When the 2008 financial crisis happened, it could have been much worse. Governments stepped in to prevent the collapse of banks spreading (Gordon Brown doesn’t get nearly enough credit for this). The biggest mistake was allowing investment bankers who had put customers’ money at risk without doing due diligence and accurately reporting risk to escape accountability.
But now think about the AI bubble. It seems very likely that the burst will happen during the Trump regime. Can you imagine Trump participating in a coordinated multinational effort? No, he’ll demand concessions from everyone in exchange for doing things he doesn’t understand primarily benefit Americans. He won’t be motivated to do anything to avoid US pension funds crashing, unless he is personally invested in them (and banks that he owes money to going bust will probably be something he sees as a net positive).
I hope other countries are starting to think about how they will firewall the US financial system to prevent contagion. I don’t know if this is even possible to any meaningful degree. With Trump in charge, I don’t see any path that doesn’t look like the Great Depression.
Fantastic exploration of the actual claims in the stupidly over-hyped comment by the stupidly over-promoted GitHub CEO. Key observation:
To conclude, the actual findings of this "study" seem to be that: AI does not improve developer productivity or skillsAI does increase developer ambitionThis is strictly worse than the current state of affairs.
What is the idiomatic way in #Rust of defining a type that represents an MMIO region and therefore must use volatile loads and stores for every field access?
Ah, once again, it is the time of year when the University of Cambridge makes everyone complete mandatory cybersecurity training, by making them click on a link in an email is indistinguishable from a phishing scam. It comes from a domain unrelated to the university, it sends you to a third-party domain via an obfuscating link, and it then requests your login credentials.
My recommendation was that anyone who doesn't do it should automatically pass.
I know people like to make fun of niche operating systems, but for the five years I was at Microsoft I used Windows (10 then 11) as my daily driver. It’s much less stable than a professional OS, but it does kind-of work. I wouldn’t say it’s ready for the desktop. The UI is inconsistent and changes randomly between releases, a load of common software is basically useable only in a VM, it lags and freezes periodically (unlike an OS designed for interactive use, random drivers run a load of things directly in interrupt handlers, so you get latency spikes that you wouldn’t see in a more mainstream desktop OS) and the update process can hose the system, so it’s mostly of interest to people who like tinkering with their machines than people who actually want to get work done. Oh and a load of random bits of the OS have ads, but that’s what you get from a free ad-supported system instead of one developed by an active open-source community.
I don’t think I’d recommend anyone use it as their daily driver or in a work setting, but it’s not totally unusable. It’s not at the level of maturity than you’d expect from, say, Linux or FreeBSD, especially not for client workloads. If you do have to use it, I recommend that you install FreeBSD in a Hyper-V VM for real work. That’s what I did and it works quite well.
I guess, in light of the liblzma debacle, today is a good time to remind everyone that the #CHERIoT platform was designed from the ground up with supply-chain security in mind. If you want to use some third-party code, you can audit precisely the APIs from other components that it can use, the set of things that can call it, the set of devices it can directly access, the amount of heap memory it can allocate, and more.
For a case study, see our ongoing work on compartmentalising the network stack, where we can fearlessly reuse third-party code and know that we are safe from entire classes of compromise.
If you want to build IoT devices with long, low-maintenance, secure lifetimes, SCI Semiconductor may have the microcontroller that you need to realise your goals.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)