Entirely correct, and interestingly, the observation applies not only to the "lolcat", "bits, scams, apps" industries, but in fact everywhere -- in finance (both "TBTF" and otherwise), manufacturing, etc.

Re: "garage LSI": IIRC already "pulled off" -- for certain values of "garage" (some experimenters did get hold of surplus industrial gear that would otherwise cost 7-8 figures, the necessary caustics, etc.) But the software problem remains -- to this day there is not AFAIK even a reasonable (i.e. effectively auto-routing) open PCB CAD, much less a useful logic toolchain.

I guess there's something to be said for this approach of doing things. My point is, the trust you put in your hardware is whatever trust you put in the folks who provide it to you.

@Stanislav Datskovskiy: Continuing on the same line as the reply to Verisimilitude above, for trustworthy computing to become an economic activity, you need askers on the market. As long as computers will be used to prop up all the various lolcat platforms and other assorted bits, scams, apps and so on and so forth; and as long as the customers on the hardware market place enough trust in the providers, whether said hardware goes into clouds, electric cars and what have you -- as long as all these hold true, things won't change. I'm also willing to bet this holds true in the Eastern hemisphere as well.

Regarding LSI in garage: I'm curious to see if they manage to pull it off, regardless of the amateurism. I certainly remember the days when I was an amateur and even if it took me about twenty years... well!

Baking a useful and reasonably general logic synthesis toolchain is actual work (and considerably harder than writing a traditional optimizing compiler for a von Neumann machine); the number of people qualified to do it -- likely numbers in the dozens; and all of these people have day jobs. Nor is there any incentive to carry out such a project commercially -- especially considering that the available quasi-documented homogeneous FPGAs are of "toy" size in re: LUT count, and this seems unlikely to change.

The more general underlying problem is that approximately no one in the commercial world (as far as the naked eye can see) actually gives remotely enough of a shit re: trustworthy hardware (or even software) to even contemplate the "DOS-like on a hand-sewn FPGA CPU" approach to computing (whether via "open" toolchains or otherwise) for any purpose whatsoever. There is no economic underpinning for any such work, even in industries which a naive outsider may imagine are strongly concerned with security.

And so, unsurprisingly, what there is -- is of decidedly "amateur-quality", riddled with piles of Open Sores dependencies, and largely unmaintained. Quite like the familiar Linux hell, but without a 1990s golden age to "run off the fumes" of.

I don't really want to discuss FPGAs

Neither do I. Regardless, from uniformity comes better inspectability.

I'm not sure hardware production economics can be scaled down this century, so our generation is stuck with ThinkPads or whatever.

Yes. The only way to reasonably use untrusted hardware for trusted computations is to use a variety of multiple such machines, unlikely to be tainted in identical ways, and determine they return identical results.

In any case, we should focus on correcting the situation of piss-poor software first, since we can control that moreso than hardware.

The yet-undiscussed issue is whether we want to be able to access them internets or not. I'd give up continuous internet access any time for the cost of a self-sufficient home.

So... not sure how this blog will make it through the collapse.

Quite interesting to think about the shortest tech path to electricity tbh. Hydro seems like the way to go methinks. Even ancient peoples could throw together a water wheel, and a dynamo you can rig together with just wire.

Reinventing basic electronic control might also be not totally hopeless if we can write down the know-how at least. I once saw a video where some sort of soviet hag built an amplifier tube from scratch in her own garage. A shitty one, but working nonetheless.

So anywho, were I our esteemed host, I would ensure that Chateau Lucian is built next to a raging water source. Good also for disposing of unwanted visitors, in Minecraft.

1. Buy a plot of land somewhere -- there's plenty of acres going well under $50K a piece in this fine country we have over here in Eastern Europe
2. Stock up on diesel fuel
3. Buy a bunch of redundant generators
4. ... ???
5. Profit!

I'll also anticipate your next thought: the way this is going, you're going to need an armed militia to guard the land, a couple of iobagi to work it and so on and so forth. On the medium-term there's no alternative to rebuilding the supply chain from the ground up. The future of urbanity is quite simply sheer poverty, and the future is very-very close, if not already here.

@Verisimilitude: The debate you mention doesn't really surprise me. Just yesterday I heard some congresswoman supporting the introduction of female crash test dummies because they promote gender equality in car accidents. If this is not the mark of generalized schizophrenia, I don't know what is. Maybe life in 1980 USSR could equal this level of nonsense, although I doubt it.

I don't really want to discuss FPGAs, since for example the software toolchains supporting even the open source Lattice items used by Stan are as good as proprietary. I'm not sure hardware production economics can be scaled down this century, so our generation is stuck with ThinkPads or whatever.

A number of changes are needed for a solution to this nonsense. Firstly, programs must be finished at some point, and they must be correct when finished. Secondly, there needs to be much smaller programs; this can be done through less code using more data. On the hardware front, it would be good to have uniform and interchangeable components; memory chips work, and are simple compared to processors; the FPGA is the closest thing for computation. Rather than learn how to cook, learn how to not be poisoned.