>A tidal wave of blue in the midterms I think is the only hope a lot of us have left. Maybe if that doesn’t come to fruition, either legitimately or illegitimately
So you admit you're ok with cheating in elections to get your desired outcome?
Heh, the “illegitimately” was in reference to it “[not coming] to fruition”, precisely in the immediately preceding clause of that sentence.
In other words, I was saying that the reason for it not coming to fruition could be either legitimate or illegitimate. You assigned your own presumptions to what I said.
Ironically the Democrats deserve much more benefit of the doubt when it comes to election fraud and interference given the glut of evidence of such on the other side of the aisle.
To others who read the comment above, we know that this administration has done many illegal actions. Lying about elections and causing an attack on the capitol, then further pardoning the attack is a blatant example of this.
The comment above is frankly disingenuous and disguises blatant strawman fallacy with an air of moral superiority
Probably because this looks more like a Deep Research agent "delving" into the infrastructure -- with a giant list of sources at the end. The Archive is not just a library; it is a service provider.
An article about "infrastructure" that opens up with a dramatic description of a datacenter stuffed into an old church, I would expect more than just generic clipart you'd see in the back half of Wired magazine.
That's super cool!
Can the IA building be accessed by some random people like myself? Next time I'm in SF (who knows when that will be though) I'd very much like visiting it!
Because like most political threads, it will largely consist of people with a crayon-and-coloring-book understanding of geopolitics posting low-effort snipes and trading insults while contributing basically zero to productive discussion.
The most disgusting example of this in recent memory was the Scott Adams death thread, where complimentary comments were being aggressively flagged, and toxic vitriol was being upvoted. It made me finally realize how many joyless, seriously broken people lurk here.
Hey, I'm just joyless, not broken. Also that thread was full of people complimenting his political views, not just his work on Dilbert.
Don't try to sneak in political commentary under the guise of "complimentary comments" and you shouldn't have to deal with as much pushback from people with opposing viewpoints.
That or keep doing so and complaining about others free speech. I'm an anonymous poster on the internet, not a cop.
Like all the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.
It's also ironic in the sense it implies the indignant people were so bad at their jobs they designed and built a system so fragile it would collapse without constant intervention from thousands of individuals.
You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?
This is unrealistic and seems to be biased by some kind of broad un-focused hostility. Yes, maybe they were overstaffed. But it's reasonable to suspect that leadership overcut, given the current climate and the number being 15,000. Your characterization of Twitter predictions relies on cherry-picking and ignores the actual impacts, and there's no evidence that the system goes down without "constant" intervention from "thousands". Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.
>Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.
That's correct.
In the case of Twitter, it was disclosed that many of their systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point of being a security liability, which raises the question: if the systems weren't being maintained, wtf were all those people doing? Taste-testing the free food and cappuccinos?
> many of their systems were running out of date EOL software, to the point of being a security liability
This is more likely a management problem rather than a staffing problem. Lower level management knows about these kind of things but often they are not incentivized to make them a priority due to a culture focused on growth and “winning”.
Verizon is a traditional for-profit telco. Not some VC funded startup trying to hit a burn rate. Very unlikely they were overstaffed by 15k, sounds more like overzealous cost-cutting to hit a quarterly target.
There were issues and outages for weeks after the layoffs though. Many people also believe its overrun with far more bots than when it had more robust content moderation tools and teams.
Also things break. Vulnerabilities come along that need to be carefully patched and deployed. Tools and packages get depreciated. Updates can be done to save compute, and money. Things don't just hum along with zero intervention by no one for years and years.
Real-time multi-directional communications over massive geographic areas with tens of thousands of physical cell sites connected to ~140M devices vs... public text messages with media.
I realize your point, but its fair to say maintaining a nationwide physical wireless infrastructure may not be the same as hosting tweets, particularly when outages strike.
I see multiple posts here speculating on cyberattack—as opposed to "we pushed a bad configuration update which messed everything up irreparably"—you know, like it has been every other time before this.
E.g., Cloudflare, Meta (who in doing so also locked themselves out of the building), and didn't some bumbling major Canadian telco knock themselves offline for like a week not too long ago?
It works both ways, a lot of people also take the "nothing ever happens" position and it is true that most of the time "nothing ever happens", so by taking that position, they're right 99% of the time and sound smart
Yes, but the majority opinion is "nothing ever happens" by default for everything, not just tech outages. It's not about sounding smart, but getting ahead of grifters and clout chasers.
Your post reflects another online observation. With the rise of online sports books, this sort of predictive doomerism has flooded almost every team's online comment section. It no longer feel like fandom or community in the same way. Just lots of voices that will be glad to say, "I told you so," in the loss and crickets with the W. Wish there was some accountability mechanism for all the negative noise broadcasted into the channel.
The great thing is that with all of the encrypted/signed DNS thingys, you now have not one, but multiple options to combine “invalid certificate” and DNS in one outage. You no longer need to choose!
Yeah, the Canadian telco was Rogers. Total recovery took multiple days. From the Wikipedia writeup:
> In a letter to the CRTC, Rogers stated that the deletion of a routing filter on its distribution routers caused all possible routes to the internet to pass through the routers, exceeding the capacity of the routers on its core network.
I took my kids swimming that day and the pool couldn't take our money since the payment terminal was on the Rogers cellular network, so it was a free family swim.
Cyberattacks are a good scapegoat for any large incompetent non-tech company that is unable to admit a mistake. (tech companies are more open to admitting actual mistakes - and reluctant to disclose cyberattacks even if there actually was one - where as non-tech ones would rather allude to an attack than admit a mistake)
Cyberattack scenarios pretty much never make sense in case of complete outages; if you have the access required to cause such an outage it’s always more profitable to keep this access and use it for covert spying/targeted attacks or save it for later than to burn it by causing a massive, visible problem.
Verizon had issues routing calls to a provider I'm aware of yesterday, and had to make some sort of change today to fix it. I'm definitely thinking bad configuration update.
20 years ago much less of the infrastructure of everyday life depended on an always-on network connection. Smartphones in particular were a relatively niche product. I didn’t even have a cell phone (and not because I was too young), much less expect it to work all the time.
No, it's affecting Verizon and people on ATT & TMO trying to get in touch with the Verizon customers who are affected.
Note the tiny fraction of people reporting for ATT & TMO compared to Verizon on DownDetector: https://downdetector.com/
(You have to click the links to see actual magnitude because the graphs are scaled to show relative outage within a given service -- order of 150k for Verizon vs 1.5k for the others.)
Brazil is on the list just because Brazilian justice condemned Bolsonaro for a coup attempt very similar to Jan 6 (it was Jan 8 the following year). The beef has been going for a while, and Lula has been quite combative against Trump.
Maybe because the intended target are immigrants who purportedly put a higher load on welfare and public services:
> "The Trump administration is bringing an end to the abuse of America's immigration system by those who would extract wealth from the American people," State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said. "Immigrant visa processing from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassesses immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits," he said.
Since the Indian diaspora is famously known to be the wealthiest on average in the US, they wouldn't be targeted under such reasoning.
My iPads on 18.7.3 just yesterday started pushing notifications to upgrade to 26.2 again.
Guess Apple wants to pump up those numbers. If they really cared, if they had an ethical bone in their body, they would release 18.7.3 to the public WHICH THEY ALREADY HAVE STAGED.
This is more like blackmail where they are dangling these security issues over everyone's head as some scare tactic to upgrade, instead of giving everyone access to the iOS 18 security patch which already exists.
>If they really cared, if they had an ethical bone in their body, they would release 18.7.3 to the public WHICH THEY ALREADY HAVE STAGED.
>This is more like blackmail where they are dangling these security issues over everyone's head as some scare tactic to upgrade, instead of giving everyone access to the iOS 18 security patch which already exists.
18.7.3 was released a month ago. Anyone who cared about security updates would have already gotten it using the beta workaround. Anyone who's apathetic about updates isn't going to be swayed by 18.7.3 vs 26.2.
>including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF
Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK, and your choice of 167 different desktop environments. Don't forget the whole Wayland schism.
Mac is no better, shifting SDKs every few years, except Apple goes one step further by breaking all legacy applications so you are forced to upgrade. Can't be schizo when you salt the earth and light a match to everything that came before the Current Thing.
PowerPC stuff? Anything more than a few years old?
Forget it.
You can't even run versions of iPhoto or iTunes after they deliberately broke them and replaced them with objectively shittier equivalents. Their own apps!
Windows can still run programs from the 90s unmodified. There are VB6 apps from 1998 talking to Access databases still running small businesses today.
Can't say the same for either Mac or Linux.
It's not really a problem for Apple because their userbase is content to re-buy all their software every 5 years.
Well, that's true. It's an interesting point actually. Windows certainly wins in terms of binary compatibility.
I was thinking more about the developer perspective, i.e. churn in terms of frameworks. Yes, PowerPC is gone. Intel will be gone soon.
But both the transitions from PowerPC to Intel as well as from Intel to ARM were pretty straightforward for developers if you were using Cocoa and not doing any assembly stuff.
Carbon only every was a bandaid to give devs some time for the transition to Cocoa.
Maybe I am a bit jaded, but with Apple's yearly OS release cycle — and breaking things nearly every time — I grew sick and tired of software I spent good money or relied on suddenly not working anymore.
Imagine taking your car in for an oil change annually and the radio stopped working when you got it back. It's incompatible with the new oil, they say. You'd be furious.
With the Windows of yore this wasn't so much of an issue — with 5-10 years between upgrade cycles — and service packs in between — you could space it out.
When you work in the computer industry, there tends to be a disconnect with how they are used in the real world by real people — as tools. People grow accustomed to their tools and expect them to be reliable as opposed to some ephemeral service.
Apple's change for the sake of change is extremely annoying, especially since the changes have been regressions lately.
They always push their commercial interest at the cost of their users, refusing to maintain stuff properly to save money.
At some point I had to change a Mac because the GPU wasn't compatible with some apps after they pushed their Metal framework. But it was working just fine for me, and I didn't really need to change it at this moment; Apple just decided so.
And if you use their software on different hardware and make the mistake of upgrading just one, it is very likely that you will have to upgrade the other because the newer software version won't be compatible with the older hardware (had the problem with Notes/Reminders database needing an OS upgrade to be able to sync).
Microsoft is all over the place, but at least it is very likely that you can get away with changing your hardware only once every 10 years if you buy high-end stuff.
Is that a good or bad thing? Yes, Mac chops off legacy after a decade or so, but I don’t see not being able to run apps from the 90s as a problem (or if I did, I’d probably be running windows or Linux instead of Mac OS).
From my own experience things tend to keep working on Linux if you package your own userland libraries instead of depending on the ever changing system libraries. More or less how you would do it on Windows.
Except Windows isn't perfect either, I had to deal with countless programs that required an ancient version of the c runtime, some weird database libraries that weren't installed by default and countless other Microsoft dependencies that somehow weren't part of the ever growing bloat.
Although it's rare for me, I have used some old software that was built for Windows 9X or old versions of NT. So far, the track record is perfect - native programs have worked just fine, though I obviously can't vouch for all of them.
Old, complex games are the worst-case scenario, and are the exception, not the rule. Since they were only beginning to figure out hardware-accelerated 3D gaming in the 90s, it meant that we were left with lots of janky implementations and outdated graphics APIs that were quickly forgotten about. Though, MDK doesn't seem to suffer from this - it should be capable of running on newer systems directly [1]. One big issue it does have is that it uses a 16-bit installer, which is one thing that was explicitly retired during the transition to 64-bit due to it being so archaic at that moment, only being relevant to Windows 1-3. But you can still install the game using the method described in the article, and it should hopefully run fine from there on. Since it has options to use a software renderer and old DirectX, at least one of these should work.
I use WinAmp 2.0 sometimes which was released in 1996. I prefer to use v5 but I like to show friends that such old software still works fine (even Shoutcast streaming works fine).
> Try running windows 11 on old CPUs, or machines without secure boot / TPM 2.0.
The more relevant test is the reverse: running Windows XP and apps of that era on modern hardware. It will work perfectly. The same cannot be said of 2000-era Mac software.
That's because TPM 2.0 module allows M$ to uniquely identify you and sell your info to advertisers - it's not an actual technical limitation, it's just because M$ is greedy, and it's a shame they aren't punished by governments for creating all this unnecessary eWaste just to make even more cash.
With GNU/Linux and BSD I just recompile. I can run old C stuff from the 90's with few flags.
Under GNU/Linux, the VB6 counterpart would be TCL/Tk+SQlite, which would run nearly the same over almost 25-30 years.
As a plus, I can run my code with any editor and the TCL/Tk dependencies will straightly run on both XP, Mac, BSD and GNU/Linux with no propietary chains ever, or worse, that Visual Studio monstruosity. A simple editor will suffice and IronTCL weights less than 100MB and that even bundled with some tool, as BFG:
Carbon is long deprecated and as mentioned was only ever meant as a transitional framework.
Cocoa still exists and is usable.
UITouch is not a framework, but a class in UIKit.
UIkit still exists and is usable.
Same for Catalyst. Same for SwiftUI.
As said, I'm not pretending everything is sunshine and roses in Apple-Land. But at least Apple seems to mostly dogfood their own frameworks, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case anymore with Microsoft. WinUI 3 and WPF are supposed to be the "official" frameworks to use, but it seems Microsoft themselves are not using them consistently and they also don't seem to put a lot of resources behind them.
Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, and WPF also exist and are quite usable.
Apple also doesn't always uses their stuff as they are supposed to, Webviews are used in a few "native" apps, some macOS apps are actually iOS ones ported via Catalyst, which is the reason they feel strange, and many other stuff I could list.
> Ah yes, and the solution being presented is Linux, with Xlib, Motif, Qt, GTK
I'm not going to descend into a "my OS's API is worse than yours" pissing match with you, because it's pointless and tangential. The issue is not "is the Windows framework situation worse than Linux" but rather "is the Windows framework situation worse than it used to be" and the answer is emphatically yes, and due mostly to Ballmer's obsession with chasing shiny things, such as that brief period when he decided that all Windows must look like a phone.
So you admit you're ok with cheating in elections to get your desired outcome?
At least you're being honest.
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