An official update hard (and permanently) bricked my S8 phone back when it was still the flagship. Samsung refused to fix or replace it because I had moved overseas meanwhile.

While "technically" valid, this never happened with iPhones despite frequent travels.

Don't buy Samsung consumer devices.

I'd never buy a Samsung fridge, but ironically I'm loyal to Samsung phones because they've always worked out well for me and I've had bad experiences with Apple and Google hardware. I'd just never buy one of their smart appliances, or any smart appliance for that matter.

Yup, Chinese voted with their wallets, so Samsung had to exit their market after Samsung Note 7 double standards fiasco, good for them.

Likewise. I'm only interested in books that were either published before 2024, or are by authors I respect (e.g. Patterson & Hennessy), or by respectable academic publishers (e.g. Cambridge University Press). I used not to be so picky.

It also presents a bit of chicken & egg for new authors: nobody knows them, and now few will risk it, so they stay unknown. They must pursue other avenues to gain traction; far more than was needed a few years ago.

The deluge of AI books on Amazon has really been quite amazing. Between them and the higher risk of poorly-printed books, I don't buy from Amazon anymore. Now it's always direct from publishers.

It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead.

You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.

Can you elaborate why adding guards makes things faster?

Presumably it gives the JIT more type information, parent example was specifically about one of the type-check functions you can use for guards (is_float). While running it'll use the is_float information to generate code for the float case, and bail out if the actual values fail the guards at runtime.

Other JITS like V8 will do things like speculative inlining and inserting its own type guards , but if this JIT is "Admittedly an extremely simple one" then it presumably doesn't do much of that.

You can get it direct from Elsevier for ~78 euros: https://shop.elsevier.com/books/risc-v-system-on-chip-design...

Maybe it's just a regional thing, but it's showing 78 euros for the paperback for me. Plus I bought the paperback recently at that price too.

For the ebook

With or without DRM?

It's available as a PDF. I think Elsevier puts the buyer's name (email address?) into the file as a watermark of sorts, but that is it.

Use FOOD30 for 30% off.

“The promo code "FOOD30" is not valid.”

Might be a region-specific promo code? Worked in the US for me.

Works only on the paperback. I had added the bundle to my cart.

You're right, and yet it's also true that existing institutions have ossified. There is immense inertia.

You're right that a lot of material really does require a physical book. Anything even remotely technical.

That said, I would argue that a voice actor is far more significant than page formatting when it comes to novels. A good voice actor can turn a good story great, and sometimes a poor story to... acceptable.

I've read thousands of novels over the decades, both with and without audio, so I'm reasonably confident about the above.

It's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.

Most do, in my experience? I worked at Argonne for a while, and they absolutely treated their profession with deadly seriousness. I didn't meet anyone who took the stance of "Move fast and break things". Most spent too many late nights rechecking their work to make sure it was correct. Even when being wrong would be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.

For all its faults, you won’t get a rug-pull like this with OSS CAD Suite and something like the ECP5, especially as a hobbyist.

Embedded developers often suffer under archaic toolchains. There's plenty of reasons for that, but one of them is UB: a newer version of the compiler can completely change an embedded program's behaviour.

Where I was it was quite the opposite. The bloody compiler guys kept on updating the compiler, and we were required to use the OS-delivered one. Since we were often using pre-release OS's, the toolchain could change every week.

It did make you write robust and defensive code, though...