Oh, and just to add one more thing . Some network protocols just fundamentally can't work under NAT. Ex: FTP. So party of the reason this seems to worn is because we changed the way we design protocols to be NAt compatible. That's dumb. The Internet should just work.

I work for a company that makes large industrial machines. Some of the machines are, themselves, networks. They have motors and sensors and encoders and PID controllers and more. But too many of those devices assume ipv4, as do the corporate networks they live behind. So we have to assign all the embedded devices IPv4 addresses that don't conflict with the corporate s network, then apply NAT. It is overcomplicated, and so I can't remotely monitor the devices. To solve this there are a gzillion 3rd-party companies each with their own tools and APIs for remote monitoring.

Each device ought to be able to assign itself a unique IPv6 address and we could talk straight to it. Instead we go through a myriad of 3rd-party NAT hacks to get there.

A firewall is fine. Multiple levels for firewall is fine. Multiple levels of firewall each one rewriting the IP address is a nightmare. Often time today teams assume NAT is a firewall feature, when in reality firewall don't need NAT to function. It's just a hack.

We have made it work, but it is costing us dearly. End-to-end addressability is fundamental to the original design of the internet. It enables any two nodes to communicate directly without needing a third party to broker the connection. For example, decades ago two people could play a video game over the internet without needing a 3rd-party server. IPv4 exhaustion and widespread use of NAT broke the model, handing control over to centralized services. So today, my cell phone can't ping your cell phone without going through someone else.

The Internet went from a democratic self-healing system to one where big corporations dictate what protocols we can use to connect.

Us old farts pine from the old days. Today's network engineers are fine with corporate control because they don't know anything else. Time will tell how big of a problem this really is.

Perhaps governments that want the citizens and corporations to police speech should provide a webapi like https://gov.br/IsAcceptablePos... that returns true or false, so we all know what is okay and what is not.

It seems we 100% agree, but based on your final jab I think you missed the key point. I am not saying "both sides are bad." A more accurate paraphrasing would be "anti-science positions are wrong no matter what side they come from." But even that misses the crucial point. Take a look at what the OP posted:

This person asserts that typically, conservative people question the use of fluoride, not liberals. Anyone watching the current US news cycle might conclude that too. But historically, it was the other way around. My point was this: People should stop associating concepts like "liberalism" with Democrats, and "conservatism" with Republicans. It doesn't work like that. Parties change their positions over time and cannot be mapped to these basic (and overbroad) concepts.

This realization helps people break free of partisan thinking. I have had hyper-partisan family members who don't care if their position is stupid. But if I remind them that a liberal once held that position, well suddenly they question it. I've seen the look on their face: "How could I possibly have had a liberal thought? Impossible!"

You are exactly right when you stated "Mainstream Republicans took the stupidest ideas from the lunatic left and made them the center point of their platform." Just understand this completely shifts people's assumptions about party identity. If someone chooses to, based on data, consume raw milk, consolidate power in a unitary executive, and raise tariffs -- that is totally fine. But they should not call themselves conservative. And we should call it out when people erroneously assume that a belief is conservative or liberal when really it's just "dumb."

The anti-fluoride and anti-vaxx movements have always been on the Democrat side. Under Trump, those anti-science conspiracies are being embraced by Republicans as well.

This is, once again, a reminder that Trump and MAGA are not conservative movements. Anti-science positions are not, and were never, solely the domain of one party. They just chose *different* anti-science positions. The Republican who believes that climate change isn't real is applying the same kind of wrongthink as the Democrat who believes that alkaline water cures cancer.

Nah, the large Microsoft hops they have their documents on the cloud anyway. Share drives and local SharePoint have been replaced with OneDrive, Sharepoint online. Outlook is in the cloud, messaging is Microsoft Teams, etc. Half the people open a document from SharePoint and edit it in the online Microsoft Word and don't even know they are doing it. Then if you get really fancy, you have documents in ERP systems that are on the cloud too.

PLUS: The hybrid solutions are sneaking into things that are supposed to be on-prem anyway. So IT goes through all the work to setup their ERP system on-prem (SAP, Oracle, etc.) but then a bunch of features require cloud connections to work anyway. So technically the documents are local, but maybe your indexer, search, analytics, virus scan, and reports all require the cloud. It's the worst of both worlds, and it is becoming the default.

Perfectly said! The "claptrap" came from the very people who are complaining today. Those who are screaming about teachers feminizing male students are the anti-intellectuals that defined masculinity to be violence and stupidity. They perpetrated that culture upon themselves, then when it turned out that punching the smart kid in the face wasn't a useful job skill, they blamed their failure on the schools.

But at half the range because of the lower energy density. Americans are very concerned about range.

So time will tell which is the winner. Sodium-ion will only be viable if it can provide some superscalar benefit. Suppose it winds-up half the capacity, half the price, and charges in half the time -- then it is really just equivalent to halving the lithium-ion battery. Hopefully it will be much much cheaper, because that is the key factor that will drive adoption.

Then the Sierra Club should spend money researching sodium batteries or building a battery plant. And your own post says "Except for transportation" so sodium batteries aren't a solution anyway

93's point is not dependent upon them being the same organization. It does not matter. The point is that the administration is controlling and does not care about privacy in general.

I would be totally on-board with this if they used a local AI like Apple does. Or even "use a local AI if your machine meets these requirements" or "only if you turn it on." But as-is, I am forced to send everything to Microsoft's cloud. Which, I admit, 99% of people don't care about so us privacy-focused nerds are an ailing relic. How about a plug-in that lets me change the engine? I know Microsoft's Semantic Kernel allows for this, so it should be easy for them to do if they are eating their own dog food.

Until then, I run ollama so I can use any model I want locally. Performance is just fine using llama3.1 on my mid-level machine.

The US builds a lot of infrastructure then cuts the maintenance budgets. The engineers knew those cloth wires weren't going to last forever, but some politician probably decided that as long as it lasts for one more election cycle, it would become someone else's problem. This happens with schools, nuclear power plants, sewers, etc.

This isn't about technology obsolescence: NY could replace the cloth-wrapped wires with new cloth-wrapped wires. But they can't just leave them to rot.

Two words that should never have been put together are "Malicious" and "PDF" -- Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash are two of the most vulnerable pieces of software ever written. A document viewer should not be able to compromise an entire server! There is something fundamentally wrong about the foundations of software engineering that such a thing is even possible. This is equivalent to a poorly designed lawnmower destroying company HQ.

^^ This post is what the entire discussion should be about.

If AI can adequately replace a human, is there a reason we should object to it? For over 100 years, we have allowed technology to displays humans. Is this time different? If so, why? Is it because it replaces us in ways we morally object to? Is it because we are concerned that there will not be jobs left for humans? Is it economically unsustainable? Or is it just history repeating itself and people are afraid, just like we were during the advent of the steam engine or the typewriter?