I'm trivialising, but a lot of software in medical devices is turning a GPIO pin on/off in response to another pin, then announcing that it did so. The piece missing from the article is that the assumed probability of software/firmware (or anything really) failing is 1.0. Everything is engineered around the assumption that things (_especially_ software) WILL fail and minimising the consequences when they do. LLM's writing the code will happen soon, it's a GPIO pin control after all. LLM's proving the code is as safe as possible and that they have thought about the failure modes will be a while.
Readit Newsamaterasu commented on Code and Trust: Vibrators to Pacemakers punkx.org/jackdoe/code-an... · Posted by u/jackdoe
amaterasu commented on Australians to face age checks from search engines ia.acs.org.au/article/202... · Posted by u/stubish
The co-leads on drafting the code are rather interesting:
> Drafting of the code was co-led by Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which was contacted for comment as it counts Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo among its members.
Who are these UL Solutions? They seem to have come out of nowhere and hit the jackpot, inserting themselves as arbiters for security. Smells a bit like how Common Criteria proffered independent certification labs, which were no panacea either.
Underwriters Laboratories, UL. Look at the back of pretty much any mains powered device and you'll see their mark. They were founded 130 years ago, and test and warrant devices (typically high voltage) to be safe. Security is a new thing for them, but they're well suited to provide the services.
amaterasu commented on Run0, a systemd based alternative to sudo, announced mastodon.social/@pid_eins... · Posted by u/CoolCold
amaterasu commented on Maybe getting rid of your QA team was bad davidkcaudill.medium.com/... · Posted by u/nlavezzo
Ignoring the common trope that developers are bad testers (I am, but not all devs are), QA presence allows teams to move faster by reducing the developer test burden to automated regression, and developer acceptance testing only. Good QA can often assist with those tasks too, further improving team velocity. Also, moving tasks to people who specialise in them is not usually a poor decision.
The best way I've found to sell QA to management (especially sales/marketing/non-technical management), is to redefine them as marketing. QA output is as much about product and brand reputation management as finding bugs. IMO, nothing alienates customers faster than bugs, and bad experiences result in poor reputation. Marketing and sales people can usually assign value to passive marketing efforts, and recognise things that are damaging to retention and future sales.
amaterasu commented on Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro prolost.com/blog/applelog... · Posted by u/robenkleene
If I was a prosumer/hobbyist video equipment company, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next. They already have significant penetration into the editing market (both with Final Cut, and codec design), they control a number of the common codecs, and they have _millions_ of devices in the field along with substantial manufacturing capability. The cinema end aren't in trouble yet IMO, but the rest should be concerned...
amaterasu commented on Log is the "Pro" in iPhone 15 Pro prolost.com/blog/applelog... · Posted by u/robenkleene
It's always surprised me that there's not more interest in log-scale/floating-point ADCs built directly into camera sensors. Both humans and algorithms care a lot more about a couple-bit difference in dark areas than light, and we happily use floating point numbers to represent high-range values elsewhere in CS.
Some sensors do this internally, unusual though. The rest of the high-end ones apply curves manually in software directly at the egress of the sensor. The reason they don't in all cases is that it complicates black level correction, gamut transforms and demosaic operations (without some assumptions).
amaterasu commented on Batman easter egg (click the bat signal) google.com/search?q=gotha... · Posted by u/simonpure
For the Australians reading this, Gotham city is a brothel in Melbourne, ymmv on clicking this link at work or school.
Easier if you live on an Island, but still quite difficult - Victoria (about 1/4 of the Australian population, IIRC) had a serious 4-month lockdown that just recently ended.
I suspect most countries who would take a 4-month lockdown would be in a very good condition.
The place where being an island helps tremendously is with avoiding re-introduction.
Still ending really... There are still travel restriction from metropolitan Melbourne to regional Victoria - expected to end Sunday at midnight. Retail capacity is also limited still, but ramping back up.
amaterasu commented on Horizon – a free and open source electronic PCB design package horizon-eda.org/... · Posted by u/guiambros
Same question -- I've been using Kicad on personal and light-duty professional projects for about 5 years (yeah, Altium is the real deal, but when you're making a small run of prototypes for a university lab, sometimes you use the tools you have). It definitely has some rough edges, but it's also got a very established ecosystem, so I feel like Horizon will have to be a massive improvement to compete.
I've been using Kicad for the same workloads as you, and Altium + Cadence for heavier ones over the years, and I must say they hit the nail on the head here with their comments about KiCad:
https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why-another-eda...
I'll have to find a simple project to test this out on though, because as you say, It needs to be a huge improvement on KiCad to warrant a switch.