dminuoso

On a side note: grouping cables based on the connector form factor is evil when you include USB-C.

Which of the cables are for PD? How much power? Can they do USB? If yes, at which of the dozen speeds? Is it a Thunderbolt cable? Which TB version? Is it certifiable or just blatantly unstable when running 40Gbit/s? Or is it some proprietary alt mode cable? And which ones are just spec breaking fire hazards if you tried PD with 240W through them? Do the cables have markings to tell you the capabilities? Are they even correct? Were they put on as a lie to upsell cheap USB 2.1 cables?

Bonus points if there are cables with some sort of “adapter” dangling in front (quotes because these are not a thing in USB). Double all your points if there is an USB-C to USB-C extension cord in the box.

It is certainly a box of mysteries.

I do not mean to invalidate your organizational scheme, but every time I am reminded of USB I have an irrational desire to rant about the flaws of USB-C.

Merit-order pricing keeps consumer prices high.

Whether it is the best mechanism to incentivize a transition towards renewable energy sources is debatable, but OP at least implies that we’re on the right direction.

At some point we will have enough renewables to turn off the old and expensive gas and coal plants. Until then we just have to live with the feeling that it’s an investment towards future generations.

Perhaps humanities biggest flaw is to prioritize instant gratification over long term benefits.

This would require a complete new ecosystem and likely new language where any degradation of code flow becomes communicatable in a standardized and fully documented fashion.

The closest we have is something like Java with exceptions in type signatures, but we would have to ban any kind of exception capture except from final programs, and promote basically any logger call int an exception that you could remotely suppress.

We could philosophize about a world with compilers made out of unobtanium - but in this reality a library author cannot know what conditions are fixable or necessitate a fix or not. And structured logging lacks has way too many deficiencies to make it work from that angle.

One thing that has not quite been mentioned in the blog, is how much of the MITM spyware comes from very big and well known „security“ companies.

You know, the ones that really know about security. X-PAN-AUTHCHECK type of security.

The amount of CVEs some of the big firewall companies collect make it seem like it is a competition for the poorest security hygiene.

The real problem we have is compliance theatre where someone in management forces these solutions onto their IT department just so they can check a box on their sheets and shift all responsibilities away.

The GPDR is not criminal law. But ignoring that, regulators barely pursue GPDR violations.

Consider the swaths of dark patterns surrounding cookie terror banners. The GPDR language is extremely clear that none of them are legal, but virtually nobody is ever punished.

If I infiltrate someone else’s computer, secretly run code in order to to exfiltrate data I risk prison time because objectively it seems to satisfy criminal laws over where I live.

How do prosecutors in any modern country/state not charge this behavior when done by a website owner?

We operate an MSP business for tens of thousands of customers and have our own ASN, but gmail outright refuses all our corporate email. Why? We do not know and gmail refuses to tell us. Their postmaster tools lie, are incomplete, display no data, display errors or contain no useful information. There is no human postmaster to contact, all our attempts have been ignored successfully. It’s downright silly but we have to send our corporate mail via a paid third party relay to be delivered to gmail.

These gmail postmaster tools seems to exist to make antitrust cases difficult, not to enable other MSPs to deal with deliverability issues.

At the same time gmail is emerging as the number one source of spam for our customers. If our spam fighting is too tight we falsely flag important mail as spam, and this is absolutely unacceptable to customers. As a consequence we have to relax our spam classification for gmail senders, which manifests itself in false negatives from the perspective of our customer.

But to the customers this reflects on us, not on gmail.

It’s just gmails best interests to make other MSPs miserable to operate. It drives our users to them.

You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated.

In mail we have so many freedoms. We have become so locked into technology that we have to introduce a term like “federation” to signify the interoperability and freedom of a single component. Mail is federation layered upon federation.

The fact that you can just use a mailings list address as a member of another mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.

Bandwidth costs next to nothing these days.

And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs

Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.

You can use your own router in Germany, this is enforced by the regulation agency BNetzA. Your ISP must provide you with sufficient information to set it up.

As a point of interest, there is a class of patterns called Standard Essential Patents (SEP), which the patent holder is required to sell licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) conditions when an implementation of that patented idea is required to comply with certain standards.

What is even more interesting: At a given power rating, coal plants produce up to 3 times more radioactivity than nuclear power plants directly in leftover ash because coal contains large numbers of radioactive isotopes. It might not seem like much, but when you consider that a 1TWe coal plant burns 3.2Mt of coal a year compared to 27t of uranium for an equivalent nuclear power plant, this might become more apparent.

Most of that waste is captured in ash via particle filters and has to be treated like any highly toxic and radioactive waste, but as far as I know this waste it not destined for secured long term nuclear disposal where it would be kept safe from interacting with the environment. We don’t seem to have a problem with that…

Further, some low percentage (literature tends to point at .5%) of it is in gaseous form or cannot be filtered, so it gets vented into the atmosphere. That’s assuming modern and intact particle filters. And we aren’t even talking about CO2 here.

It’s somewhat absurd we have to have discussions about nuclear power plant waste in this reality.

The modern supply chains behave this way precisely because no such requirements exist.

It’s a typical facade argument you might hear from politicians when they parrot lobbiysts.

GDPR has no such exclusion criteria. The definition is astonishingly simple:

‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’).

Note the weight of the word “any” here.

Neither is the case.

Elm semantics were originally loosely based on functional reactive programming in the sense of Conal Elliot, as per the thesis of its author.

Redux on the other hand is just imperative programming folks rediscovering that a state transition can be described as a pure function S -> S, with all the benefits that come along with it. This is as old as lambda calculus itself. Words like reducer are just red herrings.

The primary problem is language/library designers/users believing there must be one true canonical meaning of the word „length“ like you just did, and that „length“ would be the best name for the given interface.

In database or more subtly various filesystems code the notion of bytes or codepoints might be more relevant.

By the way, what about ASCII control characters? Does carriage return have some intrinsic or clearly well defined notion of „length“ to you?

What about digraphs like ij in Dutch? Are they a singular grapheme cluster? Is this locale dependent? Do you have all scripts and cultures in mind?