I understand, and I understand that there were limits to what could be done with the resources there were. What irks me is the strength of the claim made without enough evidence to make it.

> The ST intern found those boosts all by himself. They compared the exact MCU & peripheral initialization of the C and Rust firmwares, tightened I2C timings (where STM Cube has vendor tuned & qualified values), and enabled the MCU's instruction cache, which somehow is not default in Embassy's HAL. We were quite impressed actually, the last days before the deadline were quite productive, optimization wise.

Fair enough, hats off to the intern. This kind of thing is common in MCUs, even on low-end CPUs weird defaults can be selected. But the involvement and influence of the OS developers remains unclear.

Again, there's just not enough data to make such strong claims. I think the paper could easily make recommendations, it could say that at least in some cases (as evidenced) Rust could be a reasonable choice, and it could make an argument for further work.

If I ran an experiment where I gave a cancer patient bread, and then they recovered from cancer, I couldn't then say: "It is concluded that is a sound choice today for in this domain.". You would rightfully jump up and down and demand further experiments to increase the confidence of the result before drawing the conclusion.

It could have been concluded instead that there is a case for further experiments to be conducted, or that Rust could be approaching a maturity where it could be considered for some firmware projects. But as it stands, the conclusion is far too strong given the experiments performed.

This conclusion was reached with a single experiment.

> Two teams concurrently developing the same functionality — one in C, one in Rust — are analyzed over a period of several months.

> Furthermore, Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime in Rust whose footprint is smaller than that of the state-of-the-art bare-metal C stack traditionally used in this context.

> The authors thank Davide Aliprandi and Davide Sergi of the STAIoTCraft team, and the wider Ariel OS team.

So one team had Ariel OS developer support, and it's unclear what support the other team had. Seems fair.

In Figure 12, they simply stop optimizing the code once desired rate is reached. Just at the end of the project the Rust firmware gets over a third performance boost, most likely from their OS developers.

Additionally, there is a claim that "Ariel OS is shown to provide an efficient and portable system runtime" - but there are no real tests for portability are conducted. Worst still:

> Where C-based projects require a separate project setup and manual code copying per target, Rust on Ariel OS consolidates everything within a single project [..]

This claim is just not true. This sounds like somebody that is not as familiar with C.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bic_Camera

So they're going to open the laptop up and make hardware modifications to random laptops sent in? May as well have a VPS at that point.

A far better business offering would have been to offer pre-selected physical devices where such things are well known.

I wrote a very quick hacky program for X11 that stays always visible that will display the information for any number of batteries: https://gitlab.com/danbarry16/bat_mon

It ends up being 50kB with minimal optimization and sports a lightweight X11 library (GUI) and JSON parser (configuration).

One of these devices for approximately $100 would sell all day long.

Is there a service to get on a FOUP with a group of people? I know for example of Tiny Tape Out [1], but I'm wondering where you might explore for larger designs.

[1] https://tinytapeout.com/

What kind of order of magnitude of cost are we talking about?

What are the next steps - is there some service to cut the wafer and put into a package for you?

^ Encase the link also responds with this for you:

    Access Denied

    You don't have permission to access "http://www.marketscreener.com/news/us-private-credit-defaults-hit-record-9-2-in-2025-fitch-says-ce7e5fd8df8fff2d" on this server.

A large business is estimated to use 50MWh at £14,706 a year [2]. It'll cost in excess of £300k per year just to run electricity, not that the grid has that in spare capacity [3]. It's completely in contrast to their green energy campaign.

Then, they don't even have any kind of contract actually in place:

> Asked about the terms of the contract that Nscale had signed to build the supercomputer by the end of this year, the government did not reply directly. Instead, it said that Nscale’s entire $2.5bn investment was “not a formal contract, rather an intention to commit capital”, and “may well include equipment and capital funding”.

There's not enough serious capital invested to get this off of the ground (or even to break ground seemingly). And then there are basic questions, like:

1. Why would build a data center that is supposed to create tonnes of jobs, in a location where it costs a lot to employ people?

2. Why would you outsource your data center if you live in the US or EU, when there are better options available locally? These data centers sure as hell won't be used by British companies because the government are crushing them with tax.

3. The energy cost is far too high compared to locations with nuclear or hydro electricity generation.

This whole thing stinks. I think it's a complete and utter lie.

[1] https://uk.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/how-much-doe...

[2] https://www.moneysupermarket.com/gas-and-electricity/busines...

[3] https://watt-logic.com/2025/01/09/blackouts-near-miss-in-tig...

Today - Parsing a website's HTML (lots of pages, lots of links) to update an RSS feed that accepts filters. Rather than manually checking a website and losing track of what I have or haven't reviewed, the idea is to feed it into an RSS aggregator.

I was talking somebody through Bayesian updates the other day. The problem is that if you mess up any part of it, in any way, then the result can be completely garbage. Meanwhile, if you throw some neural network at the problem, it can much better handle noise.

> Deep learning’s convenience advantage is the same phenomenon at larger scale. Why specify a prior when you can train on a million examples? Why model uncertainty when you can just make the network bigger? The answers to these questions are good answers, but they require you to care about things the market doesn’t always reward.

The answer seems simple to me - sometimes getting an answer is not enough, and you need to understand how an answer was reached. In the age of hallucinations, one can appreciate approaches where hallucinations are impossible.

470k crashes in a single week, and this is under-reported! I bet the number of crashes is far higher. My snap Firefox on Ubuntu would lock-up, forcing me to kill it from the system monitor, and this was never reported as a crash.

Once upon a time I wrote software for safety critical systems in C/C++, where the code was deployed and expected to work for 10 years (or more) and interact with systems not built yet. Our system could lose power at any time (no battery) and we would have at best 1ms warning.

Even if Firefox moves to Rust, it will not resolve these issues. 5% of their crashes could be coming from resource exhaustion, likely mostly RAM - why is this not being checked prior to allocation? 5% of their crashes could be resolved tomorrow if they just checked how much RAM was available prior to trying to allocate it. That accounts for ~23k crashes a week. Madness.

With the RAM shortages and 8GB looking like it will remain the entry laptop norm, we need to start thinking more carefully about how software is developed.

This is truly crazy. Random companies interacting on this level with children is far from ideal.

> Please, gov.uk introduce a gov ID verification service? I could trust that, -ish, I have worked with public sector clients several times...

I don't like the idea of governments collecting this sort of data either.

I'm the sort of person that either rejects the cookies, or will use another site entirely to avoid some weird dark-pattern cookie trickery. I don't like the idea of any particular service getting more information than they should.

Siting there I realized, we were not the real target. It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept, enter any details asked of them, and to not value their personal data. Sadly, the damage is already done.

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