In order of addictive potential, smoking >>>>> lozenges/gum >> nicotine patch.
It's all a matter of how long it takes to reach peak concentration in your blood stream. Smoking takes seconds, lozenges take minutes, a patch takes 2 to 3 hours.
I have smoked for 14 years and hated every second of it until I quit. Nicotine is not cripplingly addictive. Inhaling tobacco (or electronic cigarette) vapour by lung is crippingly addictive.
Years later, I replaced my ADHD medication with low-strength nicotine patches and I find it as effective, cheaper, longer-lasting and with less addictive potential than dexamphetamine. The side effects when I forget a patch are much less than not having my morning cup of coffee — just extremely distractable and lower energy.
Smoking is terrible, but I wish people learned that the effects of smoking are much more intense from the effects of pure nicotine.
Silly opinion that has no relevance to building competitive CPUs, but I like that RISC-V is modular and you can pick and choose which extensions to adopt.
Makes writing a simulator so easy (just have to focus on RV32I to get started), and also makes RISC-V a great bytecode alternative for a homegrown register-based virtual machine: chances are RV32I covers all the operations you will need on any Turing-complete VM. No need to reinvent the wheel. In a weekend I implemented all of RV32IM, passing all the official tests, and now I have target my VM with any major compiler (GCC, Rust) with no effort.
If there is any architecture that scales linearly from the most minimal of low-energy cores to advanced desktop hardware is RISC-V.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about ARM, but 1) it isn't as open and 2) it's been around enough to have accumulated as much historical cruft as x86.
Not for the same reason as you, the whole time I was thinking "I'm pretty sure NASA can assess the risk of their mission better than an Internet famous blogger", despite the sentiment on HN at the time being very negative after reading these words [1].
These days the only qualification required for people believing anything you say is to have a blog and strong critical opinions about $AUTHORITY. Software engineers somehow believe they are knowledgeable in any topic just because they spend a lot of time reading on the Internet.
Given the shoddy state of network security at large, especially on infrastructure projects (power plants, hospitals, dams, etc.) I always feel like major governments sit on so destructive potential to disrupt communications and anything connected to the Internet of its adversaries to have mutual assured destruction potential of a nuclear bomb.
No one’s crazy enough to push that button, because once you do there is no turning back.
I have often wondered about this exact situation. Like there are many instances of companies who depend on keeping their network secure and are actively taking preventative measures to keep their network safe that end up getting hacked.
So surely there has to have been infiltration to some of the critical infrastructure keeping cities running. Why don't we hear more about it?
It's all a matter of how long it takes to reach peak concentration in your blood stream. Smoking takes seconds, lozenges take minutes, a patch takes 2 to 3 hours.
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