You’re right about the Snopes article. It does do a decent job of pointing out that a lot of this reporting is rumor based.
This first anecdote (also highlighted by Snopes) is amusing
Double-hit cases" have been around for decades. I first heard of the “hit-to-kill” phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as an English teacher. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss of a motorcyclist, he said, “If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.” Enjoying my shock, he explained that in Taiwan, if you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you “only have to pay once, like a burial fee.” He insisted he was serious—and that this was common.
So is it Taiwan or the mainland with these wild laws?
Woah, definitely need to check this out. I wanted to slap guix system on an old laptop but had issues with proprietary drivers, very curious to see what workarounds people have had luck with. Otoh I barely touch this computer, and NixOs is running fine on it…
In addition, hardware developers reinvent old ways of doing things and only learn by making all the same mistakes that have been made before. It’s sad, but true.
This same criticism is validly launched at software devs all the time lol.
One thing I’ve anecdotalally seen and heard is hardware guys indicating that something is rock solid and solved because it’s old, so building on top of it isn’t a problem. Obviously we have to build on the old to get to the new, but if we just skip auditing hardware due to age we end up deploying vulnerable hardware globally. Spectre and Meltdown are an interesting example where I’ve heard from at least one distinguished professor that “everyone” believed branch prediction design/algorithms were essentially done. Was it adequately assessed from a security POV? Clearly not, but was it assessed from a security POV in general? I have no idea, but it would be nice as a tech enthusiast and software guy to see the other side of the fence take these things seriously in a more public way, in particular when it comes to assessing old hardware for new attack vectors.
A new trolley era (lemmy.world)
What open-source software would you like more people to know about?
Linus Torvalds takes on evil developers, hardware errors and 'hilarious' AI hype (www.zdnet.com)