I'm all for the DSA as well, but this argument doesn't hold water. Any sufficiently large cloud provider alternative (ie. Google, Microsoft, etc) would likely be the target of similar government instructions. In fact, I bet they already are - they just can't talk about it.
And of course, it's already possible to disable iCloud backups and use a smaller provider or host your own alternatives. I already do, through Nextcloud, etc. It's not as fully integrated of course, but you bet that if it was, then the largest alternatives would be targeted all the same.
If Apple were to add new APIs, it might be possible to use personal cloud storage (NAS, Decentralized Web Nodes, etc.) with the same UX as iCloud with E2EE.
> it might be possible to use personal cloud storage [...] with E2EE
Which would quickly become illegal if UKGOV is set on getting access to people's iOS backups / cloud storage / etc. Hell, it's already a legal requirement to hand over your keys if UKGOV demands them[0].
[0] "Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 part III (RIPA 3) gives the UK power to authorities to compel the disclosure of encryption keys or decryption of encrypted data by way of a Section 49 Notice." https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investig...
Scale matters. Police don't have the time to go through everyone's computers. It is much easier to scan everyone's conversations, notes, or photos. Cloud storage invites this kind of mass surveillance by being high-value targets with little capacity to resist.
Ah, so in the UK or China this could go through a proxy that steals all the keys.
Half the computer crimes in the UK involve illegal access to the PNC (police national computer), how exactly do we think this would go.
For all the checks you put on people who can access this stuff the temptation is too big - just look at the intelligence analysts using systems to stalk Exs etc.
For any system like this to exist you must ask yourself if you would be happy with the worst person you know having a job where they have access to it.
You can always have an company without legal presence in the UK to do the operations, beyond the reach of the UK government. If you are allowed to run your own software on your devices, you can always encrypt before sending. Apple and to a lesser extent Google got themselves in this position of being able to spy by building their walled gardens.
So, this seems like an alternative to things like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. What's the benefit of the banks? Bigger cut of the transaction fees somehow?
I must admit, I use Apple Pay whereever possible, I'll even temporarilly switch my browser to Safari if I see a merchant accepts Apple Pay, just because its so much easier than any other payment method.
I do it because Apple is one of the most opaque payment vendors. I don't want a direct relationship with so many companies having my payment information.
Oh, I've been looking for awhile, but every one is out of stock of that new device that allows you to insert your cash bills into a website. Where did you find one that had it in stock?
Ya monthly bills are done online. But most of my day to day expenses, eating out, shopping is mostly cash. It helps there are multiple ATMs around I guess.
This (or, PainStation v2) visited the student union at Abertay University a good 15 or so years ago. I played it on many occasion.
One aftertnoon I played with a particularly competitive friend of mine. I am also competitive. The game went on far longer than it should have, and I ended up with some pretty painful burns on the bottom of my hand and a large welt on top of it. I also had twinges in my arm for several hours afterwards.
They're not non-existent, I work with a few myself. But generally I've found that they're single, live by themselves, and enjoy the social interactions of meeting coworkers in person. (Of course, there will be exceptions to this).
I dont think you can generalise this way, its is also dependent on where you are living or what your commute looks like.
As an example, right now I am living and working in Amsterdam. My commute is 10 minutes by bike or 25min walk. I generally prefer to work in the office since I like the free exercise, context switch, and my office is also nice. However if my commute was longer than 60 mins, and in a car or public transport, I would want to work remotely.
Same. I’ve been working remotely for 23 years. I love working in an office when I get the opportunity to. The context switch is what I miss the most. It’s a 30 minute bike commute downtown for me. I had a chance to work in an office downtown several years ago and it was one of my favorite experiences.
And before anyone asks, yes, happily married, kids at home, excellent home office, healthy social life.
Great, but it's a pretty isolating idea that you should spend all your time with the same few people. It's nice and healthy to context-switch and spend some time around different people.
Pointing out that this isn't OP -- took me a minute, I was confused by the tone switch from 'there's nuance here and its conditional based on current circumstances' to chiding of a position no ones advanced.
And I'm very much RTO crew! Who is calm about it because of exactly that conditionality on current circumstances.
Why is it not possible? There have been countless times where co-workers have booked in time on the calendar (for observability for the team) to meet up with a friend for lunch, or to even meet up after work and support local businesses around their home.
Re: "1 on 1s walking around the block and seeing this cool cafe that closes at 2pm?"
That does sound nice. All of my in office jobs were sitting at my desk staring at a computer for 8 hours. No one was walking around the block. :-) But that was over ten years ago.
They edited to make it less confusing / sarcastic, tl;dr they're lecturing people, with a family, who don't want to RTO, who think you only need to socialize with family
Married, my wife also works a demanding career, and we have 3 kids and 2 dogs.
I've been part-time remote since ~2012, full-time since 2016. I've recently taken a hybrid role. I really, really enjoy going into the office twice a week these days. The change of scenery is helping my brain. Plus, my kids preschool/daycare is equidistant from our home and the office, so it's not actually adding any measurable commuting time to my life. My daily commute is ~40 minutes in total regardless of where I sit my ass down to work.
I'm fortunate that my life is set up this way but I know from going into the office twice a week for months now that I'm not alone, most of my colleagues are in similar situations.
I'm all of those things - and /much/ prefer working from home. If I was made to RTO - even one day a week - I would find another job that was 100% remote.
From the ones I know and myself, it more about where they want to life. If I would be living in the suburbs with a long commute, I'd definitely insist on working remote only. But since we are living around 10-20 minutes from the office by bike or public transport anyway, I enjoy the social interactions with coworkers a couple times a week, working from home the rest of the time.
That said, I'd be perfectly happy to go fully remote as well. Wouldn't come to my mind to advocate that others to have to go to the office, just because I enjoy it once in a while.
That's not my experience - but then I work in quite a different line of work (investing) to the majority here. My experience is there isn't really any correlation between age, home situation, etc and desire to work in the office. Most people I work with (of all levels of seniority) seem to be happy with a hybrid setup (which probably averages out over the year at 1-2 days per week WFH, 3-4 days in office or work travel). In fact that's what we naturally did ourselves before there were any rules set from above.
I wondered on a recent trip where I was supposed to add credit to a Västtrafik card I had from a previous trip.
In Denmark, there are equivalent top-up machines at almost every rail and metro station. (The exceptions are some very rural lines, where machines are on trains instead.)
At the central station in Copenhagen there must be at least 10 machines, if not more. There are also two SJ ticket machines! Sorry Gothenburg.
You must go to pressbyrån, but many people use their app to buy the ticket. This of course means that you can get fined if your phone runs out of charge.
The trams have a machine selling tickets on board, and that costs sensibly more than the other options. There is no way to buy tickets on a bus. On a train you must plea your case to the conductor as to why you have no ticket. For example like explaining that the pressbyrån closed at 15.00 and the closest open one implied an 8km walk.
You're not taking into account data, you're only talking about features. What about when the data no longer fits on the one machine? Or processing the data exceeds the capacity of the machine?
Data growth through user growth or just normal day-to-day usage is expected.
If Twitter's data can fit on one machine, then the data of 99.99% of companies can. Not every product needs a billion users with Gigabytes of storage each. The assumption that if your startup's tech isn't scalable enough to become the next Google then it's the wrong tech is hilarious nonsense driven largely by ego fantasies.
Nope. It's not Tweets that generate that data. It's the insane amount of (mostly unnecessary) noise that gets thrown into the mix: analytics, logs, metrics, you name it.
Every time you scroll Twitter sends multiple events to the server. That alone will generate a large chunk of those petabytes.
No, they don't. In spite of the confusing wording in the post you cite, its petabytes/year claim is not derived from the 500m tweets/day claim – it must include metadata and/or multimedia.
This was all already derived (correctly) in the original post. Recapitulating:
Assuming compression and variable-length encoding of this long tail in colder storage, it's more likely <20 TiB/yr (<=115B/tweet on average)
Yes, this excludes analytics metadata, which as you suggest would not support Twitter's current ad products. But your core repeated claim about tweets alone is two orders of magnitude off.
I wonder if the "Petabytes" figure being claimed includes pictures/videos that can be attached to a Tweet. In that case, I could easily see "Petabytes/year" be accurate.
Just to clarify, Mindstorms has had many iterations. I believe what you're referring to is Mindstorms 1.0 (RCX). It's had three successors in the past 20 years or so - NXT, EV3, and most recently, RIS.
The most recent iteration is based on SPIKE Prime. It's the same hub, but with slightly different firmware. The motors are and sensors are the same but in different colors.
All Mindstorms iterations (including the most recent) are untethered. As is SPIKE Prime.
Essentially this announcement is that they are discontinuing the consumer-facing branding, but continuing with the education product, SPIKE Prime. Both products are actually identical, minus a few firmware differences. The number of motors and sensors included in the box also differed.
That may have been your intention, but your statement of "environments where people aren't curious" comes across as putting the blame on the people themselves. As has been stated elsewhere, often times engineering is lacking in bandwidth to do anything but meet the deadlines.
I don't disagree that the "environment" itself could do more to further making improvements outside of the assigned work - initiatives such as 20% time, cafe days, etc. exist in other companies. But I don't put the blame on the curiosity of the people themselves.
I mean at the end of the day we’re products of our environments.
If SWEs can only work on features and do nothing else that is still a sign of poor project management. Just accepting that fate is worse for your growth I’d wager.
But idk, I never worked in an environment that encouraged curious people either. I suppose the closest for me was working at Comcast but that was only one manager with a small team of 4 people and no real deadlines.
I feel like two separate thoughts came from replies to my comment. One advocating for engineers to push back and care about their crafts, the other absolving the choices that were clearly made by people as some mechanized process that could never be changed.
The only thing I’m wondering is what the replies would be like 10 years ago on HN.
> The part that irked me here was I only got like 1 years use out of the software.
Surely it doesn't actually stop working after a year? ie. You can keep using the version you bought after a new version comes out. I presume it still does what you bought it to do?
I bought my 2013 MacBook Pro with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM, with the highest specced i7 at the time.
I sold it last month to pick up a new 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max. I bought it with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD because I don't need anymore, 8 years later. And the i7 I had still beat out last years base model on Geekbench.
Not to take anything away from how long you got to use your computer, but you couldn’t get 32GB of RAM in an Apple laptop until 2018. You likely had 16GB of RAM in 2013 if you had a 15” retina MacBook Pro.
And of course, it's already possible to disable iCloud backups and use a smaller provider or host your own alternatives. I already do, through Nextcloud, etc. It's not as fully integrated of course, but you bet that if it was, then the largest alternatives would be targeted all the same.
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