI as a search engine for a while now, and I think they’re taking the right approach. It employs LLMs at different stages to parse your query, perform web searches on your behalf, and summarize findings. It provides in-text citations as well, which is an opportunity for a media-literate person to confirm the validity of anything important.
Amnesty International provides a FOSS tool to check your mobile backups for traces of the Pegasus Spyware. I’d trust that over a sketchy proprietary app. Link: https://docs.mvt.re.
I watched “Buy Now!” last night. The editing was a bit campy, but overall it was interesting. I appreciated seeing both iFixit and Framework being represented!
Anyone who found this interesting should check out Nick Harkawway's novel Gnomon. It's set in a near-future society with a similar kind of omnipresent and ambivalent AI/surveillance system, combined with some fantasy elements.
It's about time. I hop between iOS and Android every so often, and the lack of RCS has always been a major pain in the ass. Goodbye shitty compressed photos and hello read receipts. Unless your Android vendor doesn't fully support RCS... Looking at you, Samsung
Or maybe… hire a diverse set of journalists to cover different points of view???