danhor

> Here's a simple one: Build an open standards-based system where users choose their backup provider and let them decide whether they prefer to have full control over the encryption keys or whether they want them to be managed by a third party. Educate them so that they can at least try to make an informed decision. Warn them about the risks and jurisdictions of built-in providers.

WhatsApp performs (on Android) backups inside a normal directory. You can just backup it via e.g. Syncthing, which I've done in the past.

It doesn't get much more standards based. Strongly pushing users to deviate from the standard flow IMHO risks them quickly choosing poorer options (e.g. a free, dubious, online hoster). At least with the current setup, the "easy option" is quite safe in terms of not loosing data and very low risk that anyone apart from you and governments with lawful access ever accesses the data.

> The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I'd love to see more of this "all things considered" thinking around bans.

In terms of CO2e, a familiy of 2 + a kid driving a car instead of flying results in quite a bit of less emissions. Depending on the assumed mortality per tonne CO2e, driving might lead to a lot less deaths.

This is of course quite unreliable data, but one example of just to say how "all things considered" is very hard and almost always still comes down to a judgement call.

> WhatsApp is similar by the way. Unless you enable E2E backups, they end up in iCloud/Google Drive backups and are only encrypted at rest

One of the few good things about WhatsApp is that Meta can very credibly claim that they can't access the backups (as they're not stored by Meta). Meta holds the encryption key & Google/Apple hold the backups, so at least you now have deal with two entities to get the data.

I don't think without forcing more customers to loose data (e.g. by requiring them keeping an encryption pin/key) it's possible to perform backups in a (much) better way.

> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU.

Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the cheapest, after that it only got more and more expensive.

The PS5 and Xbox are also very close to being an x86 PC, but you're not installing your own OS on there even though there are few technical hurdles if the manufacturer removed the mechanisms to prevent that.

> You can just ignore the EULA. Nobody is coming to get you.

You can, but it's not gonna gain broad attention.

> Why is nobody using it?

It's used for chips with a good open source backend (lattice, gatemate). But it's non-trivial to integrate with the vivado backend and doesn't bring many benefits when used as such.

> You can extract the timing information from Vivado. Such information is not copyrightable.

Yes

> You could also collaborate with someone with a really fast oscilloscope to gather some timing yourself

No. Especially not fast-fast and slow-slow corners.

> Even if you just get the connectivity data and bitstream format and no timing, that's massively useful for less-than-high-speed projects.

Not really, you need at least a rough worst-case estimate. Otherwise even trivial designs might not work.

> A single open source developer just has to make a contribution, doesn't have to do the whole thing in one go.

A large part (clocks, routing, LUTs, BRAM, IO, a basic timing model) has to work, otherwise it's not really usable.

It's really non-trivial to get to a basic usable point. I would estimate at least 4-5 very experienced people working on this 2-3 years. Nothing impossible, but also not something that easily happens.

> Nothing stops someone from taking the free Windows Vivado and making it run on Linux

The EULA and the fact that the linux versior runs faster & has fewer bugs.

> just the device-dependent backend would be a major improvement and the frontend and optimizer could be shared with other toolchains

That's yosys and it's used by smaller commercial vendors.

> or reverse engineering then bitstream format for these FPGAs

Getting the timing is the hard part (+ good routing afterwards). The bitstream format has AFAIK mostly been reversed. 7 series has mediocre support , but US, US+ and Versal doesn't (probably because they're too expensive for personal usage).

A PDF of a long document such as a standard or reference manual is almost always preferable to an HTML version. HTML versions have issues with formatting, searching (as browsers struggle with multi-thousand page documents and non-native search document search implementations almost always suck), indexing, correct behavior on windows size change (especially a side-by-side pdf view is almost unheard of for webpages), ... . Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me.

It's often a requirement for bare metal embedded development (too heavy in terms of memory), so it's basically unavoidable. Non-standard languages are very common for this kind of thing, just look at the linux-flavoured C.

Signal Priority only works well if the arrival time of the bus can be predicted some time before arrival at the signal (~30 seconds is a number I've heard a few times). As bus stopping times are highly unpredictable, a lower number of bus stops makes signal priority work much better (and far-side bus stops).

Furthermore signal priority and own lanes are almost always beaten by good circulation planning, reducing the number of traffic lights and cars on the route of the bus.

Certainly not with hydrogen directly. It might be involved in the production chain, but it's such a pain. If it's at all possible to electrify, that'll very likely win.

For flights, a combination of batteries for smaller, regional planes starting with "islands hoppers" now and SAF from either Biofuel or produced from Electricity (with Hydrogen as an intermediate step). Although I think that we might first see moves to reduce the 2x non CO2 Climate Impacts which can be much cheaper to tackle (such as Contrails).

For maritime applications, batteries when regularly near ports, probably hybrids with methanol for cross-ocean passage far away from coasts.

It's still the lingua-franca of ASIC/FPGA/Simulation, especially for scripting the tools.

I think it's slowly being replaced there by Python, but it's very slow.

The Hazard 3 is basically a hobby project of Luke Wren, a Raspberry Pi Employee. He's contiuing to evolve it further, but I don't think it's ready for a full replacement of the Cortex-M yet, especially in regards to the Security Features.

The source code is all from Luke Wren and I don't think other cores use the source code directly, but improvements to test harnesses or general implementation patterns as well as better software support help other cores: https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3

For the SoCs I would expect to see an off-the-shelf Risc-V core (certainly no Hazard3 as the main CPU), but we'll see.

My "Homeserver" with its database running on an old laptop has less downtime than AWS.

I expect most, if not 99%, of all businesses can cope with a hardware failure and the associated downtime while restoring to a different server, judging from the impact of the recent AWS outage and the collective shrug in response. With a proper raid setup, data loss should be quite rare, if more is required a primary + secondary setup with a manual failover isn't hard.

One of the reasons amaranth (and other neo-HDLs) is so great is the full-fleged seamless integration with the host language. Generating DSP filters using the numpy for all parameters, creating CRC structures, diffent logic for different word widths, ... .

This is all feasible with SV or an embedded Macro language as well, but you'll either have to live with a poorly documented meta language (as not a whole lot of people are using it) or heavy missmatches between the meta language and the "real" language. Cocotb very much suffers from this for simulation usage.

And, tbh, if it can be nicely implemented in the host language (which IMHO is the case with amaranth, less so with migen), I don't think there are many benefits by being standalone.

What are the benefits of SV for multi-clock design? I found migen (and amaranth) to be much nicer for multi-clock designs, providing a stdlib for CDCs and async FIFOs and keeping track of clock domains seperately from normal signals.

My issue with systemverilog is the multitude of implementation with widely varying degrees of support and little open source. Xsim poorly supports more advanced constructs and crashes with them, leaving you to figure out which part causes issues. Vivado only supports a subset. Toolchains for smaller FPGAs (lattice, chinese, ...) are much worse. The older Modelsim versions I used were also not great. You really have to figure out the basic common subset of all the tools and for synthesis, that basically leaves interfaces and logic . Interfaces are better than verilog, but much worse than equivalents in these neo-HDLs(?).

While tracing back compiled verilog is annoying, you are also only using one implementation of the HDL, without needing to battle multiple buggy, poorly documented implementation. There is only one, usually less buggy, poorly documented implementation.

> There's still relevance in making it stupidly easy to make an LED blink and make basic apps on circuit boards. Education + weekend hardware hackers might look for something different in a framework than a professional.

This group is has been moving to circuitpython, which is much less performant, but even easier to use. The more serious cross-platform development environments, like Zephyr, have also become much better.

How would you effectively stop windows updates to china? Bypassing the Windows activation measures isn't stopping single pirates (or people still wanting Windows 7 updates intended for big business with legacy devices), the only way to stop windows updates is preventing access to it. It's impossible to do so while still having Windows as an Operating System that people outside high security environments use.

While energy is expensive, I find it hard to blame on the "green stuff".

The majority of the energy cost increases in the last few years are because fossil fuels got more expensive for europeans, as cheap gas and oil from Russia wasn't cheap nor very available any more. Lower emissions technologies require much less energy: Heat pumps, induction stoves, electric goods and private transport. Renewables are furthermore more resilient to supply shocks, as they aren't as dependent on from despotic states such as Russia, Saudi Arabia or (seemingly) the US for much of the (fossil) energy. The correct response would be to electrify as much as possible (much less energy required) and produce electricity without the need for importing fossil fuels.

The housing situation sucks, but while many rules discourage housing production, only a smaller subset is there to reduce emissions (requirements about amenities such as outlets, room size and layout, parking and local opposition have little to do with emissions). Many countries such as the US which care much less also suffer heavily as well from being unable to build enough housing.

I have little idea about what specifically the netherlands are doing on climate, but it has at least not been my impression that they were the "best boy in class".

It takes a bit of effort to add all you would want and, for me personally, bangs can be anywhere instead of having to be at the start of a search query as is needed for custom search keywords.

And to avoid having two sources (perhaps with slightly different voltages) connected together and leading to hijinks. E.g. a usb A-C cable plugged into a USB-C power supply.

That is the point of Amaranth (and migen). It's not HLS, it doesn't try to generate logic from normal python code. It's an HDL implemented in python, not trying to look like python code.

In my opinion, it's even more of an HDL than SV or VHDL: It has native concepts of Clock Domains, reset handling and e.g. blockram, it describes the hardware. There is no missmatch with two different, weird assignment types. It's occupied with with accurately covering available/commonly used hardware constructs with commonly used features, not introducing useless abstractions that don't help in practice (trivial example: Your clock signals are not just another signal that mess up timing everywhere if you try to use them that way).

But on the other hand, there is no weird, half-useless metaprogramming/simulation layer with almost the same syntax but tricky rules that differ. That part is proper python.

Thus it's easy to write code that is flexible over different interface types (i.e. one async fifo that can be used for almost all data or an width adapter that mostly works automatically), generate memory-mapped registers that are correctly hooked up, generate wide e.g. CRC operations that are optimized in python code before making HDL out of it as Vivado barfs on them (which I've also seen done with python code that generates systemverilog using string concatenation).

I think my point is just that SystemVerilog isn't a good HDL. It makes it hard to (correctly) describe hardware and makes reuse often harder than it needs to be.

Regarding the intermediate translation step: Amaranth has it's own native simulator and for system-level simulation interfaces directly with yosys for cxxrtl or synthesis for parts directly supported by yosys, bypassing the need for a yosys-> verilog conversion. It's "only" needed for most commercial tools, that can only process SV and VHDL.

Alon Levy has also written some more on Tram-Trains: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/03/tram-trains/

A few points I want to add: The Stadtbahn (called Tram-Metro in this Article) is usually just as fast in the outlying areas as in the inner areas and rarely street running, just doing it with less infrastructure. It's just that rail tracks are even faster.

There are quite a few newly built S-Bahn Tunnels in cities under a Million in Germany, in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Leipzig (you could quibble about citie vs metro area population).

The major downside of Tram-Trains compared to S-Bahns, Rapid Transit or just through running away from the city center is that they slow way down in the city center, much more than the other options. This makes it a bad fit for the sprawly, north american cities without a strong center which have much more demand for non city center destinations and a much more expansive center compared to european cities with tram-trains.

The big benefit of Tram-Trains is the flexibility. Over a region, some sections can implement their own new through running section for the Network (Heilbronn), be almost a metro (the Kombilösung and some parts of S11) or provide S-Bahn style service (e.g. Freudenstadt for a mediocre Regio S-Bahn).

But it's a master of none: Too slow and cramped for high-quality regional services, too few doors for rapid passenger exchange, too demanding and expensive (electrification and vehicles) for connecting small rural lines, legally limited in capacity (75m) for very busy services.

They can be great, but it really depends on local circumstances.

Before converting commuter rail to Tram-Trains, most American cities should first implement a frequent (at least 2tph), all-day, regular service with more urban stations for commuter rail and perform true ticket integration between mainline rail and their other urban transport (the ticket integration is very important!). This also applies to many european cities, such as in France, Spain, Belgium, ... .

Mont (if not allmost all) S-Bahn trains in Germany only have one staff member. The space for wheelchairs is directly behind the drivers cabin and the few times I've seen a ramp being deployed, it took the driver 1-2 minutes (Usually the automatically deployed gap filler is good enough). A large portion (I'd guess somewhere around 20-40%) of regional trains are also only staffed with the driver. The others do have an additional staff member, but they're almost always not safety relevant and only perform ticket checks, answer questions and help with ramp deployment.

The only times I've seen more than the driver on trams/Stadtbahns/metros, they checked tickets. This also happens surprisingly rarely.

Current modern nuclear reactors getting built are huge.

Maybe, perhaps, in the next decade or two we'll see small(er) reactors, but this isn't a new idea and hasn't worked out it practice before.

It seems like this is already deployed in Arch, as I've hit it yesterday. I was surprised at first, but it was quite useful.

As the local machine is there anyway, only the increase in energy usage should be considered, while the server only exists for this use case (distributed across all users).

The local machine is usually also highly constrained in computing power, energy (when battery driven) and thermals, I would expect the compute needed to be very different. The remote user will happily choose a large(r) model, while for the local use case a highly optimized (small) model will be chosen.

Most car trips could be replaced with ebike trips, but the majority of distance travelled (and thus, roughly, carbon emitted) can't. 80% of the distance driven is with trips >10 km, 70% of the distance driven already at >20 km. There are people doing these trips on E-Bikes daily, but even with great infrastructure they'll remain a small proportion of the modal split (Data from Germany, MiD, 2017). The long(er) trips are the majority of the problem, as the rest are, well, short.

Most rail should be powered by overhead electricity, but for short- to medium-term gains BEMUs are also great, with most European train manufacturers not building DMUs anymore. They'll hopefully also come down in price, as this first generation is really expensive.

I know that the US (and Canada) has issues with battery busses, but in (western) Europe, they work great (but currently still a tad too expensive). Trolley busses are even more expensive (similar if not higher purchasing cost, much higher infrastructure cost, slightly less energy usage) and require a whole lengthy political process to deploy, while battery busses can be deployed in a few months.

BEVs are the only feasible solution for replacing a large part, if not most, of the emissions from cars. Even in countries with a great countrywide transit network and reasonable bike infrastructure (Germany), 73% of passenger-kilometers are traveled by car (MiD 2023, 19% by transit, 4% by bike, 4% by walking), down from 80% in 2002. There is no way to much more than double transit usage in the next 15-20 years. And the situation is much worse in e.g. the USA where little good transit exists, where good infrastructure exists operations suck, building transit is astoundingly expensive, land developmental patterns run contra feasible attractive transit and transit agencies seem unable to learn anything from outside the US (in operations, construction, planning, ...).

This is not to say that anti-car policies (and pro-walking/biking/transit) policies shouldn't be implemented and are in many cases preferable compared to subsidizing BEVs, but their potential in the short- to medium-term for carbon reduction is quite limited.

Carbon-neutral synthetic gasoline is and will be too expensive to work, apart from small niche cases. This makes it politically unviable.

We're going to have almost universal BEV adoption before the carbon avoidance cost of synthetic gasoline becomes attractive.