It all seems like a backdoor to let tech companies build power generation on site without all the red tape and sell the excess power to consumers. This indirectly allows them to offload some of the fixed operational costs onto consumers.
We just approved the first nuclear plant in 20 years to a company owned by Bill Gates and in a state that has basically nothing but farmland and a Microsoft datacenter.
Price of power goes up and the local people are not connected to the benefits. You might think they will receive a lot of money in taxes but you would be wrong because they have tax breaks.
Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".
The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.
I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
"Attempt" is doing a lot of work there. Companies are driven by a profit motive, and are practically required to renege on promises that are not legally enforced.
In a different world they would have earned trust and deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is not that world.
You'll notice that I did not advocate against building and grid reconfiguration. Indeed, my company does microgrids. I do, however, believe strongly in being aware of tradeoffs.
In short, I'm very much in favor of building the right solution to a problem.
I am unsure what cognitively triggered an unhealthy response of "this is NIMBYism!" and would welcome a follow up comment to understand your train of thought.
> A keyboard backlight is such a cheap and useful addition to a keyboard
Useless LEDs that burn battery budget.
The thing everyone seems to be missing is this isn't a laptop for you or me. It is to compete with Chromebooks in the educational market, and to have a SKU to sell in developing countries.
Isn’t the iPad already competing in these segments? Because unless reality has changed dramatically, this is still fairly pricey and a full-fledged laptop that doesn’t make for direct competition with Chromebooks.
Even in my home country of Portugal 700€ is a lot to throw at a ‘laptop’ that will be somewhat obsolete in 3–4 years, assuming Apple continues the trend of graphics-intense, memory hungry OS releases. An iPad seems like a better candidate for students or those on a budget.
I’m actually not sure who the Neo is for. Unless it’s a 3-model trick to price the Air upwards.
Thank goodness they removed this fantastic thing everyone wants to give you an extra fourteen seconds of use time per battery charge. Come on man.
As for the importance of it, if you want to give these to kids, you should have something more rugged, more replaceable, and more built for all kinds of environments (including kids who don’t have a conveniently well-lit place to focus on schoolwork at home).
A large school could have thousands upon thousands of broken Chromebooks waiting to be shipped off - literally multiple pallets. I’ve seen it more than once. Absolutely nobody is begging for an unrepairable, unexpandable, more-expensive version of what they all already have. It’s garbage for school, dead out of the gate.
I wouldn't normally comment on such stuff as it's clearly a personal preference, but just to underline that it is in fact a preference vs everyone, I have used keyboard lighting exactly once in the ~decade it's been available to me. On a laptop with predictable keyboard, it genuinely doesn't matter to me.
(On a laptop with unpredictable keyboard, light is mitigating, not fixing the problem :)
Touch typing is a useful skill for everyone to have and doesn't take long to acquire.
Not to mention even the light of the display should be enough for you to be able to read the key caps if you really need to. Keyboard backlight seems like a gimmick with limited use to me. I always thought it was purely aesthetic.
You're sitting back in a chair watching YouTube in the dark. Hit F for fullscreen. (OK, that was the easy level because of the key bump.) Now hit L to skip 10 seconds forward. Now hit < and > to adjust speed.
The backlighting is useful. But no, it's not for typing, for most people.
Also I don't understand what would be hard about your challenge. My hands automatically move to the home row, feel the key bumps and I instantly know where every key is. I never need to look at my keyboard. Not to mention having to move my eyes down from the displays would be annoying.
I mean people like backlight keyboards. So if it fits your use case great. Still makes sense to not include in a base model. I actually actively avoid keyboards with any lightning.
The fact that one in ten million people is annoyed by one of the softest lights ever invented by mankind is not a good reason to not include said feature in a product my guy.
Most people don’t have the touch typing skill and do not care to learn it. It literally matters zero per cent if they would benefit from learning that.
And a less incompetent government interested in protecting the environment, citizen's rights, and finite resources will have outlawed artificially locked computing machinery for the same reasons as single-use Lithium e-cigarettes.
Somebody had to die of cancer at the FAB to give you that CPU, only for the manufacturer to brick it with an eFuse N years after sale. All to protect an unsustainable business model, underpricing the hardware and rent-seeking on zero-cost distribution.
Oh and in both cases, whose rights does the DRM protect?
Sure thing, as long as it doesn't require any permissions. I have installed multiple apks on my phone from unknown people. Note that Google's requirement is also for completely permissionless apps like games.
Nice strawman. People want the ability to decide for themselves whether or not to install some APK, they are not saying every APK under the sun is trustworthy.
If you want to make the decision to install Hay Day, the user should be able to know that it is the Hay Day from Supercell or from Sketchy McMalwareson.
99.9% of apps should have no issue with their name being associated with their work. If you genuinely need to use an anonymously published app, you will still be able to do that as a user.
Android already tells users when they're installing software from outside the Play Store and shows big scary warnings if Play Protect is turned off. What else do you want? If I want to install something from Sketchy McMalwareson after all that, that's my phone and my business.
It makes the awareness global so instances stop independently hammering a service that the rest of the fleet already knows is down. You can always override manually too and it will propagate to all servers in <15s
Censoring an interview with a political opponent is a far cry from spreading disinformation that is counter to broadly accepted medical advice during a pandemic with the intent of harming the general population.
More to the point… the same president was in power during when COVID information was supposedly being censored, and today when political opposition is supposedly being censored.
So OPs argument that it’s both parties doing it falls flat on its face.
Sure, but that's the straw-man version of the argument. During COVID, there was aggressive censorship of _everything_ related to the virus that didn't exactly toe the party line. Satire, comedy, and truly live questions (like the weak version of the lab leak hypothesis, that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab into human population) were censored alongside the obviously false, harmful, and misleading takes about drinking bleach and Ivermectin.
Both science and democracy require active conversation that permits dissenting viewpoints and challenges to the accepted wisdom. Once we have an organization deciding what "the truth" is, we're doomed to stagnation and extremely vulnerable to organizational capture by self-motivated people.
In other words, once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted by people with anti-social intents.
Weird, cause I remember there being a very lengthy and involved debate about COVID. I remember hearing a ton of dissent and disagreement with the government positions... almost like... they weren't being censored. There are hundreds of thousands of discussions about the lab leak hypothesis, and there were hundreds of those discussions at the time. There was also plenty of conflicting advice given, including "injecting bleach" which was advice given by the then president, and ivermectin, which was advice given by 100s of online podcasters.
Even today, you can find like, hundreds of articles of dissenting opinions that were posted at the time of covid. In fact, no one quite yelled "I'm being silenced" as loudly as covid deniers who were demanding to share untested hypotheses.
What I can't find, is any articles that were pulled-from-the-air for going against the then-administration's opinions. But if you have them, please share. Importantly, they need to not be pulled for "false, harmful, or misleading takes."
Certainly at the beginning, the tools weren't 100% in place, at least in the west. Famously, China silenced one of the very first COVID reporters and forced him to recant, before he himself died from the virus.[1]
As the pandemic wore on, we began to see a fight over "fact-checking". Mostly, it played out on Facebook and YouTube, not in traditional media. At the height, I saw a lot of channels self-censoring by avoiding any mention of the words "COVID", "virus", "coronavirus" etc to avoid the AI bot that would capriciously ban or demonetize their videos because it clocked them as COVID misinformation, even when they weren't primarily talking about the virus or proposing any sort of false, harmful, or misleading takes. Many channels do similar today, saying "PDF files" instead of pedophiles or "SA" / "Sea Ess Eh Em" instead of "sexual assault" or "kiddy porn" while talking about the Epstein files. Or everyone's favorite, "unalive" or "self-delete" instead of "dead"/"kill" or "suicide".
I don't have a good source for most of that handy - I just remember living through it. I'm sorry, I know anecdotes aren't data!
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I also lived through it, and you and I remember it differently. Which is why I asked for clear examples, because it's easy to go back and forth about anecdotes.
> once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted
Indeed, my original post ("Both political parties have tried to silence dissenting views") was simply about censorship being bad no matter which political party does it. I hate that the current administration is doing it. I hated it when the prior administration did it. If we can't acknowledge that both parties did it, then when the parties switch again, there will still be secret soft censorship happening. It's a moral hazard to reflexively discount when a side I may agree with does something wrong.
It's getting increasingly harder to point out when both parties are wrong without people assuming it's a back-handed defense of the other party.
> "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities ... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines."
"Pressured." They merely suggested that it was better for the country and for business, and most of the companies agreed. There were no threats of fines or lawsuits, and none were levied.
Weren't there huge monopoly cases being furthered against Meta, Twitter and TikTok at that time? And more action against other major tech companies
If I'm threatening you over your 'possible' monopoly with one hand, and 'politely' asking you to censor millions of stories with the other - are those things completely unrelated? Or is there possible an implied message there?
A mafioso will never tell you straight-up that they're threatening and extorting you. But if you look between the lines even a little bit you can discern the message.
(Sometimes the person delivering that message isn't even aware of the threat they're sending; afaik it's entirely possible that Lina Khan was completely genuine with her push.)
> and none were levied.
Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked', didn't they. Meta alone removed or suppressed well over a hundred million posts.
> None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest.
I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.
> You're grasping at straws.
Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
> Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.
They didn't do everything, they say (did they ever say what they refused to do?), but they did a lot. As did Twitter. We know this for a fact.
> I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.
There was no punishment for not following the government's recommendation or reward for following it.
> Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not, which makes it difficult for you to advance your nonsensical "both sides" narrative.
> There was no punishment for not following the government's recommendation or reward for following it.
You don't know that, and it's not reasonable to assume that. They all mostly caved, hence the letters of regret and the Twitter files etc.
> You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not
You certainly did not. You showed that you don't even know what happened, couldn't be bothered looking into it, and yet are happy to pronounce 'the truth' as if it didn't contradict well known and documented reality.
That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
> You don't know that, and it's not reasonable to assume that. They all mostly caved, hence the letters of regret and the Twitter files etc.
I do know that, and what's more, I assert that you know that too. Hence, why you wrote "mostly" and why you have so far been unable to show any punishment for the "some" who didn't "cave" to the suggestions given without any threat of punishment.
The Twitter files also did not show any threat of punishment. The letters of regret came from Zuckerberg, who, as we have already seen, did not claim any punishment was threatened or meted when he did not agree with some claimed recommendations.
> That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
This is exactly how the current CBS censorship works. The FCC said they "may" revise a rule, so CBS complied in advance by removing the political speech that the admin wanted to avoid.
Unfortunately, reasonable views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed. Kulldorff only responded to a question saying: "COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children." Which is correct, mainstream epidemiology and was the government guidance in the most countries at the time.
> views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed
It turns out that when you have millions of doctors (or scientists) in the world, at least some of them are going to say things that go against scientific consensus. This does not mean they're correct.
Here are 2 more examples of people saying things:
> [Kulldorff's] declaration was widely rejected, and was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. Francis S. Collins, NIH director, called him a "fringe epidemiologist". [0]
The lesson here is, if you're cherry picking individuals, rather than going with peer-reviewed scientific consensus, you're liable to be blown way off-course at some point. Personality cults are bad no matter who it is.
Fear is the enforcement mechanism because it can't be challenged in court.
It is long past time for everyone in tech to take a long hard look at the current situation and stop doing anything that financially benefits Musk, Ellison, or Thiel.
There is no "who", once stabilizing institutions 'fall' the only remaining option is social pressure (which can come in various forms) but that does require a critical mass as it's very much reliant on network effects.
I went to a tech founder conference recently and it was quite jarring given the current state of startups to see no lecture or discussion of ethics of products people should be building. It was all focused on demands of PE and delivering profit, no matter the moral cost, not a minute to stop and get a broader systemic reality check. “It turns profit, it must be good”. Not sure how we collectively combat these dominant forces of privacy violation, attention demands, and mass exploitation.
It kind of explains quite a lot of behavior of the Russian government like low level aggression in the west, interesting ways of killing people and the like. Maybe also the Epstein files - he was in touch with Moscow a lot, and the behavior of Trump who seems pretty scared by that stuff.
Maybe the standards documents you are used to differ from RFCs, but here is the official language:
3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
SHOULD is effectively REQUIRED unless it conflicts with another standards requirement or you have a very specific edge case.
I just don't understand how you get from the text you pasted to "required". Nowhere does it say that anything is effectively required. Words have meaning.
> the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
In this case, the full implication is that your email might be undeliverable. "Should" indicates that the consequences for this fall on the entity that is deviating from the thing they "should" be doing.
But the RFC language clearly anticipates there are situations and good reasons leading to a message that does not include a message-id. Google therefore would be rejecting RFC-compliant emails, and they are the ones who have to justify themselves.
Theoretically, anyway, I expect in practice they'll just ignore the issue or have their own good reason. But they should accept emails with no message-id; there it does strain the imagination to see why lacking an ID would make a message unreadable or undeliverable.
There are indeed such situations. Two situations AFAICR, and neither of them apply to when you connect to someone else's MX.
Gmail rejects the vast majority of compliant messages, I think they've stated in public that they reject >99.9% of messages, and hearsay has it that the percentage for with minor errors like this is even higher.
There are good reasons why a message might be unreadable. For example, message-id is often used by the threading algorithms in MUAs and IMAP servers, and many don't test whether their threading code handles ID-less messages. I use one that deduplicates by ID, what do you think it does when the ID is empty or missing? I don't know, I haven't tested and I'm not going to.
- `MUST: This word, or the terms "REQUIRED" or "SHALL", mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.`
- `SHOULD: This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.`
- `MAY: This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is truly optional.`
In practical terms:
- MUST: It's always a failure to do this. E.g. you MUST have some form of stored energy in your car for it to propel itself down the highway.
- SHOULD: If you don't do this, it's likely to cause failures unless you really know the situation is one of great exception and have thought about what else this change may affect. E.g. you SHOULD maintain a large distance between yourself and then next vehicle on the highway (an example of an exceptional case might be a standstill backup on the highway).
- MAY: This is something which is actually optional and has negligible impacts to successful operation if you do/don't. E.g. you MAY activate cruise control instead of always manually operating the accelerator.
For your car example as-is it'd probably best be MUST unless there is expectation one might reasonably consider their car exploding a valid scenario. In the real world where the car doesn't actually blow, it'd probably be that you MAY leave your keys in the ignition rather than SHOULD/MUST.
Is that what the spec says? Or is this something that Google decided, by making an optional feature a requirement when interoperating with their systems?
It is something Google decided. SHOULD means the other party should anticipate may not. The party examining a SHOULD and deciding not to do something is obviously not required to consider incompetence of other RFC readers as a reason to global replace SHOULD with SHALL before examining requirements.
You should wear sunscreen to the beach. Its recommended as a good way to prevent sunburn. However, the beach police aren't going to come get you for not wearing it. You just might get a sunburn if you don't plan accordingly with other sun countermeasures.
So if I send an email that lacks a feature that MUST be there, will the email police come get me? At a certain point, looking for an analogy stops making sense I think.
I mean, kind of, yeah? If you're sending traffic that fails to meet the MUST requirements, you're probably going to be marked as malicious traffic and eventually wind up on spam/bot lists. If you fail to do the SHOULD things, you might find yourself in some odd edge cases of your peers and experience behavior you didn't expect.
No, its not a "required"... It means someone may have reasons not to use something, and so spec implementors need to allow for circumstances where it is not present.
Those reasons can be anything. Legal, practical, technological, ideaological. You don't know. All you know is not using it is explicitly permitted.
"permitted" is a pretty empty word in the given context. Because dropping such emails is equally "permitted". Sure, there will be no arrests made, but there will be consequences. And those are what this article is about.
If that's your line, then I am equally permitted to send random binary blobs along the way. Not a crime, so totally permitted. They'll just drop the connection.
Buuut I don't think that is at all relevant to the discussion at hand.
I don't even know how you got to "used twice" tbh. Both your own comment AND the post you quoted from only have a single "must".
The only thing that text demands is understanding and carefully weighing the implications. If, having done that, you conclude that you don't want to then there is absolutely nothing in the spec stopping you. Maybe the spec would have been better off putting more stuff in SHALL and less in SHOULD, but as written that is definitely not the case.
Any time any document (standards or otherwise) says something is recommended, then of course you should think it through before going against the recommendation. Going from their verbiage to:
> SHOULD is effectively REQUIRED unless it conflicts with another standards requirement or you have a very specific edge case.
Can you start actually reading what you quote? "The implications must be understood and weighed" does not mean "you are required to have a good reason not to do it". I can know of the Message-ID field, understand what it's used for, and carefully weigh the possible lack of interoperability against the effort required, concluding that I'm too lazy to do it right now. I have then understood and carefully weighed the implications before choosing a different course, but I don't have a good reason to.
Words mean things, especially in standard texts. You can't just carelessly rewrite sentences using not-quite-synonyms like you're doing here.
Oh, and that "must" is not a "MUST". Had the text said "The full implications MUST be understood ..." it would have been a proper requirement by the standard, but this lower-case "must" is just normal part of prose and not the magical "MUST" word which formally imposes a requirement.
This very clearly says that SHOULD is not effectively REQUIRED at all, and is fact nothing more than RECOMMENDED. Really not sure how you misinterpreted this so badly
It's not required but they need to understand the implications. In this case the implication is that Google drops the mail. So clearly they didn't understand the implications.
Google probably did parse these messages as well-formed before inspecting them and deciding to drop them based on the lack of this field. The RFC imposes no mandatory obligation to deliver messages just because they are well-formed.
Who do you think is doing the leasing? People who have no IP space?
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