I didn't read the thing but a friend sent me a headline he saw "Larry Ellison predicts everyone will be under constant surveillance"

wtf. why the hell is that 'news'?

Really sick of the world kissing up to these scumbags and making it worse.  Is it time for cake yet? Please?

"Qualcomm acquires Italian hardware company Arduino to push deeper into robotics"

Well, that is the end of them. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/qualcomm-acquires-italian-hardware-company-arduino-in-robotics-play-.html

Arduino is bigger than Arduino at this point.  The development system is all open source, and the hardware has long since expanded way beyond Arduino-branded boards.

I'm happy to hear that the Arduino people are getting a big payday.  Now I don't have to feel bad about buying cheap clone boards.

The interesting part will be to see how they evolve the core products.  Atmel will likely be the big loser, since they'll bring out new boards with Qualcomm chips.  But the software ecosystem won't hiccup, since it's already designed to build on any supported hardware (think ESP32) and there's no such thing as distributing precompiled binaries in the Arduino world.

Looks like they do plan on moving to only their own silicon. News letter today, the next product was announced, its got their silicon.    As far as im concerned the product line is dead. 

As far as Atmel, i think the ship already sailed on that. For all practical purposes, ARM and RISC-V took their market.  Hell even expressIF is moving away from Xtensa and into RISC-V. 

Tue Oct 07 2025 17:24:28 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Arduino is bigger than Arduino at this point.  The development system is all open source, and the hardware has long since expanded way beyond Arduino-branded boards.

I'm happy to hear that the Arduino people are getting a big payday.  Now I don't have to feel bad about buying cheap clone boards.

The interesting part will be to see how they evolve the core products.  Atmel will likely be the big loser, since they'll bring out new boards with Qualcomm chips.  But the software ecosystem won't hiccup, since it's already designed to build on any supported hardware (think ESP32) and there's no such thing as distributing precompiled binaries in the Arduino world.

And it doesn't matter!  The work is done.  The entire Arduino ecosystem is open source, and they succeeded at their mission of bringing microcontroller development to the masses without requiring megabuck$ development kits.

Thanks to the Arduino bootloader and development system, turning any microcontroller into an Arduino just requires another one with the bootloader.  Anyone can turn an Atmel microcontroller into an Arduino with not much work.   But you really don't have to, when you can get a Nano clone for $3.

Even so, Espressif is the current favorite, thanks to its network stack.  And they're everywhere.  Hell, my smoker has one to talk to its app.

I'm not going to get worried about this one.  The cat's out of the bag.  Microcontroller development has been democratized.  It isn't going back - with or without Qualcomm.

Great.   Blackrock ( ya them ) is looking into buying the regional electric power provider for a few billion.

Does not effect me directly ( it will indirect of course ) since mine is a different company but it will directly effect millions.  And who knows, they may try to buy mine next..

Due to where i live, drilling a well is not legal. You are forced to use city water, and sewage.    If i get to move, that wont be the case again.

The house i lived in when i was in gradeschool, the city incorporated, then a couple year latter, just before we moved out "You are grandfathered, any new house must use city resources and if if you touch your systems at all, you must now hook up to new city resources".   I heard some 20 years later, they just forced it. "you will now connect or be fined".   Just a power/cash grab like the rest. 

Tue Oct 21 2025 10:46:57 UTC from darknetuser

aaaaand that is why I generate my own power and have my own water supply. You can't trust external agents.

It's different everywhere.  My house was built in 1991 and hooked up to town water.  Sewers came in some 15-20 years later but we're not hooked up.  If they want me to connect they can pay for the 250 feet of pipe and trenching, and the lift station that would be required to send my sewage uphill.

And if I ever did hook up ... oh the things I would send down the drain!  A garbage disposer would get installed in my kitchen sink on day one.  Followed by old paint, used motor oil, liquefied dead bodies, fish-shaped ethylbenzene... oh the places you'll go!

So, traffic on my Citadel had died to almost nothing - it would go weeks without a visitor - and I just kind of lost my drive to check up on it at all. 
So, that ISP I was using to redirect so that it looked like I was hosting from NY.... called me and said "We had to shut you down - we're getting reports of rogue traffic from your site." 
I had plenty of backups, and an entire machine ready to just swap out as a hotspare - so I could have picked up from the place in time before it was compromised easily - but there just wasn't enough reward. The world really isn't big enough for more than one web accessible Citadel BBS anymore. Especially when I was paying like $15 a month for the service to tunnel its presence to New York. 

Every now and then I get a little wistful. At first, right around the 2018-2020 - way back when I was running it on a Pi 3B - it was actually pretty high volume - more traffic than here. 

But it never recovered when I took the downtime to go from Pi to an i5 on Proxmox... making it BETTER... but that was around the time that everything went nuts with the 2020 election, Covid, Twitter and Facebook really bringing the hammer down on anyone that disagreed politically with their then current agenda. 

Somewhere I lost the fire. 

Recently it has been ignited again to a certain extent by things going on in the world - but not enough to consider putting the Citadel up - although I still have the Cisco router, the clean i5 with Proxmox and Citadel on it, and the shared storage. 

The real problem is - it just isn't practical to run a system out of your home that is on the public web - you need an IT team dedicated to protecting it from attacks. Or at least one person willing to pay close attention who knows what they're doing. I'm just not able to commit that kind of time. I travel enough I had to give my fish away... I can't manage a BBS if I can't keep a 10 gallon bowl of Glofish. 

So... that is my story. 

That is mostly why my BBS vanished the last couple of times, the hassle/risk. The first time, life got in the way.. was a long time before i took the time to bring the village back up, and it was basically an echo chamber. the world had changed. 

And it might be low traffic here, but not nonexistent  

Thu Oct 30 2025 21:11:58 UTC from ParanoidDelusions

*snip*

The real problem is - it just isn't practical to run a system out of your home that is on the public web - you need an IT team dedicated to protecting it from attacks. Or at least one person willing to pay close attention who knows what they're doing. I'm just not able to commit that kind of time. I travel enough I had to give my fish away... I can't manage a BBS if I can't keep a 10 gallon bowl of Glofish. 

So... that is my story.