With Micro-USB, it was exactly the same, just five years early.

Until recently when we switched to VoIP I ran a few telephone switches for work. I could send arbitrary caller ID through the phone network, but didn't because we want people to be able to call our customers back if they're called.

If I had sent a fake caller ID, could the destination phone company figure out that I was sending it? Yes, but it would be non-trivial once it had gone through a few PSTN switches run by different phone companies and they all had to track it back through their switches to find out where it really came from.

It may be easier with VoIP but I don't really know how that works once the call leaves our system. With the old PSTN switches it would be something like "yeah, the call is coming in on line 12 and leaving on line 17".

We are living out the TV show. Everything in that show is coming true (if it wasn't already).

If you haven't seen it, it is very entertaining, and now almost seemingly prophetic.

Long before the E.U. legislation went into effect, there were long consultations which standard to adhere too. So tech companies had enough time to read the writing on the wall and move. That was the reason why USB-C was ubiquitous everywhere when the due date came. Apple was struggling for some time, debating the idea, but finally caved with the 16 series.

Your argument is a typical strawman argument. You postulate the idea that the E.U. came up with USB-C as the next standard out of the blue, and then argue that companies were already transitioning when the legislation was finalized. But your postulate is (probably intentionally) wrong.

Obviously the switch from "loss leader on a scale the capital markets can barely absorb" to "losing money" is going to sting; but I'm curious if we'll see sneakier knock-on effects.

So long as they were losing money hand over fist the vendor does want to throw enough tokens at you to make you feel like you are having a good time; but as few as are required to do that since they lose money on every one. If they were breaking even or turning a profit the incentive would be to sneak as much spend and upsell in as possible; and it's well known that the verbosity/cost of LLM chatter is hard to predict; harder if there are multiple models and other complications being switched around in the background.

What sort of exciting little tricks will we see from vendors who actually make more if you use more?

Not exactly. Personal originally meant "not shared with another person". Originally, it meant a computer only you have access to, only you install and run software, and only you store and retrieve data.

In my experience, smart people at best found school worthless, dumb people found it a waste of their time, and midwits loved it. Midwits are smarter than most teachers and the teachers tell the midwits how smart they are and give them gold stars and certificates that say they're smart. Which is like cocaine to a midwit.

When I see someone talking about how great their government school teacher was and how much they learned, I assume they're a midwit until proven otherwise.

Seems to me that most government school teachers go into teaching because they're not smart enough to get a real job and where else will they get a pension, job security and long vacations?

Or because they want access to kids.

> Thinking starts with foundational knowledge taught in schools

Every smart person I know would laugh at that idea.

If a kid can't think by the time they get to school, they probably never will. Dumb kids can't learn much and the idea that a 100-IQ teacher can teach a 150-IQ kid how to think (or anything much else really) is laughable.

Government schools were created to turn kids into compliant industrial drones. They have served no purpose since all the industrial jobs were shipped to China, but teachers' unions have ensured that millions of teachers continue to have jobs anyway.

Also Africa has a heck of a lot of sun in patterns that are more consistent all year round. Close to the equator you may get less sun in the day but you don't get a 4x difference between the peak summer production and minimum winter production as we do here.

More consistent output means it's easier to plan around, and not having winters at 40 below zero means even if the power is out for a while you're probably not going to die.

Lastly, of course, with local power production there aren't thousands of miles of copper cables and tall metal pylons to cut up and steal.

Apparently, you have never installed Nagios. Back in the days, when you ran the install script, it wrote out what it was doing, and then suddenly the lines appeared:

It was the same warning to you to vet any code before executing it.

Pretty high, I would wager. Alcohol and coding don't mix.

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.

Someone on the email list said it can give a 6-8% performance boost because the pointers are half the size so you get better cache utilization. For some uses that's going to be a noticeable win.

That said, I've never heard of any software using it rather than just requiring a faster CPU.

The whole 'responsible disclosure' preaching and the not-terribly-subtle threats seem particularly bad given that there's an entire industry of actively more dangerous people who are not only treated as legal but actively courted by state agents and cops(and often even less savory customers, though they tend to be cagey about those); the ones who actively seek to keep vulnerabilities quiet so that they can continue to sell exploit tools and services based on them. Throwing zero days on github isn't ideal vs. getting them fixed; but it gets them fixed faster than if Cellebrite wants to hang on to a bitlocker bypass or Trenchant, and L3Harris Technologies Company, wants to keep selling 'network investigative techniques' that can bypass default windows defender configurations or whatever the situation is.

From the outside it's hard to know whether MS actually mistreated the researcher badly enough to justify their displeasure(the consensus appears to be that MSRC was never the best to deal with and has actively gone downhill; but this person's position seems significantly angrier than average) or whether they are perhaps wound a little tight; but implying that their legal status is the same as people actively running attacks against user systems is blatantly false and totally ignores the class of researchers who do actively run attacks while being treated as respectable.

It's a particularly bad look when at least Facebook got into a public legal fight with the NSO group over their nerd-merc work against their users; not like that actually solved the problem of attacks on cellphones; but it was an all-too-rare case of industry pushing back against the 'respectable' arms dealers; and not one that MS has an analog to.