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MBed OS and platform are shutting down in 2026, although rumor has it almost all of the devs have already been downsized.
https://os.mbed.com/blog/entry/Important-Update-on-Mbed/
A couple of possible discussion points from the perspective of someone who used it for STM32:
It was one of those FOSS-but-not-really products that was completely corporate controlled and funded and written, but under a FOSS license. It never really gained any traction outside corporate. There is a winner-take-all mentality in microcontroller RTOS... why use Mbed if Zephyr supports 10x as much "stuff" out of the box? Also, given the primary source of funding, it really only practically functioned on ARM processors. Pragmatically it seems multiplatform RTOS are the only ones that survive long-term, single platform seems always doomed, a bit different than the desktop/laptop/phone market.
There was something of a product-tying thing going on with Pelion IoT cloud platform, which used to be free, but the free tier disappeared. It was pretty awesome for hobbyist use until they intentionally got rid of the hobbyists, presumably to "save money". However this seems to be a common pattern for decades, the devs who influence million dollar contracts during the day want to play with pirated/free versions at home at night, so arguably Pelion and thus Mbed shot themselves in their own foot.
I wonder how much C19 killed Mbed a couple years later. After STM32 procs and ARM microcontrollers were unobtainable for couple of years, there was no way to get hardware to run Mbed.
It was a bit memory-hungry; IIRC by the time you got a full IoT platform with auto-updates and telemetry over WiFi working on commodity dev board hardware, you were out of either flash, ram, or both so you couldn't run your app.
I have happy memories of being introduced to LwM2M protocol; it was an interesting innovation on MQTT but a little too "organized" for widespread use. Take MQTT and "compress" by turning all common (and uncommon) nouns and verbs into integers; kind of like the old Apollo spacecraft computer, kind of like a fixed compression standard.
A final interesting discussion point is tool manufacturers going out of business is a pretty strong signal the bubble is over. The permanent solution to "The S in IoT stands for security" may very well be the IoT industry drying up and blowing away, and this shutdown is a sign of the start of the end.
Anyone else have fond memories of MbedOS? I thought it was pretty awesome back in the day, although I switched to Zephyr years ago. Other contemporary microcontroller or IoT comments?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 16 2024, @02:19PM (10 children)
Yes, I've seen the future, and that's it.
There is a SLIGHT problem.
Right now if clickbait.com hosts a web page with Pepsi ads and some middleman like your ISP or search engine replaces the Pepsi ads in-place with Coke ads, there will be ... legal entanglements when discovered. The middlemen are pretty mad they're not able to middleman. Even worse (for the middlemen), most of the over 90 IQ internet users have ad blockers installed.
With AI, instead of a search engine pointing you to clickbait.com the AI part will generate a somewhat edited summary of a better search engine result... no ads... which the business middlemen will run thru a post-processor to insert their OWN Coke ads, political ads, outright propaganda and intentional biases, etc. Meanwhile, because AI exists, you will be unable to use a trad search engine because there's too many pennies to be made using scripted AI autogenerated clickbait sites. Finally because the paid advertising will be embedded directly in the AI response there will be just about no way to browser-block ads; you will watch ads, and lots of them, as many as they wish to subject you to, if you want to use the internet.
The main problem with their plans is webforum type forums like this one, which AI can also eliminate, by using AI to implement infinite spambots.
In the long run WRT Dead Internet Theory, once the internet is abandoned by most people and most sites are majority spam and bots, the advertisers will follow the people and also leave the internet, and things can return to some kind of pre-90s normal both online and offline.
In the long run, the internet will be something like a cross between CB radio and the post office, and some legacy daytime TV content.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday July 16 2024, @02:48PM (8 children)
That would be wonderful but it also sounds to good to be true. By that point so many people will have been running AI bots, and it will take so long to get a clue that it's a bot commenting and not a human, that I would think users will still have lingering doubts about who they are really communicating with. I would assume that would be the last nail in the coffin for forums like this one.
And if all the shitty monetization disappears from the internet then I think it will go the way of Gopher and the ISPs will eventually drop support for it. We might have to return to something like bulletin boards, though with the death of analog phones will dialup even work anymore? I did have dialup working on my cellphone years ago but at the worst case in the future it might have to be an ultra low bitrate transmitted over the highly compressed voice service! And even then, you wouldn't know whether you were just communicating with AIs again on the BBS.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 16 2024, @03:36PM (6 children)
True you wouldn't know, but someone would have to pay for the AI, and if there's no advertising money, there's no one to pay for the AI if its all hobbyists instead of businessmen.
Back in the local BBS scene era in the late 80s we had meetups and bar nights and people who knew IRL sometimes hung out on BBSes, so there would be some kind of social networking effect such that possibly AIs would not be plausible online.
Very few business people were on BBSes in the late 80s. Almost entirely tech hobbyists.
Wifi with a very big antenna on a very tall tower has incredible range, tens of miles. No one will complain about the interference if no one is on the internet but bots and the ultra long range wifi is mostly text bbs traffic. I toyed with the idea of doing something like this in the past; set up a pi with BBS software and a captive portal wifi on a very tall antenna. No network connectivity other than a crossover table between the dedicated wifi router and the raspi would seem to eliminate any security concerns for my home plan, its literally not connected to my LAN or my house other than a power cable... Don't even need text bbs software, could just run a web forum like this on a captive web portal. Interesting idea.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by rufty on Tuesday July 16 2024, @04:24PM
Have a look at the ham radio system AREDN [arednmesh.org]. Its WiFi routers, mostly Ubiquiti, reflashed with custom firmware to run on the ham microwave bands "next door" to the normal wifi channels. And the "MechChat" running on top of that.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday July 16 2024, @11:26PM (4 children)
I just want to stop here and reflect on the fact that we are casually talking about bots passing the Turing test like it was never a big deal. Strange times we live in.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday July 17 2024, @09:38AM (1 child)
"...we are casually talking about bots passing the Turing test like it was never a big deal."
Nope.
Some people are casually taking about bots passing what they think is the 'Turing Test', without knowing what they are talking about.
It's the Imitation Game, and does not involve a person deciding if entity they are talking to is artificial or not*. It also happens to be a statistical measurement over many 'runs'. Turing's original paper is available without charge online. It is worth reading. Most social network commentators 'discussing' AI definitely have not read it, or if they have, have not understood it.
Furthermore, intelligent robots/computers/non-biological things have been a trope in Science Fiction for a Very Long Time. Hoyle's 'The Black Cloud' from 1957 was more intelligent than humans. Asimov's robots with 'positronic brains' ate also quite well known. Everyone else is just catching up.
*The key sentences in Turing's paper, which many people ignore, are:
The object of the exercise is to determine whether A is a man and B is a woman, or B is a man and A is a woman. It is not to determine is A is a man or machine. Effectively, the game measures how well a machine can simulate a man pretending to be a woman (for the purposes of the game), and convince the interrogator (erroneously) that the women is more likely to be the man. It seems to be too subtle a point for most readers and commentators.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 17 2024, @11:46AM
OK I can see what he was getting at but imagine the controversy if such a methodology was used today. It relies on the theory that men and women talk differently to a degree that can be observed beyond random variation. In Turing's day I am sure the social pressure to conform to very distinct gender roles would create very different dialog between men and women on average. Today in the west I am sure the very idea would cause outrage and long arguments.
Anyway, I've learned something about the Turing test, so thanks for that.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 17 2024, @01:12PM (1 child)
A lot of social media posting is like prayer; send it out into the void for a possible updoot, or not; back and forth discussion like on Soylent News is relatively rare.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday July 17 2024, @01:57PM
I know and it's quite depressing. Even on reddit discussions rarely seem to last more than a couple days. Hell, even stack overflow will have a limited number of replies in a disussion although I appreciate that is quite heavily controlled to steer things towards a well defined question with a well defined answer.
Longer attention spans are needed for people to really properly think about a topic and analyze it in depth. The human race is so fucked.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2024, @05:48AM
Digital versus analog is not any problem, the phone system was pretty much all digital in the late 1990s and in fact the fastest dialup speeds depended on the ISPs modems having a direct digital connection to the phone system.
The real problem is the death of the circuit-switched phone networks with fantastically low latency and basically zero jitter.
You can connect two modems to voip ATAs configured to call each other directly and the modems will connect (just make sure to be using one of the G.711 codecs with all signal processing disabled). Some (most? all?) like the linksys SPA2102 support dial sequences that enable "modem mode" which turns off all the problematic processing for a specific call. But when I tried this the latency was really bad.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 16 2024, @04:28PM
Some oof the AI crap I've seen promises to do the processing on your own machine, rather than the cloud, so maybe you can adjust the damned thing to not include advertising. There's not a lot of opportunity for anyone to inject advertising if the AI runs on your machine. Then again . . . if the advertising generation is done on your machine, there's just about zero opportunity to block it either. Once again, you're relying on browser ad server blocking.
I said what I said. - Sophie Cunningham