AmpBenzScientist @AmpBenzScientist@qoto.org

@freemo @BernieDoesIt @jkxyz @scottsantens Poverty will lead to improved money management skills. Before I started college I bought around $400 dollars in hand tools and a laptop. It took a lot of saving up to buy but good hand tools are an investment that pay themselves off.

I still have those tools and that laptop. A Craftsman 354 piece Mechanics Tool Set and some Toshiba Satellite with an AMD C-50 "Ontario" APU.

Poverty is something that I've never been able to escape. It gets rough but I would like to think it will all pay off one day. I can only say stay sharp, say nawt. One needs every bit of leverage they can get.

@DanielaKEngert @daridrea Ah this reminds of a time when some people tried to get rid of C. Nothing will replace C. Looking at Cpp after the Rust Epidemic was nauseating. Is memory really safe if it can't be accessed?

I bought a book on Rust and intended to learn the language. I made it to the part where it got into memory management and stated that it was completely unnecessary. Pure hubris. Even if the language is magical, it could make its users horrible coders in another language.

It does have beautiful syntax. The Licensing and Foundation are pretty sketchy. MISRA Cpp and MISRA C already exist so what is the point in Rust? I'm not saying that C is without faults, something about the power of assembly with the usability of assembly. I despise Cpp unless it's embedded, it became bloated.

Rust has numerous faults and the heavy handed foundation might be its downfall. Hopefully it will escape the grips of the corporate overlords and evolve freely. I hope to see it again someday but in better condition.

@thor @alci That's not called penetration testing? That sounds a lot like penetration testing.

@rhempel @xorbit @lupyuen Embedded Systems need to evolve for product sales. A good Embedded System should operate without issue for many years.

I didn't see EEs or CS majors doing anything useful for embedded systems. It was only a group of hackers that dared to mess with the dark arts.

@freemo Don't worry, there will be more horrifying STIs coming soon. Perhaps some are already spreading silently. Maybe it will be similar to The Crazies but more subtle and slower.

Data is beautiful.

@freemo Maybe the solution is to eat the snake.

@thor That's perfectly reasonable. In my 20s I believed that doing the right things and playing by the rules would result in a decent life. Now in my 30s and having a good decade of my life being taken advantage of, I'm not bitter about it. I learned many things and that is priceless.

Friends of mine who went off the path are far more successful than I am. I'm not jealous of their success but I am relieved that they have good lives.

I've already tried challenging people or businesses that have belittled my work and me as a person. Surprisingly I was successful in besting most and in nontrivial ways. It resulted in me being seen as belligerent and irrational by many. It doesn't matter if I was correct, acted in good faith and saw it through at my own expense. The experts are always right but not always correct.

To defend what is correct against the powers that be is almost entirely futile. My efforts were praised in private and I was treated warmly. To quote a wise man who saw it play out, "You proved that you were better than the expert. They were thankful that you saved their ass but you are seen as a threat because of what you did in good faith. The threat that would have hit them got taken care of by you. NDA? Even if there was no NDA, whatever you presented would be dismissed. You worked hard and you did good work but you were disposable."

To summarize, experts tell no lies that stand out to normal eyes. Going against the tide is career suicide. Doing the right thing might very well cost one everything. I don't have any regrets, I just want to get over the result of that experience and other similar events. This is the reason why I want to work on equipment or something very different.

The damage is done. I can't forget what I know and love. I can do something else and do what I love in my free time. Once bitten, twice shy. I just repeated being bitten in the hopes that it would pay off.

@freemo @VoxDei The NSA?

@thor It was probably better and more efficient. Remember having less than 1GB of RAM and using floppy disks? It was terrible but it taught values that modern computers don't.

A virus killing an OS was a regular occurrence. Having to open a computer to replace a card for a certain use was common and people lived off the hardware.

Performance penalties will increase the further we distance the code from the hardware. Perhaps the most important point is that the user is further removed from the hardware and less knowledgeable about the features. This Security Fallacy is going to ensure less impressive code as a parasite core will keep useful features behind barriers.

Programmers now have to play in a sandbox with their degrees that crush their ambitions. They will use what they were taught with fear of deviating from a textbook. Perhaps there exists a better way but if they tried it in University, they were likely punished for going outside of the textbook.

Modern design principles are the cause of the problem. The principals were likely formed as the old assembly coders and C coders were becoming disillusioned and deciding to quit. Perhaps the industry deserves this. They reap what they have sown, the grapes of wrath.