true, but most people doing hardware are doing formal designs and prove their work correct. While the proofs are not perfect, there are a lot less bugs. The cost of fixing bugs in hardware is a lot more than software, so it is seen as worth it.

Of course the cost of doing the above is one reason we don't do everything in hardware. If you have the money you could implement everything people do with computers in hardware, no software - I don't even want to think about the cost.

> most people doing hardware are doing formal designs and prove their work correct.

My god how I wish that were true.

I have experience working with IoT hardware, there were a fair few bugs, in an apparently constrained domain.

One including a datatype mismatch, that was also a bug in the specification.

Sounds like a good feature. More trustworthy device.

If a pregnancy test can run doom. It can run state level surveillance.

In the past, technicians would get engineering change orders and follow the instructions to rewire boards to fix problems. You could also replace state machine and microprogram ROMs, which I guess sounds a lot like a firmware update.

It's expensive to hire someone technical enough to:

- Perform such an update

- Sign off that they performed the update _correctly_

If you need an air-gapped system, it's still much easier to set it up so it can update from a USB flash drive and log "I did the update correctly" back to the drive.