Side note, the Connection Machine is pretty much the coolest looking computer ever: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/story/73 It looks exactly to me what a powerful and slightly scary computer from an 80's movie looks like.
I mentioned this last time around [1], Tamiko Thiel worked with Feynman and Hillis at thinking machines and is responsible, amongst many other things, for how cool the CM-1 and CM-2 looked.
And it was designed after the T-shirt that feynman wears on one of his most known pictures [0]. BTW: there we still have a nonfunctional CM which we equipped with LEDs to put fun games on it at the CS faculty in Karlsruhe [1]
The blinken lights panel on the original machine was functional, each small cluster of processors controlled one LED and there was a microcode instruction for latching the LEDs.
We found this museum completely by accident on a visit to the US, and it is a delight. When I saw the Connection Machine all lit up, I squealed :)
It seems like the reason it's on like that is because it used to belong to the NSA so they took all the insides out and destroyed them when the machine was donated. The blinkenlights are driven by Raspberry Pis or something similar.
I can understand the frustration from a climate change perspective, but you still get the benefits of cleaner air locally, increasing energy independence and freedom from commodity cost fluctuations.
It's an interesting trade off between swapping station cost and time to charge. I suspect charge times will decrease enough that it's not worth all the physical investment in swapping, it may already not be.
Swapping for regular cars is a dead end I think. But for trucks and such I imagine it makes a lot more sense. Much longer charging times vs a quick swap. Much easier to put battery in an easy-to-swap location. Fewer swapping stations needed before it makes sense to utilize it for transportation companies, ie team up with a company that has a few fixed large-volume routes to get going.
My understanding is that this the vulnerability only allows memory access to related Safari/Webkit processes (specifically those sites that were opened with a window.open call). So passwords stored in a separate password manager app are inaccessible unless that app autofills the password into the compromised Safari window/process.
It's hard not to think that both Honda and Toyota are just trying to convince EV buyers to delay their purchase since something "much better" is about to be released, or at least until they have time to release competitive EVs. Both companies are in the press talking about huge improvements possible with their solid state batteries, with no current production to speak of.
It should be considered a failure of our profession that after all these years the number 1 issue is still out of bounds write, a memory safety issue. In any true engineering profession a failure of this sort would be unacceptable, but in ours it's tolerated and explained away as a necessary byproduct of certain tools. How much personal information has been compromised due to these low standards? How many people put at risk? It's shameful.
It’s very healthy to be skeptical. I’m no expert but the current status appears to be a successful test of the merge on a public testnet and an expectation that it will happen on mainnet in the next few months. More details here: https://ethereum.org/en/upgrades/merge/ and a prediction market on the actual date it will happen here: https://polymarket.com/market-group/ethereum-merge-pos
I very happily use this technique and I believe I found out about it from your original blog post. Thanks for the original writeup and for the update on how it's going a few years in!
Has anybody tried this and can share their experiences? It sounds really cool, but it's usually the edge cases that determine whether something like this is actually good or not. Thanks!
