Lots of people are speculating that the price spike is AI related. But it might be more mundane:

I'd bet that a good chunk of the apparently sudden demand spike could be last month's Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-support finally happening, pushing companies and individuals to replace many years worth of older laptops and desktops all at once.

There's a tradeoff and the assumption here (which I think is solid) is that there's more benefit from avoiding a supply chain attack by blindly (by default) using a dependency cooldown vs. avoiding a zero-day by blindly (by default) staying on the bleeding edge of new releases.

It's comparing the likelihood of an update introducing a new vulnerability to the likelihood of it fixing a vulnerability.

While the article frames this problem in terms of deliberate, intentional supply chain attacks, I'm sure the majority of bugs and vulnerabilities were never supply chain attacks: they were just ordinary bugs introduced unintentionally in the normal course of software development.

On the unintentional bug/vulnerability side, I think there's a similar argument to be made. Maybe even SemVer can help as a heuristic: a patch version increment is likely safer (less likely to introduce new bugs/regressions/vulnerabilities) than a minor version increment, so a patch version increment could have a shorter cooldown.

If I'm currently running version 2.3.4, and there's a new release 2.4.0, then (unless there's a feature or bugfix I need ASAP), I'm probably better off waiting N days, or until 2.4.1 comes out and fixes the new bugs introduced by 2.4.0!

I appreciate that, thank you! :)

Could always just use a status page that updates itself. For my side project Total Real Returns [1], if you scroll down and look at the page footer, I have a live status/uptime widget [2] (just an <img> tag, no JS) which links to an externally-hosted status page [3]. Obviously not critical for a side project, but kind of neat, and was fun to build. :)

[1] https://totalrealreturns.com/

[2] https://status.heyoncall.com/svg/uptime/zCFGfCmjJN6XBX0pACYY...

[3] https://status.heyoncall.com/o/zCFGfCmjJN6XBX0pACYY

Not sure if it’s a fit for what you’re looking for, but maybe https://ultimateelectronicsbook.com/ (maybe more theoretical than practical).

I’ve heard good things about “Practical Electronics for Inventors” but haven’t gone through it myself.