> Singapore is a much more democratic country than most outsiders realize
Yeah no.
In Singapore you have a single party which has used it's constitution, laws, courts and media control to enforce a defacto one-party state for 60 years.
Singapore citizens can (and do) vote but those votes have absolutely zero chance of changing anything.
Is it technically democracy? Well they vote so yes? Is there any chance at all of peaceful regime change through voting? Technically yes, in practice? Probably not. I would expect extreme suppression and HK style riot crushing. They have been doing it quietly for decades, targeting and legally destroying/bankrupting any opposition to the PAP.
So the only real difference vs say China is that while both are authoritarian regimes the Chinese didn't bother with a mechanism to pretend you can throw them out.
To be clear, I don't object to their form of government. I think it works for them and thus it's completely ok. If anything I find Singapore a really safe and efficient place and visit frequently.
I do object to people pretending it's somehow a liberal democracy though, that just ain't the truth.
People also voted in USSR. DPRK has a 99,9% voter turnout that modern OECD countries could only dream about.
Voting is only a part of the democratic process, but is meaningless taken alone.
To add to what you say, Singapore is not a democracy, Lee Kuan Yew's son ruled the country for 20 years after his death, and his successor was chosen by him.
those votes have every chance of changing everything.
its a first past the post system.
but fact is they always have majority of the popular vote. i dont think it ever declined below 55%. and at best they get 60+%.
there's always a large proportion of singaporeans who want the change. just never enough of them, yet. and maybe there might never be, if most singaporeans are happy with things as they stand.
People get overfixated on the runners. They don't matter.
GHA, Buildkite, Jenkens, Gilab, doesn't matter. That isn't to say GHA isn't poo (it is and always has been poo) but it is to say it's not the actual problem.
The actual problem is using a bunch of unportable vendor YAML for literally anything.
Define your entire build + artifact publishing pipeline in something like Bazel, Nix, etc and completely decouple everything from the runner.
This allows running it locally and also switching runners extremely easily if one of them is no longer to your liking.
Coming from a lot of bare metal C and FreeRTOS it finally feels like embedded is getting a toolchain that is actually modern and better.
Some of that isn't just Embassy but the surrounding ecosystem, some highlights:
* probe-rs w/cargo run integration
* defmt logging (combined with probe-rs and rtt it's very nice)
* embedded_hal (and in my case stm32-rs)
I have also tried RTIC but I decided to keep going with Embassy because I like the async ergonomics more and the few times it's been a downside/missing functionality (no existing async driver for specific peripherals basically) it wasn't to hard to implement what I needed.
I was surprised it just works out of the box on OS X also, generally speaking I would always end up having to use Linux to develop for embedded. Being able to compile on fast Apple M hardware and then run immediately with zero friction is awesome.
It took a little bit to get my head around how to share access to peripherals etc but once I did it's been great and it's nice to know that locking semantics are essentially enforced at compile time so it's actually not possible to have 2 things stomping over the same bus etc which can sometimes be a very hard bug to track down when working with big and fast SOCs.
Other really big aspect Embassy has been good for is really high quality USB and networking stacks. I am using both the USB stack (for PLDM over USB) and Ethernet w/the TCP stack in embassy_net and both have been flawless.
Only real downsides I can think of are it can sometimes be hard to onboard folk that are used to copy/paste from vendor examples and sometimes communicating and debugging with vendors themselves when they aren't familar and won't engage unless you can reproduce on the vendor HAL.
So overall really happy with it and I highly recommend trying it out especially if you are in the STM ecosphere.
Absolutely. I'm using it on RP2040, and it's actually superfun to have real low-level code working in parallel.
In my case, one CPU is doing the CAN-based communication and the device control loop, and the other core is providing the IP-based interface with SNMP-based monitoring.
>it finally feels like embedded is getting a toolchain that is actually modern and better
Last time i tried embassy, it pulled over 100 dependencies just to build a blinky. Its great for hobbyist programming but i doubt its going to be used in any industrial application any time soon.
In all seriousness, why is that a problem? Surely for embedded, the size and hardware usage of the resultant binary is what matters, not the size/number of tools used to build it? I get that a lot of people worry about supply chain attacks right now (and that's fine, everyone should be thinking about how to mitigate that problem/reduce it) - but going back to a world where code re-use is significantly less usable isn't likely to magically make everything better, that has trade-offs too - particularly if (as plenty of people clearly do) they want a modern dev experience for embedded hardware.
It's already in use at least it automotive. If you are not working with safety critical systems (ADAS type) Rust and to some extent embassy is already in the wild. Companies like ETAS (https://www.etas.com/ww/en/) or Ferrous (https://ferrous-systems.com) are working to certify Rust and some crates (embassy is there) to be used with safety critical components. It's not question if but when it will be used. Volvo, Renault and some Chinese brands already ship cars with Rust embedded components in non safety critical path.
Do you have any (soft) evidences, that actually embassy is used in safety-critical applications? I think that is quite more difficult to qualify the whole of embassy with the HAL, executor and the other components used. Ferrous is just the qualified toolchain incl. core std. and some other libraries. Additionally a question is how well it integrates e.g. with ARM self-test libraries for the platform safety.
I know that sonair [0] is actually using Rust in the safety critical path. Toyota Woven [1] is for now just using it in infotainment and non-safety applications.
A lot of those dependencies are from the same project, though. It's just split into multiple crate so you don't need to pull in one mega-lump of code for everything.
(Also, I am currently using it for an industrial application)
Late stage capitalism, protracted and targeted destruction of public education and health systems, lack of STEM focus eroding most of their massive lead in innovation, overemphasis on preservation and subsidisation of dying energy vs new energy (also contributing to innovation losses), overemphasis on meaningless politics and culture wars that ultimately mean absolutely nothing, excessive inequality resulting in the destruction of productivity in the lower ~50% of the wealth pyramid, over-extraction of the middle class leading to declining birth rates (increasing reliance on immigration), poorer health outcomes than other developed countries due to numerous factors (broken overly exploitive health insurance system, terrible diet/obesity, decreasing vaccination rates), toothless antitrust leading to monopolies/duopolies in most critical areas further exacerbating the rent-seeking and over-extraction, loss of soft power due to destruction of the state system under first Trump admin and continued decline due to tariffs and being an unreliable international partner.
So there isn't one reason, there is a ton of reasons.
It's not irrecoverable but it's bad. I honestly hope there is some wake-up moment for Americans when they realise that their leaders have been selling them out for decades now.
Upvote for Bazel. I think these days I place a lot more value on how well an ecosystem slots into Bazel/friends because monorepos are increasingly more useful and relevant.
So nice to see there are good rules for Zig and that folks are using them.
Also ironically I think starting with Bazel/Buck/whatever your poison of choice is almost always a good move even if people tell you it's overkill. The easiest time to do it as at the beginning, all times after that is too hard and the marginal cost of building with it from the start is minimal.
People are free to knock themselves out with Bazel if they’re into that kind of masochism, but having it as the ONLY way to build your OSS project is a big no.
The problem with "the language tooling is already a build system" is that cross-language dependency chains are a thing. The moment you need a Rust or Zig file to be regenerated and recompiled when a JSON schema or .proto file is updated, you're outside what most of those language-specific toolchains can support. This is where Bazel absolutely shines.
If all of your dependencies need to use the same build system as your project then your build system/process is defect anyway. It should be possible to invoke a foreign build system as part of your build.
I asked AI where should I publish my article, it said Medium at first. I submitted to illustration and 10 days later, the article is still pending review right now. So I ask AI again, what should I do? It says HN is the best but also toughest, it's hard to show in the front page. After I tried, I think I kinda made it.
Beyond the usual points there are some other important factors to consider self-hosting PG:
1. Access to any extension you want and importantly ability to create your own extensions.
2. Being able to run any version you want, including being able to adopt patches ahead of releases.
3. Ability to tune for maximum performance based on the kind of workload you have. If it's massively parallel you can fill the box with huge amounts of memory and screaming fast SSDs, if it's very compute heavy you can spec the box with really tall cores etc.
Self hosting is rarely about cost, it's usually about control for me.
Being able to replace complex application logic/types with a nice custom pgrx extension can save massive amounts of time. Similarity using a custom index access method can unlock a step change in performance unachievable without some non-PG solution that would compromise on simplicity by forcing a second data store.
Yeah I think it's likely they get an EUV machine working but with less efficiency than ASML just because of how long it takes to tune these beasts and work out all the kinks.
The big brain move is to try leap-frog the whole thing with XFEL. Smaller wavelength, way brighter source, no vaporized tin particulate, etc.
It's a much bigger lift, new optics, new resists, etc. So a completely brand new supply-chain from scatch but with no competitors on that tech yet and low will for Western companies to try compete on it because they need to get money out of existing EUV tech first.
This is very similar IMO to Chinese auto manufacturing. Their ICE cars never really did meet the same standards as European or Japanese manufacturers despite JVs etc.
However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
> However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.
Making batteries for $80/kWh IS the next gen tech. I’m pretty sure China invented lipo (EDIT: I meant lfp) (at least they’re the only ones making it) and they’re currently pushing ahead on sodium ion. They are also the ones who have pushed lithium ion to the point it is today. My first EV was a Nissan Leaf that cost 40 grand and could drive 80 miles. Now you can buy 300-mile cars for about that. That was all China’s doing and nearly every EV on the road today uses their batteries.
They have done to the battery market exactly what Taiwan did to the chip market. You can buy an EV made anywhere the same way you can buy a laptop made anywhere. But guess where the chips and batteries were made.
They didn't invent LiPo (and you probably don't want those in a car), nor did they invent LFP (LiFePO4) but they did license it when no one else wanted to and turned it into probably the best EV battery tech you can buy today. They didn't innovate a ton on the chemistry but they did on the packaging side, BYD and CATLs structural pack designs exploit the low thermal runaway characteristics in a way that wouldn't be safe for NMC etc to reach near parity on density but with better longevity and cost.
They will be the first to sodium ion and solid state though.
One could tune an FEL to precisely the same wavelength as ASML’s setup if one were so inclined. (Subject to all kinds of complications, as the high energy electron sources needed are complex and EUV light is hard to work with. But there isn’t much of a fundamental constraint on the ability to adjust the wavelength of a FEL.)
Yeah no.
In Singapore you have a single party which has used it's constitution, laws, courts and media control to enforce a defacto one-party state for 60 years. Singapore citizens can (and do) vote but those votes have absolutely zero chance of changing anything.
Is it technically democracy? Well they vote so yes? Is there any chance at all of peaceful regime change through voting? Technically yes, in practice? Probably not. I would expect extreme suppression and HK style riot crushing. They have been doing it quietly for decades, targeting and legally destroying/bankrupting any opposition to the PAP.
So the only real difference vs say China is that while both are authoritarian regimes the Chinese didn't bother with a mechanism to pretend you can throw them out.
To be clear, I don't object to their form of government. I think it works for them and thus it's completely ok. If anything I find Singapore a really safe and efficient place and visit frequently.
I do object to people pretending it's somehow a liberal democracy though, that just ain't the truth.
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