I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.

The extent to which members of the executive branch adhere to their oaths is not written down. Ofc the oath is written and its power may partly derive from its written nature (clear; predictable; well publicised etc) but there is a lot more than its written nature that might cause a general to refuse to follow a Presidential order to arrest all people suspected of voting for their opponent.

> The lack of arbitrary rule... is emphatically not [a defining feature of both]

I guess it depends on whether you (or most reasonable people) would call countries like Russia a 'constitutional republic'. Of course there are plenty of dysfunctional and dictatorial countries which superficially describe themselves as XYZ but it lacks substance.

While there may be a textbook answer, I strongly suspect it is debatable within the field and comes down (like so many things) to how you define your terms. Do you define 'constitutional' as attaching more to the codified and written nature of any rules or whether it is more to do with predictable and enforceable rules limiting arbitrary government. My view is that it attaches more the latter.

If you go into the etymology of the term, I don't think codification is baked in - that you can find a large number of books discussing the English or UK constitution (using that term) is testament to the fact that it's not just some niche view. I do suspect the influence of US popular culture (e.g. Hollywood) has biased the term towards the US' arrangement vs. the alternatives.

Your question does raise a valid point - Github Copilot's value proposition is fairly limited in my opinion. Not to say worthless but limited and clearly varies depending on how Githubbey your dev workflows are.

Yes, it is a substantive difference but it does not follow that this difference provides the 'constitution' property.

> one of these has an indisputable source of truth... the foundations are not the same

They are so similar as to be almost the same and if an 'indisputable source of truth' exists anywhere, it is not in the written documents or their structure but unwritten norms and rituals sit beneath both.

What stops a President from simply choosing to ignore a Supreme Court ruling and what prevents the King from returning to personal rule?

The lack of arbitrary rule is a defining feature of both and relies on something that emerged rather than something imposed from without by written words.

Some special amendment procedure is not the only or even defining feature of constitutional law. There is non-constitutional law that has this property and there is constitutional law that does not.

The underlying protocol (git) already has the cryptographic primitives that decouples trust in the commit tree (GPG or SSH signing) with trust in the storage service (i.e. github/codeberg/whatever).

All you need to house centrally is some SSH and/or gpg key server and some means of managing namespaces which would benefit from federation as well.

You'd get the benefits of de-centralisation - no over-reliance on actors like MS or cloudflare. I suppose if enough people fan out to gitlab, bitbucket, self hosting, codeberg, you end up with something that organically approximates a formally decentralised git repo system.

The fixed rate payer/receiver is protected but they typically pay for that protection.

Nor will you be immune from AMD Vitis/Vivado sideloading crap into the bitstream.

Sadly, you have to fab your own chips using sovereign facilities if you want security. Individuals simply cannot access genuinely high assurance product and there's no major government in the world with the slightest interest in changing their stance on this policy. There are simply too many governments long on SIGINT to go down such a route.

One can get binaries pretty damn small (low-mid tens of kilobytes for a basic cli program doing something like hashing of a file).

Problem I've found with manually compiling std (which has ancillary benefits of being able to compile to a specific uarch) is it can break the compilation process when bringing in third-party deps. The config.toml (stored in $PROJECT_ROOT/.cargo) overrides cargo's behaviour for all dependencies as well - which may break those compilations.

Tbh, it's one reason I don't particularly rate the rustc+cargo toolchain - but for most people writing regular applications: just being able to do ```cargo build -r``` and not care about binary size, uarch optimization or custom llvm/rustc optimizations (PGO etc), most won't care.

Personally, I do not see point in implementing a softcore Cpu unless design absolutely requires it.

Separately, FPGA makers has shifted focus a bit from facilitating hardware design to providing coprocessors/accel cards.

I do wonder whether someone has looked at the game theory of all this - how devs (and employers) pick langs and frameworks as a strategy to maximize their respective positions under competition.

It's also used by some pretty huge and non-middling corporations. I don't know why I'm defending it - I find Java a too verbose and don't use it personally- however if I were employing and needed to build anything that wasn't a game, an OS, embedded etc. I'd go with Java for large chunks of it because I can find good people to build, maintain and improve it - for years to come. I'd probably throw in some Go and perhaps C++ for compute bottlenecks.

I’m not even a Java dev but I respect its place in the ecosystem and find evangelism quite irritating and normally, has some corporate backer(s).

Its future in some segments is extremely safe while in others it has more competition. Whether it has a future for you depends on the kind of fields you want to work in.

In any case - once you learn a couple of languages (especially from a couple of different paradigms or layers of abstraction) - it becomes easier to pick up new languages.