Awesome! This will finally let me use bluetooth devices behind a KVM!

That was a delightful blog post, thank you!

I migrated from pinboard to raindrop this year, can confirm.

I was on Pinboard's lifetime plan. No subscription, just a single payment of $15 back who knows when. A few years ago I was asked if I wouldn't rather pay $5 per month instead, and declined. I wonder if all the outages and throttling were a result of underestimating the running costs.

Regardless, service quality had declined to such levels that I switched to raindrop this year. Ironically, raindrop is free to use, and may run into the same issue eventually.

I got the same e-mail and also declined to move off the lifetime plan. I would have considered it to support the site but I could see where the owner's attention was going to be focused. Politics is a hell of a drug.

There's a reason why I took my inverter offline after making sure that it was installed correctly. A cheap power meter now serves to measure my power generation instead.

Taking it offline doesn't protect against supply chain attacks in the form of built-in kill switches. A satellite could transmit signed instructions by modulating light below the noise floor, inverters must sense the voltage/current state of the PV panels anyway for MPPT to work.

Only deep inspection of the silicon and code can improve the situation.

Perhaps Western blocks could develop provably secure silicon IP and code, formally verified, and perform continuous random sampling on imported goods, including full multilayer silicon inspection; publish it for free and refuse to import products that don't cooperate.

I'm curious about the feasibility of modulating light onto a solar panel. I feel it would not be feasible, except possibly onto a single panel at a time over a long time period. Just a gut feeling based off radio stuff (GPS).

GPS can provide the coherent reference, if you mean transmitting signal (say sound) while the panel is illuminated by the sun theres youtube videos of people doing that, with a laser pointer, but in sunlight and without information theoretic justified modulation scheme.

Nothing prevents the satellite to transmit the commands at night, if that feels more convincing to you.

Ask yourself what is the active area of a photodiode in your TV/... ? What is the active area of your light-bucket on a roof?

This is just FUD.

I'm not at all claiming this is happening, I'm claiming this is very feasible to do. Consider the aperture (area) of a camera or telescope, how many times can you fit this area into a domestic solar panel installation?

If we are discussing the solar panel that powers your outdoor garden light, I don't suggest to apply the precautionary principle, but we are talking about products that sum up to a significant fraction of grid power generation.

I thought so to at first but no, this person is not wrong. The situation is FUBAR.

s/to/too/ damnit

It does. The second half is written in C. Java is just used for the simplified first part.

A thought experiment:

A piece of code takes 6h to develop in C++, and 1h to run.

The same algorithm takes 3h to code in Python, but 6h to run.

If I could thread-spam that Python code on my 24 core machine, going Python would make sense. I've certainly been in such situations a few times.

C++ and python are not the only options though.

Julia is one that is gaining a lot of use in academia, but any number of modern, garbage collected compiled high level languages could probably do.

Fair. Add a couple hours to learn enough Julia to write the code.

And that's exactly why it's so cool to see this in the Surface tablets.

...he writes, on his Snapdragon Surface tablet.

(Also, I find it hella entertaining that a snapdragon is a cute little flower, martial naming notwithstanding)

On the other hand, the throughput requirements on image processing are often far more stringent than in audio. A full-resolution stereo audio stream is only 200kb/s = 12 Mb/min after all, whereas a video system might have to chew throw many gigabytes in the same time.

This is great fun! But it's much more prevalent in embedded DSP than desktop.

When I was working on desktop audio software, our rule of thumb was to keep CPU occupancy below 30%. More than that, and you'd be sure to get hitching in your audio stream. (This factors in thread contention, other background tasks stealing CPU cycles, file system pauses...)

A much different experience from embedded programming, where 99% occupancy is no problem at all.