1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.

2. As a hobbyist, you want to EXPERIMENT. You cannot do that with an ASIC. Hobbyists want to do something simple, test it on real hardware, and slowly build up from that. I don't have the time nor expertise nor motivation to spend months writing verification to get it right the first time for a tapeout.

"Just use a microcontroller"... I will concede that microcontrollers do cover 90% of hobbyists use cases (that number increasing by the day). But for hobbyists sometimes you want to learn HDL or digital logic or computer engineering. You can do this hands on with a FPGA much more effectively than in software.

> It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another.

They already need to maintain the Linux build for all the other paid tiers?? These are the same software with different features locked behind a license key. It costs them NOTHING to keep the build enabled for free tier.

Really? In my experience it's the rank-and-file employees who have this knowledge of how to get on with it without ceremony and politics. And the broken processes and politics are created BY the middle managers.

1. Lack of faith in the company they work for, ie they don't fully "believe in the vision"

2. Love of tinkering and programming

I haven't noticed age factoring in at all. Working far far away from ant tech hub areas might be a factor as well.

Pro tip for enjoying your life at work: this also applies to you work projects. Once you realize this, you can have a lot more fun at work and even coerce work projects to be more like your for-fun/side projects. Of course this is detrimental to the company as a whole, but your company almost definitely does not care about you and you might as well extract as much enjoyment as possible.

If your coworkers are actually passionate about programming (i.e. not drones or PM brains running flowchart to increase quarterly profit), you can even make work more enjoyable for them.

Things like unconventional language choices, over-engineering of systems, unusual coding styles, obscure protocol/library use, and of course a ton of NIH can really spice up a mundane codebase.

Even stretching an "easy" module into a masterfully crafted program and going 4x over estimation can be fun sometimes (without any of the bad design choices suggested above).

Yes I stand by this bad advice, and it's allowed me to play with so much technology I would never otherwise touch at day job.

*Mainline linux*

Most changed files: pretty much what I expected for 1 and 2... the "cutting edge" of Linux development over other OSes -- bpf and containers. The bpf verifier and AMD GPU driver might get a boost in this list due to sheer LoCs in those files (26K and 14K respectively). An intel equivalent of amdgpu_dm is #21 in the list (drivers/gpu/drm/i915/display/intel_display.c) and nvidia is nowhere to be seen (presumably due to out-of-tree modules/blobs?).

    186 kernel/bpf/verifier.c
    174 fs/namespace.c
    162 drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/amdgpu_dm/amdgpu_dm.c
    161 kernel/sched/ext.c
    159 fs/f2fs/f2fs.h

    10399 Christoph Hellwig -> I only know his name because of drama last year regarding rust bindings to DMA subsystem
     8481 Mauro Carvalho Chehab -> I also know his name from the classic "Mauro, shut the fuck up!" Linus rant
     8413 Takashi Iwai -> Listed as maintainer for sound subsystem, I think he manages ALSA
     8072 Al Viro -> His name is all over bunch of filesystem code

    1477 drivers/gpu/drm/i915/intel_display.c
    1406 MAINTAINERS
    1390 sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c
    1102 drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.h
     943 arch/x86/kvm/x86.c
     928 mm/page_alloc.c
     871 drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/amdgpu_dm/amdgpu_dm.c
     862 drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_reg.h
     840 fs/btrfs/inode.c

Most changed files: IR autovectorization code, riscv heuristics tables, and C++ template handling (pt.c is "paramaterized types").

    152 gcc/tree-vect-stmts.cc
    145 gcc/config/riscv/riscv.cc
    131 gcc/tree-vect-loop.cc
    116 gcc/cp/pt.cc

   1017 gcc/dwarf2out.c
    885 gcc/config/i386/i386.c
    796 gcc/cp/cp-tree.h
    740 gcc/config/rs6000/rs6000.c
    720 gcc/cp/pt.c

This has not told me much other than where most of the functionality of this project lies.

Bus factor: Pretty huge. Not really an issue in this case due to lack of development I guess.

    3298  Olivier Fourdan
     530  Anonymous
     319  Xfce Bot
     121  Jasper Huijsmans

I think these massive open projects (excl xfwm) are generally pretty consistent code quality across the heavily trodden areas because of the amount of manpower available to refactor the pain points. I've yet to see an example of "god help you if you have to change that file" in e.g. linux, but I have of course seen that situation many times in large proprietary codebases.

Even if you made a version of this board with the footprint changed to the QFP eZ80, it probably wouldn't work because the eZ80 has different memory mapping and clocking differences.

Lmao he got rewarded for taking the fall.

There's nothing wrong with pinning dependencies and only updating when you know for sure they're fixing a zero-day (as it will be public at that point).