All of which would improve almost immediately with competition.

I have posted here for maybe five years. But I felt a twinge of nostalgia, so I decided to check out the latest headlines.

So I see this headline and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed about the world during my absence.

So then I see your comment and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed in the discourse, either.

The competition-porn security blanket was a cute idea back in the early 1980s. I was there when the Apple II, the TRS-80, and Commodore Pet were busy trying to set the world on fire. And I've watched the evolution of this space very carefully ever since. As a blue-blood digital native it's the main story of my life and times. My fascination with digital electronics began in the early 1970s. My attitude when the original home-computing toys arrived wasn't: Where did this come from? No, it was: Where have you been all these long, painful, pining year?

This was all supposed to set the world free. That's the story we always tell entering into a new age.

What do I see around me now? Five or so trillion dollar corporations dictating nearly every damn thing about this technology is developed, how it is delivered, and how it is consumed.

This is the house that competition built.

What were these companies competing for all these long years? What was the final brass ring? I'll tell you, and it should be obvious: To gain the monolithic scale to collect monopoly rent not just from their products, but also from the very context in which those products are rendered relevant to our psyches.

Sure, competition is a magic growth hormone, considered narrowly. But surely there's enough water under the bridge at this point that "considered narrowly" ought to be consider harmful. No?

So let's step back and not consider competition narrowly. What are the systemic realities of naive faith in competition?

The systemic reality is that competition injected at the bottom (a good thing) merely kicks the can down the road. The corporations then compete to rise above the discipline of competition. Maybe we double down and inject competition again, this time bigger, purer, bolder than before. Then the cycle repeats again. This time with even bigger corporations competing to rise above competition as titans, behemoths, and leviathans.

Is the government succeeding at taming these giants? Do Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook practice all that much legitimate competition? Here's a skill-testing question. Which of those five corporations is not known for commanding a primary vertical? Google has search and YouTube and the gated Android store. Scratch one. Amazon has AWS and the gated Kindle store. Scratch two. Apple has the iPhone and the gated iOS app store. Scratch three. Microsoft has government workflow integration and the PC gaming community. Scratch four. Facebook has social. Scratch five.

Even to define these verticals as duopolies requires athletic feats of imagination. I happen to use YouTube as my main social platform, and I've never had an account on Facebook. Do I strike you as a typical consumer? Or the 1% of the 1%?

I'm not just speaking here in cliche. I'm extremely well versed on free market principles, free market principles, and the theory of systems, including economic systems and human discourse systems. I spent over 500 hours consuming neoliberal podcasts featuring every possible flavour of neoliberal guest.

On a parallel track, over the past year I traced pretty much the entire evolution of postmodern thought from Hegel and Marx forward to the present times. There's actually quite a lot of neoliberal theory I'm sympathetic toward. I wish I could say the same for postmodernism, but that's another can of worms.

I like much of neoliberalism, but I'm not stupid. I can see the world plainly as it exists plainly before my eyes. We injected competition, it was wonder and vigorous for many decades, but finally and we got was monopoly on a larger scale than we've ever seen before.

What do you suppose the host talks about after conducting over 500 hours of interviews with hundreds of different guests, on mostly the same small set of topics?

Here's an eternal theme: If only we did it right, this time.

You see, every attempt to reform the world that lead to the world remaining the same as ever, only more so, shared the same universal flaw: We didn't go big enough to make $purity cure $horse. This is the one true universal excuse. It was used for socialism. It was used for market capitalism. It was used for every darn thing in between.

So the silver lining in creating worse monopolies than we've ever had before is that we forced them to make us a lot of nice toys in getting there. So I guess we have actually reformed monopoly to some degree. Once upon a time, monopolies came into existence without hardly making anyone a new toy worth having.

Okay, so what's another topic that burns eternal when you discuss the same small set of neoliberal principles for 500 hours?

Education reform. Sound familiar? It surely must. You see to be an expert, with an expert diagnosis, which in your unique genius you've managed to distill down to one word. Competition. Quite the magic trick there, I must say.

Here's a small thing. Charter schools, as normally implemented, are yet another government program. It's a government program with an extra degree of freedom inside compared to the normal landscape. But it's still a government program.

How do Charter schools mainly compete? For the quality of the parents. They often say that they are neutral. But then the application process is so arduous, that only the most truly devoted 1% of parents make it all the way through. So many meeting you have to attend with the school admissions people. What kind of family can organize that? Either a family with means, or a family with fervent devotion to the educational cause.

The vast majority of superior Charter school outcomes comes from this factor alone. Education concerns human capital. Nothing improves human capital like a sorting hat that selects only the right people, for whatever metric you wish to optimize.

Actual value-add in education has mostly proven to be a long unicorn hunt. You can figure out who your best students are easily. No matter how you teach, your best students will remain your best students. For the rest of your students, things are far more hit and miss. One teaching method might connect with one student, whereas a different method might connect with a different student. Neither of these were A students to begin with. And rarely do they become A students at the end. (There are of course some spectacular exceptions if you pray at the alter of N=1.)

Because building a school with better human capital is so much easier than improved the human capital you're stuck with, almost all the best charter schools have mostly done the former. Mostly. There are marginal gains to be had by getting the rest right. Marginal.

So what happens? The schools get good at lying about the reality that they are competing for human capital, and make a big story about how they've improved the capital of their students during their time at the school.

I think it's Finland that has gone furthest in education reform. This was also a competition for human capital, but they moved this into the teaching ranks, rather than the student ranks.

Education is very nearly the hardest degree program in Finland to get into. It would be maybe a small step down from medical school. Dullard teachers in Finland are rare birds. The students have far less class time, are given far less formal homework, but they work hard anyway, and consistently score highly in the world tables.

South Korea does everything exactly the other way. Stories are written about high school students in Korea jumping out of windows. After you sleep through most of the official school day, off you go to the second, private sector school day. And all they ever graduate are narrow technocrats. It's a disaster on wheels.

Blowing smoke up the ass of competition sure beats having to know something about the real world. Makes you sound smart, without typing your fingers off, like I've just done.

Which is why I finally moved on from Slashdot to greener pastures.

CCS can go up to around 400kW. Well, actually I think it is 500kW now. Which is 1000VDC x 400A or 500A.

Most BEVs canâ(TM)t go that high. In fact, I think there are only one or two that can actually max out current 350kW chargers for any decent amount of time. Neither of Them T

-Matt

Yes, but nobody fast DC charges to 100%. The charge rate drops modestly past 60% and precipitously above 80%. So people only charge to 60-80% and no more. Usually 30-40 minutes max. And if your final destination is close and destination charging is available, only enough to get there. So for trips just beyond the vehicle range, the charging stop can be very short, like 10-15 minutes.

At home, or at a destination, people will charge to 100% overnight if they will be taking a long trip the next day, and otherwise only charge to 70% or 80%. Unless itâ(TM)s a model 3 with a LFP battery, in which case people charge to 100% overnight.

-Matt

-Matt

Yah. The connector standard has settled down, which is good. Chargers are typically only able to do AC or DC anyway, not both. CCS on the vehicle allows both J1772 (AC only) and also has the extra pins for high amperage DC.

L1 (120VAC) 11-16A (in vehicle charger)
L2 (240VAC) 24-80A (in vehicle charger)
L3 (was never implemented)
Fast DC charging, direct DC to battery, dynamically managed up to 1000VDC and 500A.

Limited by the lower of what the external unit can supply and the vehicle can accept.

Chademo is being steadily removed. The cable standard was too limited. So if you own an old leaf, you need to start carrying around an adapter.

-Matt

I apologize for the (TM) junk. I donâ(TM)t know why the iPad is doing that. It isnâ(TM)t in my edit box.

-Matt

Iâ(TM)m sure it is looked at. The bigger fast DC chargers have to be located near fairly hefty distribution lines (several thousand volts AC is preferred), in order to be able to situate a sufficient number of DC supplies at a location. A DC fast charger outputs 300VDC to 1000VDC based on the vehicleâ(TM)s battery pack requirements, and up to 500A. All dynamically controlled via continuous communication with the vehicle.

-Matt

The Mach-e has a particularly weird charging curve that falls of a cliff way too early. Make sure you get all software updates and stay on top of the news, itâ(TM)s something that Ford has slowly improved over time but I donâ(TM)t think they have completely fixed it yet.

-Matt

"In a Substack article, Didgets developer Andy Lawrence argues his system solves many of the problems associated with the antiquated file systems still in use today. "With Didgets, each record is only 64 bytes which means a table with 200 million records is less than 13GB total, which is much more manageable," writes Lawrence. Didgets also has "a small field in its metadata record that tells whether the file is a photo or a document or a video or some other type," helping to dramatically speed up searches."

Yah... no. This is the "if we make the records small enough we can cache the whole thing in ram" argument. It doesn't work in real life. UFS actually tried to do something similar to work-around its linear directory scan problem long ago. It fixed only a subset of use cases and blew up in only a few years as use cases exceeded its abilities.

The problem is that you have to make major assumptions as to both the size of the filesystem people might want to use AND the amount of ram in the system accessing that filesystem.

The instant you have insufficient ram, performance goes straight to hell. Put those 13GB on a hard drive with insufficient ram, and performance will drop to 400tps from all the seeking. It won't matter how linear that 13GB is on the drive... the instant the drive has to seek, its game-over.

This is why nobody does this in a serious filesystem design any more. There is absolutely no reason why a tiny little computer (or VM) with a piddling amount of ram, should not be able to mount a petabyte filesystem. Filesystems must be designed to handle enormous hardware flexibility because one just can't make any assumptions about the environment the filesystem will be used in.

This is why hierarchical filesystem layouts, AND hierarchical indexing methods (e.g. B-Tree/B+Tree, radix tree, hash table) work so well. They scale nicely and provide numerous clues to caching systems that allow the caches to operate optimally.

-Matt

Yes, you can still have trees with an object store. The object identifier can be wide... for example, the NVMe standard I believe uses 128-bit 'keys'. Sigh. Slashdot really needs to fix its broken lameness filter, I can't even use brackets to represent bit spaces.

So a filesystem can be organized using keys like this for the inode:

parent_object_key, object_key

An this for the file content:

object_key, file_offset|extent_size

For example, a file block could easily be encoded as a 64-bit integer byte offset, with a 63 bit positive offset space, and an extent size encoded in the low 6 bits (radix 1 to radix 63, allowing extents up to (1 63) bytes. Since the low 6 bits are used for the extent, the minimum extent size would be 64 bytes. The negative key space could be used for auxillary records associated with the file or directory. HAMMER2 uses this very method to encode its radix trees, allowing each recursion to use a variable-sized extent and to represent any 64-bit sub-range within the hash space (but H2 runs on top of a normal block device, it doesn't extent the encoding down to the device).

A set of directory entries could be encoded as follows, where [object_key] is the inode number of the directory.

object_key, filename_hash_key

Though doing so would almost certainly not be optimal since directory entries are very small.

Inode numbers wind up just being object keys.

This is readily doable... actually, this sort of methodology has been used many times before. I did a turnkey system 20 years ago that used this method to create a simple-stupid filesystem for a NOR flash filesystem.

The problem with this methodology is that if done at the kernel/filesystem-level, it requires the underlying storage to directly implement the key-store, as well as to support the key width required by the filesystem.... which seriously restricts what the filesystem can be built on top of.

-Matt

Filesystems are fine. The author needs to bone-up. I have several filesystems with in excess of 50 million inodes on them right now. We have a grok tree with over 100 million inodes in it. I'd post the DF outputs but slashdot's lameness filter won't let me.

To be fair, an old filesystem like UFS is creaky when it comes to directories, but modern filesystems have no problems with directories. And no filesystem has had issues with large files for ages (even UFS did a fairly decent job back in the day). BTRFS, EXT4, ZFS, HAMMER2 (my personal favorite since I wrote it), XFS (which is actually a very old filesystem that we used on SGI Challenge systems many years ago). It is just not a problem.

Generally these filesystems are using hashes, radix trees, or B-tree / B+tree style lookups for directories and inodes. H2, for example, uses a variable block-size radix tree, which means that a directory with only a few entries in it will be very shallow (even just all in one level if its small), despite the 64-bit filename hashes being evenly spread throughout the entire numerical space. But as the directories grow in size, the tables are collapsed into radix ranges and slowly become deeper. Indirect radix blocks are 64KB, so it doesn't take very many levels to cover a huge directory.

The only way one could do better (and only slightly better, to be perfectly frank), is to use some of the object-store features built directly into later NVMe chipset standards. Basically the idea there is that any SSD has an indirect block table anyway, why not just make it directly into a (key,data) object store at the SSD firmware level and then have filesystems use the keys directly instead of linear block numbers? Its totally doable, and not even very difficult given that most modern filesystems already use keys for directory, inode, and block indexing.

In anycase, the author needs to do some serious research and catch up to modern times.

-Matt

A few simple rules will make life easier.

#1 - Have two credit cards accounts. Put trusted services that would be annoying to re-enter on one (e.g. trusted online accounts such as Amazon, Apple), and make untrusted / ad-hoc, and over-the-counter purchases with the other.

#2 - Use Apple Pay or Google Pay instead of a physical card whenever possible. And in particular at gas stations. You can associate your 'secure' card account with your phone. Always use the phone-based nfc payment whenever possible.

#3 - Never make purchases with your debit card. Use the debit card for ATMs only, preferably inside locations or at banks.

#4 - If your bank's online account has the feature, have it text you the location and amount whenever your card is used.

That's it pretty much. Either my wife's or my card (usually my wife's) would get lifted maybe once year, but it was never an inconvenience because it was always the untrusted card, and almost always due to use at a gas station that did not have wireless payment at the gas pump.

These days of course we have chip cards, and even cards which don't print the credit card number on the front any more (but still print it on the back). Doesn't matter though because modern day thieves often don't lift cards via the magnet strip any more, they install cameras that take pictures of both sides of the card instead.

It is also possible to copy a chip card (actually not even all that hard because the extra information on the chip that isn't on the face of the card is often not actually checked by the CC company, so blank cards can be programmed fairly easily). And it is also possible to fake or break a chip reader at a merchant, causing the merchant to back-off to a slider or direct entry.

And regardless of that, if your CC number is stolen at all thieves will use it at locations which don't require chip cards. And even though your bank will back the charges out for you, you still have to go through the hassle of changing cards. Which is why you have two accounts... it removes that hassle. So chip cards, even secure ones, don't actually remove the hassle. Thus, take the steps above to minimize it instead.

-Matt

Not to mention no dedicated hardware LED to indicate that the microphone/camera sensors have been switched by software into an active state. I generally keep my phone inside it's leather sheath and not in the same room. Close enough to reach in a few steps if it beeps, not close enough for rogue candid camera.

No one who actually cares about their privacy is using Chrome anyway.

You've missed the entire ball of wax. People care about privacy, but they get systematically priced out of the conversation.

People who "actually" care is just doublespeak for those who are too stubborn to allow themselves to get priced out of the conversation.

I've been immersed in the software profession since the 1970s. I once won a math prize. I even won a writing prize. I spent much of the 1990s reading Applied Cryptography for light entertainment. I understood that there ought to be side channels in the time domain concerning caches and speculation long before these began to emerge. (Peter Wright's book from 1988 had already impressed upon me that exploitation of side-channels was a going concern.) I figured that smarter people than me must have poked into this, so it probably wasn't as bad as it appeared to be. I was wrong. If anything, it was even worse than I intuitively suspected.

In summary, I have all the cognitive tools in the world, and security still makes my head hurt. To "actually" care is a Sisyphean standard in the modern IT landscape.

"Just" install Firefox. Seriously. That's the full cure?

If you can even do that much. I have family members who work for the government. They are only allowed to use Edge, which just Chrome with an additional layer of sheepskin, draped over top of a wolf with twice as many teeth. So they drive Edge for 35–45 hours per week at the office (only one of my four family members lucked into the nearly mythical short government work day) and then they come home to drive something completely different, just to show that the "actually" care about their privacy.

If greater society actually cared about people actually caring, then the government IT environment would permit the use of alternative browsers, at least within reason. Greater society does not actually care about people caring, so this is entirely verboten.

Unless this: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — 18 November 2021

How long did that last in Munich, at the other end of Germany?

LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to migrate from Windows to a desktop infrastructure of its own, based on Linux. By 2012, the city had already migrated 12,600 of the total of 15,500 desktops, until in November 2017, the Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.

The LiMux lead on Wikipedia used to also include this sentence:

The city reports in addition to gaining freedom in software decisions and increased security, it has also saved Euros 11.7 million (US$16 million).

Now you can only find it burried deep in a ==Timeline== section, as a single line item:

23 November 2012 — Savings from LiMux environment over 10 million euros.

Ironically, there's a copy edit flag on the entire section stating that "this section is in list format but may read better as prose".

Am I going to sign up for the apparently Sisyphean task of keeping that comment about security and privacy and savings prominently displayed in the LiMux article lead, where it belongs? No, I'm not. Because I "actually" don't care, according to your doublespeak usage of the word "actually". Because to "actually" care is to have infinite resources in all directions and no concern whatsoever over painting yourself thin.

Intelligence is a dumb word. I prefer cognition. Cognition is modular. Intelligence is an attribute of the whole system. Cognition is an engineering domain. Intelligence is a judgement domain.

So, three minutes of exercise a month is better for your health than zero minutes a month.