I got introduced to microcontrollers through the original Arduino board. It took me only a year to switch to bare metal atmega/attiny (zero external components!), and to this day, those are my favourite micros despite all their shortcomings. Theyare extremely well documented, and them being 8-bit with a simple instruction set makes it very easy to learn assembly (or even opcodes). At the same time, they are compatible with 5V logic (and can be abused!) which makes them almost perfect for beginners.
Would I have been able to learn assembly with ESP32? Probably not. You couldn't even find proper manuals for ESP8266 back in the day because they either didn't exist, weren't in English or weren't released to the general public...
It’s pretty wild how people lump the collective West and the US together. Maybe that worked in the past, but the US as it is today is definitely not how one would imagine a western country.
Being the dominant western force, it is the current model for “the west”. It’s pretty wild how people say “the west” and are intending to not include the US front and center of that.
I object your reference to the collective west. As a Canadian, i believe my country has very little in common with the US. In fact, the US is pretty similar to China when it comes to propaganda.
Iran has a longer history, obviously, but it’s worth mentioning the US is no longer a democratic country. The congress has effectively delegated its powers to the president. You can’t really come back from that any time soon.
They seem to be highly pragmatic. Rather than chasing AGI, they are more interested in what can be done with today's technology. Any breakthrough towards AGI will inevitably leak quickly, so they'll be able to catch up as long as the foundation is ready. In a bicycle race, it can be quite beneficial to travel behind the leader and enjoy a reduction in drag forces. Perhaps that's their guiding principle.
As you noted, it’s about what’s important to us. The physical function may or may not be sparse, but our brain model is guaranteed to be sparse. A note played on a violin is anything but a sine function, yet our brains associate it with a single idealized tone. Our world model is super compressed.
Even if you could create such a law, at this point in time, no law can protect americans agains persecution by government-affiliated groups who are immune from court scrutiny thanks to their protections at the very top. You would first have to send corrupt SC justices to prison, impeach Trump and prosecute all his henchmen. Forgive me, but i doubt this is going to happen now that the US is officially a dictatorship. There is no point in laws if you have no independent courts and almost no one is willing to stand up for democratic principles.
Tracking the populace is a bipartisan goal, not just a Republican one. Democrats support some good measures like Net Neutrality, but they're also getting behind the "protect the children" surveillance laws just like the Rs. Even when they're in power, the best we get is department chiefs like Lisa Khan doing good work that the next administration reverts.
But on the lawmaking end, they're still pretty complicit.
Would I have been able to learn assembly with ESP32? Probably not. You couldn't even find proper manuals for ESP8266 back in the day because they either didn't exist, weren't in English or weren't released to the general public...