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> I’m a big fan of Hanlon’s razor.

There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.

Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.

As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.


I'm not completely sure if this is supposed to be sincere, but it should be.

It's not uncommon practice to omit the security implications on public facing commit messages when fixing secirity issues, so as to not to draw attention until it's ready for distribution.


Not really (I've looked pretty thoroughly), but I've been looking into large format gaming monitors like the 48" Asus OLED PG48UQ [0] which are essentially dumb TV panels.

I haven't finished researching yet but happy to discover this category of monitor is a thing now, with close enough to the latest display tech at reasonable prices. I've never owned a TV either and I keep getting stuck trying to buy one because they are all so horrible.

These are essentially huge TV panels, with basic TV features like a remote control for the OSD. I guess because it's what gamers want... A TV scale monitor for use as a TV without all the smart TV bits which ruin games. There are also a bunch of "Smart Monitors" in this category to be ware, including from LG. The work is in distinguishing the true large format dumb monitors from the smart TVs in disguise.

[0] https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/asus-rog-swift-oled-p...


A lot of TVs can still be used as a dumb display if you simply ignore all their other useless "smart" functionality. If anything, "large format gaming monitors" are a response to that usage from the monitor industry wanting to get back some of those customers.


Yes, that used to be the way. But it's getting increasingly hard to ignore their smart functionality and be comfortable enough simply leaving it "unnetworked".

The problem is the incentives, even though TVs represent a higher turnover for LGE (roughly $1 B), they barely break even, whereas most of the 0.5 B from their advertising division (made through the TVs) is majority profit. They don't want you to use their TVs as monitors (they lose money that way), they are highly incentivised to find a way to track you. This is not unique to LG but they seem the worse affected while having the largest chunk of the market.

I feel a lot more comfortable with a monitor controller attached to the same OLED panel rather than trying to figure out if i've neutered LGs ad department enough, or worrying about it somehow independently gaining network in the future after monitoring everything in isolation as proven in this latest news. I think LG tvs doing something like automatic exfil via their own mesh network in future is not far fetched, it's practical with their market share and they have the incentives.


Yes, the irony is that vertically scaling will always go "faster" due to latency until you genuinely need more DB than a single box can handle. Premature horizontal scaling only increase complexity and reduce performance. And even when you genuinely need it the implementation has to fight merely to approach single box latency, which sounds like what these guys have done.

But also vertical scaling seems to be able to handle so much these days that more people probably aught to ask themselves if their application is ever likely to truly need horizontal scaling - Maybe my work is just a small pond, but I suspect we will eventually end up in a place where the vast majority of applications are happy on a single box, and only twitter scale things need to care about this stuff.

.. or maybe I lack imagination of what possible future applications might make use of such massive horizontal scaling on such capable individual boxes (seriously).


> I suspect we will eventually end up in a place where the vast majority of applications are happy on a single box, and only twitter scale things need to care about this stuff.

We're already there IMO. A single box can scale up so much more than people expect these days - over a thousand cores and terabytes of RAM. The people coming up with overcomplicated architectures and mandatory high availability get in the way of it.


A single box may have that much resources available, but no software will use them efficiently alone. You end up having issues with NUMA, with your pagetable growing significantly forcing you to deal with hugepages and eventually memory fragmentation, and who knows what other kind of lovecraftian horror coming from the sheer complexity of a single system with that much resources. Turns out scaling vertically also has cost. That's why eventually you still want to scale horizontally. And that's not overcomplicating things for the fun of it, it's just tradeoffs.


For sure, but scaling vertically to that extreme is also unnecessary for the vast majority of systems. You can still have over a hundred cores without needing NUMA. And most systems will never even need that much.


> Premature horizontal scaling

I feel like this isn't a thing when it comes to applications. All the decisions you'd make to allow an app to scale sideways are just, like, good design decisions? Even if you never went 1->2 instances. Otherwise every app would just be PostgREST on top of a beefy VM.


Thats a good point to highlight.

If the purpose of down votes is to guide discussion away from uninteresting or counterproductive paths, then it also scoops up divisive comments.

I suppose divisive comments are potentially disruptive if they are particularly flamey. But it seems like they deserve to be distinguished from more objectively negative comments. If the raw up/downs were exposed it would be interesting to experiment with this in the front end.


Exactly. Framing completely changes this from an absurd story causing pointless grounding due to loss of institutional knowledge, to an example of good judgement (or protocol) in the absence of knowledge and acknowledgement of the risk of unknown consequences.

What's being ignored is the 1/100 of these stories where this judgement pays off, saves aircraft and lives that make the other 99 worth while.


I think this is best described as a one-shot control plane, the single use address/key (same thing) is shared out of band, so it's far more minimal than the TS control plane.

The examples show the concrete use cases... Basically giving you the wiregaurd + DERP quality tunnel but as a one shot point to point cli tool. Which is a nice upgrade from the alternative "in a pinch" tools.

RE "how much tailscale" I guess it's the DERP bit + this minimal point to point control plane. Without which it's significantly more configuration to get the wiregaurd tunnel working, or impossible because of NAT, unless both machines are on the same ipv6 network.

TS basically sell the full control plane with Auth and ACL style management etc as their product so this doesn't really compete.


> Why you wouldn't want to hand that off to a computer program is beyond me.

Trust, stability, security. The reasons many people run Debian.

Although I think the main incompatibility in philosophy here is in "hand that off", e.g. direct agentic usage eroding opportunity for human judgement, which seems unlikely to be adopted anyway. The realistic proposals are essentially AI use with various guard rails and rules to preserve that human judgement (my interpretation).

Actual Proposals (scroll down): https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002


Funny they mention demoscene as an example. I've tried to get various LLMs to explain or modify my demos and they utterly fail. At the extreme end this style of coding requires you to hold all understanding of what is happening end to end in your head, this x-ray vision allows you to reason and think about fundamentals without getting held back by abstractions.

LLMs operate in abstractions. "Reasoning" is bolted on.


> You know about the values of a culture, if they call your old parents to rip them off.

Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?

> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.

You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.


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