Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.

Which part of people flying FPV (first person video) drones into the enemy wasn't clear? They're not delivering to a GPS coordinate. They're being flown.

"What really matters is that we pass on values of honesty and decency on to the future.."

Ah... have you seen the bozos running the bus?

"Looks to me that Google is afraid of having to innovate again to compete."

Most of Google's recent innovation lies in coming up with new ways to screw over its users.

And how is that benefitting Ford and GM workers these days???

I use Swift. As such I dropped semi-colons years ago...

Because you need some way to tell the idiot in headphones looking at his phone that he's about to die?

"making the infrastructure work for the humans that live there"

That means redesigning things for humans, not for cars.

"You need massive upgrades to roads to get that TEMPORARY reduction in congestion."

FTFY

The only way to reduce congestion is to reduce demand. WFH is one way. Congestion pricing is another, and is only really viable here because NYC actually has a transit system.

Battery swapping means you need extra batteries, of every kind and shape that needs to be swapped. Or is a car battery the same as an SUV battery and as a truck battery and as a heavy-duty truck/semi-truck battery? Probably not.

You iterated many of the problems, but unless you're going have specifically schedule pickup times you're going to need dozens of extra batteries or each size and type. Some charging, some waiting to be charged, and so on. It's not just a five minute gas station swap if a charged battery isn't ready.

And I don't see manufacturers of personal vehicles standardizing on something that makes them more competitive than someone else ("We have longer range!", "We have faster charging!", "We're better in the cold!", "We last for 10,000 cycles.")

IMO, the only model where such a thing makes sense is long-distance trucking and the like where fleets can standardize on a specific system, and where the packs aren't structurally integrated into the vehicle. Semi pulls into a terminal, swaps, keeps going.

The economics indeed don't work out. The infrastructure costs are high, the battery costs are high, and you STILL need to build charging infrastructure anyway, in order to recharge the dropped off batteries.

With that factored in, what are you paying per swap? 3-4x what normal recharging would cost?

Besides, battery tech is improving daily. Increasingly seeing mentions of 5-6min recharge times.

There is a school of thought which holds that past a certain scale, effective moderation becomes impossible. I've done moderation work and it took tons of judgement.

First car? MG-B. Second car? Triumph Spitfire. Third? VW Bus (manual). Fourth car...

Never mind. Point remains that I've been there, done that, I and I know that a part of your attention is monitoring engine speed/noise, engaging/disengaging the clutch, shifting, etc., etc..

And that's a part of your attention that's not focused elsewhere.

Besides, I'm way past the point of thinking I'm a badass driver just because I can stomp my foot and make a car go vroom-vroom... ;)

"Don't make people think or force them to pay attention..."

Right. Because heaven forbid we let drivers actually focus on the road. You know? Looking out for other cars? Bikes? Pedestrians?

Much better to distract them micromanaging gears and focusing on split-second timing and clutch control. After all, nothing says road safety like diverting attention away from what actually matters.

And fun in this context usually means clinging to the fantasy that mastering an outdated gearbox somehow makes you a better driver.

A comforting myth in a culture that confuses noise, speed, and complexity with competence, and one that injects unnecessary complexity into a task that already kills 40,000 people a year.

Often by people swerving back and forth in traffic, speeding, racing, and blowing red lights.