Fiber investment in The Netherlands from the big telcos is now fully based on XGS-PON. Many homes that already had fiber installed do have the technically superior AON (a dedicated fiber to the home), but it seems like investment in this infrastructure has stopped.
The current situation is one where XGS-PON users can get 5Gbps subscriptions, whereas AON users are stuck at 1Gbps - seemingly because the telcos aren’t upgrading their point-of-presence hardware to support anything beyond 1Gbps.
Do they actually bury PON components? Because around here they don’t. Fiber runs from homes to their concentrators and those house both the PON splitters and the OLTs. There’s some roadside boxes as well but afaik they’re only for splices, because those aren’t buried, either.
They've also started replacing AON with XGS-PON in some areas, by putting all the fiber combining/muxing devices you need for that inside the AON POP building (and sending out new devices etc.)
Even if you have AON you might have XGS-PON behind the scenes. In Switzerland end user fiber is AON more or less by regulation, but they just deploy the XGS-PON splitters in the COs.
For a while the maximum connection speed I could order was limited to 1 gbps. No XGS-PON here, the fiber rollout was 20 years ago in my neighbourhood so it's still the older standard. But interestingly they're now offering 4 gbps connections on the older standard as well.
I'm not sure how many home users order that, given the extra cost of 10g switches, NICs etc and then 90% of usage being via WiFi that only just makes it to 1 gbps. But it makes a lot of sense for businesses with multiple users sharing one connection.
> poor souls, though can we care about the low-end first?
What is the low end? Austria has a similar problem. There are some quite old and unmaintained AON networks where people are stuck with 100MBit whereas even G.Fast copper eclipses that in some cities at this point.
Sure, but it's pretty ironic if you are stuck on a 100MBit fiber connection and a few buildings down you get 300MBit over twisted pair. And the problem with AON losing support is that you often can't find an independent ISP that would actually give you service over that AON you have.
The low end doesn't have to deal with AON vs GPON. They get DSL or DOCSIS, or if they're unlucky dial-up.
And when the poor souls on slow internet do get upgraded, AON vs GPON suddenly decides if they can get upgraded to the new higher speeds in the next ten years or not. 1gbps may be relatively slow in 10 years, but with a widely spread GPON you're not getting much more out of that, while with AON entire neighbourhoods can be upgraded by replacing a single rack in the local POP.
> but with a widely spread GPON you're not getting much more out of that, while with AON entire neighbourhoods can be upgraded by replacing a single rack in the local POP
Except in a few places it has been exactly the other way round. AON networks in Austria for instance have been built a few years back, some random companies ended up owning that infrastructure and don't upgrade. On the other hand the incumbents have built fiber, have rolled out GPON and have in the meantime upgraded to XGS-PON whereas many on AON got stuck. It's slowly moving but very gradually.
JPEG XL also supports re-encoding existing JPEG files to decrease file size while keeping the original file quality. That really seems like useful feature but so far I haven’t seen any tooling (in macOS) to re-encode my existing photo library.
> but so far I haven’t seen any tooling (in macOS) to re-encode my existing photo library
On Linux you can re-encode every single .jpg to .jxl and they'll decode bit-for-bit, to the original .jpg.
On Debian and derivatives it's the libjxl-tools: the cjxl executable converts to .jxl and the djxl decompresses.
Works flawlessly.
P.S: as a sidenote there's zero reason anymore to serve a .jpg file to a browser when the browser supports .jxl files. That's just a waste of bandwith. (and if your stack cannot serve different files depending on the users' browsers' capacities, it's not much of a stack)
It would be safe to assume that Apple will eventually add a way to recompress your photo library to JXL… if they weren’t in the business of selling storage and cloud storage. They have in the past released tools to optimize storage so it wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary, but… I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Sigh. I’ll happily hold my breath. Apple has done plenty to reduce use of storage. They even give you free iCloud storage to back your phone up when transferring to a new device. A very clear attractive source of penny pinching that they’ve put effort into to leaving on the table. This is tiring.
My daughter took part in a large study that led to similar guidance being introduced in the UK. The was randomised into the early introduction group, which meant that she had to eat peanut, egg, cow's milk, fish, wheat and sesame on a regular schedule when she was a baby. It was interesting - though lots of work, and when she was old enough to understand why she was going up to London for the follow-up tests, she was very proud of her role as "scientist". It was very satisfying when the results were published many years later, proving the hypothesis.
> ... Early introduction of all the foods was not easy but it was safe. Among the infants who did manage to consume the recommended quantity of the allergenic foods there was a two-thirds reduction in overall food allergy.
> For those who fed their infant the recommended amount of peanut there was a significant reduction in peanut allergy, 2.5% in the standard introduction group compared to no cases in the early introduction group (0%).
> There was also a significant reduction for egg allergy- 5.5% in the standard introduction group compared to 1.4% in the early introduction group.
In other words, in the group as a whole when considering all food allergies, the difference was not statistically significant, but that can be attributed to a large number of families in the test group failing to actually perform the test. It sounds like when you control for actually following the instructions there is a statistically significant difference in overall food allergy incidence.
OP took a sentence out of context that said that overall food allergies across the whole group were not reduced by a statistically significant amount. But the authors go on to explain why that was and explain that if you control for real participation in the test then it is significant.
I didn't. There is no context there. It's not the whole group that were not reduced. Read the sentence again:
> food allergy was lower in the group introduced to allergenic foods early but the difference was not statistically significant
Group introduced to allergenic foods early. And of course if you control for kids that don't already display an allergy at the age that they're introducing it, you're going to have a reduced rate of allergy.
There's a reason they're saying it's not statistically significant...
It was statistically insignificant among the whole early introduction group. This includes everyone who may have been randomised into that group but then didn't follow the (quite onerous) regimen that we were given. This was a full schedule of when different foods had to be fed to the baby and how much. We'd have to record whether they had eaten the amount required and so on. Among those who did follow it, the results were significant. Most importantly, there were zero cases of peanut allergy in that group.
and IIRC you need to maintain consistent exposure to the allergens throughout the first, idk, 18 months of life to have the best result. So don't just expose them once early on and stop.
Yes that's part of the advice in the Netherlands as well. Keep giving them things that can be common allergies.
My 4 year old's favourite food is shrimp and sushi... Not sure whether it's related to her eating those when she was a toddler, but it's fun to see the reactions in restaurants when you don't order the children's menu.
There's very strong evidence of the success of this -- for babies with no indication of a peanut allergy, intentional exposure led to an ~85% reduction in allergies -- for those who had a positive allergy test before the study, they had a ~70% reduction in allergies by 5 years old.
> Among the 530 infants in the intention-to-treat population who initially had negative results on the skin-prick test, the prevalence of peanut allergy at 60 months of age was 13.7% in the avoidance group and 1.9% in the consumption group (P<0.001). Among the 98 participants in the intention-to-treat population who initially had positive test results, the prevalence of peanut allergy was 35.3% in the avoidance group and 10.6% in the consumption group (P=0.004). There was no significant between-group difference in the incidence of serious adverse events. Increases in levels of peanut-specific IgG4 antibody occurred predominantly in the consumption group; a greater percentage of participants in the avoidance group had elevated titers of peanut-specific IgE antibody. A larger wheal on the skin-prick test and a lower ratio of peanut-specific IgG4:IgE were associated with peanut allergy.
It's the opposite. Usually babies don't eat any food at 4 months. They only get breastmilk or formula. The advice is to start early with peanutbutter and egg.
In our case diary products were an issue instead of nuts. My daughter would get very sick from anything that had diary in it, even if my wife ate diary products while breastfeeding. But at about 1.5 years one she got over that and now at 4 she is completely fine drinking normal cow milk.
So allergies in kids are not a permanent set in stone thing. They can get over some, and early exposure makes a difference.
No, it's the opposite. The advice we were given was that it was very important that their first encounter with the allergens was to eat them, and not to allow skin contact or anything before that. This meant that with my youngest we had no peanuts in the house until she was old enough to eat solid food, and peanut butter was the first food she ate. It's still her favourite food!
If you're avoiding skin contact, then you might not have time to wipe the peanut butter mess off your hands as you rush to rescue your kid who's got into trouble.
It wasn't about them not being in the house - it was about not eating them, and particularly not feeding them to her 2 year old sister. We didn't throw them away - we just didn't buy any as we weren't going to be eating it for a while.
Babies change fast. I can certainly imagine it. You won't know when exactly the flip happens, so you err on the safe side. Also, spread of stuff though the air and by hands: I thought we just spend lockdowns realising that crap spreads far and wide.
I am not sure if you had a child or not, but you don't give the baby food before 4 to 6 months. So its not that you aren't exposing them at all, but not feeding them the food.
There are powders to add to your formula / breast milk to introduce allergens early (we used Ready Set Food but easy to DIY). Kind of annoying since they often clog the nipple of the bottle, but we did it with my daughter who is now 20 months and her favorite breakfast is a spoon of peanut butter. Sesame gives her a slight reaction still, we unfortunately don’t eat it very often.
I'm assuming you're not a parent, but it's a valid question! No food before 4 months, babies can and should subsist on breastmilk or formula before that.
Where does the peanut and egg allergy come from? My understanding is that peanut oil and egg albumin are ingredients in many common medicines given early to infants.. is there any chance that could be contributing?
Egg albumin is also interesting because the vast majority of kids outgrow it. My toddler has a peanut allergy but has already outgrown his egg albumin allergy.
It does make you wonder if we shouldn’t vaccinate until exposing the children to solid foods in ordinary healthy cases. The mother’s antibodies from her milk do good work.
There are other commenters warning about skin exposure before dietary exposure. If that’s true then it would make sense.
If you say certain words you get downvoted but I’ve found people seem to keep an open mind more if you use words like “medicine” that don’t immediately challenge deeply held beliefs
Interesting point about the skin exposure, I’ll go back and review those comments. Evolutionarily/practically i would think it’s tough to get oral exposure to something prior to skin exposure (it hits your mouth/hands/face before your stomach), unless the breastmilk vector you mention is critical
I’m not sure what the big deal with the url handler is, but I can’t imagine it causing remote code execution or other actual malicious behaviour.
At this point Apple seems to be using simple substring matches, so if there is any exploit vector the malware authors can circumvent the check using "itms" + "-services" or something more sophisticated like ROT13.
Which is also just why… the App Store review process claiming this is a problem doesn’t seem to make any sense.
Imagine your app embeds a WebView at myapp.com/terms. It’s your Terms of Service, you show it to everyone when they sign up. Everyone clicks OK.
After it’s on the App Store, you modify your WebView to include `itms-services` for some reason. You’ve just completely bypassed App Store review and gotten that URL handler into your app. The sandbox should stop you - but clearly the review processes don’t consider this possibility and are enforcing it before you publish. Why?
My point is that the scanning for this handler, if Apple doesn’t want to allow it, seems misplaced if they wanted the ban to actually be effective.
But it has been known for over a decade now that Apple searches binaries for strings. They've never done runtime execution checks which would pick up you actually making such an HTTP call.
My baseline would be similar to that which you get from modern compilers and automated tests. Something like:
Lib/urllib/parse.py contains disallowed string "itms-services" at line 62 column 25
Reason: Apps may not install or launch executable code, such as through the itms-services URI schema.
To get credit for "giving you a clear direction", I'd want them to make available and suggest a fix. In general that could be "if this is a false positive, click to request a human reviewer make an exemption" but ideally monitoring for this kind of issue in the first place (sudden increase in identical rejections) and fixing the broken check.
Instead, Apple seem to omit the information on the first line that they likely already get from their internal tool, and not only don't suggest a fix but make the proper fix so unavailable that it's easier to get the language itself changed than a check in their review framework.
> But it has been known for over a decade now that Apple searches binaries for strings. They've never done runtime execution checks which would pick up you actually making such an HTTP call.
It's true that someone with folk knowledge about the way Apple does checks, gleaned about the process by other frustrated users, could likely infer the way in which Apple's test is broken and so eventually deduce the first line from the second line. That's not Apple giving a clear direction - that's developers managing to work around an inscrutable system.
1. Apple received a copy of your source code to do source analysis
2. Apple actually supported running python code as an option for writing iOS apps and wrote source code analysis tools for python for reporting compliance issues
I'm not suggesting any language-specific features like telling you which function it's in - just the filename, position, and matched string. This is information already available to Apple, and can be useful even for compiled/object code.
From the linked Github issue:
> After lots of 'we can provide you with no further information' I finally submitted an appeal for the rejection which at last resulted in Apple telling me that parse.py and its .pyc were the offending files
But if you read the description of its spyware behaviour from a current perspective, it's not that different from the telemetry that’s implemented everywhere and Windows bugging you to use Bing as a search engine.
You can use a tool like gorun (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/gorun) to run Go source code as if it were a shell script, by putting gorun in the shebang line.
Of course the disadvantage is that you need to Go have the toolchain installed everywhere you want to use the Go script, so it's definitely not as portable as using a regular shell script.
So does it take more battery to render several small video feeds versus one large one? If I'm on a call with a bunch of people, does "speaker mode" take less battery than "gallery mode"? Somehow I doubt it would be noticeable, if the effect exists at all.
Dependabot can be configured to e.g. update dependencies with security vulnerabilities every day and all other version updates weekly, and group them in a single pull request. That should fix the main complaint in this blog post.
The current situation is one where XGS-PON users can get 5Gbps subscriptions, whereas AON users are stuck at 1Gbps - seemingly because the telcos aren’t upgrading their point-of-presence hardware to support anything beyond 1Gbps.
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