Google tends to care (for their own certification). The number of ceertified engineers in the organization can be used as a metrics for how much they want to support you and what the relation will look like.
I've heard of orgs going through a batch of certification partly for their own education and partly for the push and pull with their dev rep.
Internal key activation can be done through a KMS host , which can be activated by phone (or some other dedicated mean if you're big enough for MS to care)
> > - My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways?
> What are you supposed to do with a /8? Do you have several million computers?
The /8 was for private addresses, so "free" and uncontested, while the /64 is a public resource. Looking at it as extraneous or over provided is understandable IMHO, even if mathematically it's not supposed to get depleted.
The IPv4 10.0.0.0/8 (along with the other private ranges) runs into lots of problems when connecting two private networks (e.g. VPNs, VMs/docker, hotspotting), whereas that /64 will not conflict with anyone.
I "solved" this by running a separate VLAN for work machines that provides addresses in a slightly weird /24 carved out of the 172.16.0.0/12 [0] range. Is it as collision-resistant as a ULA address? No. But -sadly- I've yet to see an Enterprise VPN that wasn't run as an IPv4-only thing, so it's the best I can do.
[0] Or whatever the netmask actually is. I'm never sure about the 172.16.x.x space.
I'd be tempted to shove that VPN into a network namespace together with jool, and NAT64 their 10.x subnets into, let's say, 2001:db8:a:b::/96, so that their 10.1.2.3 becomes 2001:db8:a:b::10.1.2.3. Then there's no overlap as viewed from outside the namespace.
And if you ever need to use another VPN that also clashes on 10.x, you can do the same thing but map that one into 2001:db8:a:c::/96. Then you've got 2001:db8:a:b::10.1.2.3 and 2001:db8:a:c::10.1.2.3, neither of which clash with either each other or your 10.1.2.3.
The vast majority of people are not VPNing into networks they don't know and accidentally having arcane IPv4 collisions. This is not a real problem that needs to be solved.
What's the crazy to me is you took that as the gold standard for education evaluation.
For comparison we had lengthy sessions in a jailed terminal, week after week, writing C programs covering specific algorithms, compiling and debugging them within these sessions and assistants would follow our progress and check we're getting it. Those not finishing in time get additional sessions.
Last exam was extremely simple and had very little weight in the overall evaluation.
That might not scale as much, but that's definitely what I'd long for, not the Chuck Norris style cram school exam you are drawing us.
Very different. A scantron machine is deterministic and non-chaotic.
In addition to being non-deterministic LLMs can product vastly different output from very slightly different input.
That’s ignoring how vulnerable LLMs are to prompt injection, and if this becomes common enough that exams aren’t thoroughly vetted by humans, I expect prompt attacks to become common.
Also if this is about avoiding in person exams, what prevents students from just letting their AI talk to test AI.
I saw this piece as the start of an experiment, and the use of a "council of AI" as they put it to average out the variability sounds like a decent path to standardization to me (prompt injecting would not be impossible, but getting something past all the steps sounds like a pretty tough challenge)
They mention getting 100% agreement between the LLMs on some questions and lower rates on other, so if an exam was composed of only questions where there is near 100% convergence, we'd be pretty close to a stable state.
I agree it would be reassuring to have a human somewhere in the loop, or perhaps allow the students to appeal the evaluation (at cost?) if they is evidence of a disconnect between the exam and the other criteria. But depending on how the questions and format is tweaked we could IMHO end up with something reliable for very basic assessments.
PS:
> Also if this is about avoiding in person exams, what prevents students from just letting their AI talk to test AI.
Nothing indeed. The arms race hasn't started here, and will keep going IMO.
So the whole thing is a complete waste of time then as an evaluation exercise.
>council of AIs
This only works if the errors and idiosyncrasies of different models are independent, which isn’t likely to be the case.
>100% agreement
When different models independently graded tests 0% of grades matched exactly and the average disagreement was huge.
They only reached convergence on some questions when they allowed the AIs to deliberate. This is essentially just context poisoning.
1 model incorrectly grading a question will make the other models more likely to incorrectly grade that question.
If you don’t let models see each other’s assessments, all it takes is one person writing an answer in a slightly different way that causes disagreement among models to vastly alter the overall scores by tossing out a question.
This is not even close to something you want to use to make consequential decisions.
Imagine that LLMs reproduce the biases of their training sets and human data sets are biased against nonstandard speakers with rural accents/dialects/AAVE as less intelligent. Do you imagine their grade won't be slightly biased when the entire "council" is trained on the same stereotypes?
Appeals aren't a solution either, because students won't appeal (or possibly even notice) a small bias given the variability of all the other factors involved, nor can it be properly adjucated in a dispute.
I might be given too much credit, but given the tone of the post they're not trying to apply this to some super precise extremely competitive check.
If the goal is to assess whether a student properly understood the work they submitted or more generally if they assimilated most concepts of a course, the evaluation can have a bar low enough for let's say 90% of the student to easily pass. That would give enough of margin of error to account for small biases or misunderstandings.
I was comparing to mark sheet tests as they're subject to similar issues, like students not properly understanding the wording (and usually the questions and answer have to be worded in pretty twisted ways to properly) or straight checking the wrong lines or boxes.
To me this method, and other largely scalable methods, shouldn't be used for precise evaluations, and the teachers proposing it also seem to be aware of these limitations.
A technological solution to a human problem is the appeal we have fallen for too many times these last few decades.
Humans are incredibly good at solving problems, but while one person is solving 'how do we prevent students from cheating' a student is thinking 'how I bypass this limitation preventing me from cheating'. And when these problems are digital and scalable, it only takes one student to solve that problem for every other student to have access to the solution.
It was about Russian tankers breaking the sanctions, but with a well put explanation of why we can't just stop these ships even with extreme confidence in their fraudulency.
To be clear, why we don’t want to. Freedom of navigation makes all of us tremendously richer, even if it permits such fuckery.
Every great power has, at this point, rejected the notion in limited contexts. And if you’re not concerned about trashing trade, there is no incoherence to ignoring these rules.
In a hypothetical future where sailing under flags of convenience becomes untenable, all the legitimate merchant vessel owners would rush to register in the US or China. Those vessels would still be able to sail anywhere unmolested. Outside of a few pirate gangs, no one would be stupid enough to screw with them and risk kinetic retaliation. This might increase shipping costs by a few percent.
Russia can bluster and threaten but their navy is weak and shrinking. Most of their commissioned warships never venture far from port. Outside of their territorial waters they have minimal capability to protect their own merchant vessels or interdict anyone else's sea lines of communication.
> US can't afford to field the navy necessary to back this ams hasn't been able to for many decades
This is nonsense. The U.S. Navy de facto guarantees freedom of navigation today. Globally.
If we switched to a national system, our Navy wouldn’t literally escort U.S.-flagged ships. Its military would just need to enforce the threat that you get bombed if you fuck with America.
We’d save money switching to a big-stick model. (I think we’d be poorer for it in the long run. But if you’re playing chess and your opponent machete, you’re not going to find any winning moves on the board.)
Oil tankers are basically "weapons of mass environment destruction" (slight hyperbole, sorry ;). When you shoot at them, or their captains have the valves opened, their oil will devastate a sizable chunk of sea and coastline.
So you really need to tread lightly around enemy oil tankers.
> can’t see any update that says they have engaged. So yes… I think.
I wouldn't be suprised if Trump chickens out. But this logic is terrible.
The same pursuit that has been happening for days continues to happen. That the pattern has not changed in reaction to new stimulus isn't proof that the stimulus worked.
> Russia has directly asked the US to leave the ship alone
Yes. I am aware. Flags are being painted, registries updated and sternely-worded letters sent. The ship sails on. So do its pursuers.
> It’s going to be hard to duck this one
It really shouldn't be.
Just board the ship. Putin makes noises about international law. A D.C. lawyer insists that no, the vessel was stateless when found. And assuming there isn't like fissile material or a senior IRGC liaison on board, everyone grumbles and moves on.
Trump and Putin have a complicated relationship. But about the single thing that this will not depend on will be what maritime law says the U.S. should do. (And I think the legal arguments for seizure are on America's side on this one.)
You’re really claiming the U.S. military cannot stop the Houthi attacks?
The administration’s position is this is Europe’s problem [1]. It’s literally part of America retreating from that historic guarantee.
(That said, the simplest response would be to give the Saudis a weapons deal to secure the coasts. You have to blow up the ports, which will trigger a humanitarian disaster.)
> You’re really claiming the U.S. military cannot stop the Houthi attacks?
Yes, absolutely we cannot. Everytime we drive by we roll the dice with hundreds of lives.
And stop reading western propaganda! It's bad for you.
> That said, the simplest response would be to give the Saudis a weapons deal to secure the coasts. You have to blow up the ports, which will trigger a humanitarian disaster.
The saudis have BEEN a humanitarian disaster for longer than either of us have been alive.
I am formerly a Marine. This a rather silly notion and I think you should back your claim up with some evidence. Even with as much damage as Donald Trump has done to the US's military preparedness and hegemony around the globe no other fleet operates like the Marine Expeditionary Units. No other fleet can respond to any critical location in less than 24 hours. Add the Coast Guard for near-CONUS and partnered patrols and the US still maintains dominance both at home and abroad.
Nations, like China, are catching up but largely because of two outsized factors:
- The US for some time has not been able to produce ships at home, at scale, and at cost. This is more of a slow burn because the fleet has been kept up to date for the most part. Eventually, new ships need to be built at home.
- Donald Trump has done damn near everything he can to install lackey's within the military, which reduces the military's top decision making acumen down to yes-men to a 79 year old geriatric patient.
Russia's fleet, on the other hand, is an aging joke. It is where we will be if we continue electing fascists that install Martians like Hegseth.
The most frustrating part is when Apple dropped the jack we laughed at the "courage" bit, Apple's given reasons where already seen as bullshit, Samsung had their finger pointing moment.
And it just went on, Apple weathered the critics, the other makers also dropped it, and at some point there was just nowhere to go for anyone still wanted a 3.5 jack with a decent phone.
I agree the loss of the 3.5mm jack is a short-sighted and poor decision. There is at least one mitigation, which is the ability to recover the jack through a USB-C DAC. Apple sells them for USD10. I have several, in the car and in my backpack.
It's not a good solution though. In particular I find the USB-C port gets worn out pretty quickly. Its also easy to lose the dongle and of course it's more complicated to setup. (I'm not sure how to articulate the "it's more complicated" part. Adding the dongle elevates the action of "plug in headphones" from something you can do without attention to something that requires attention, and I don't like that.)
Can't you just leave a dongle on any wired headphones you have? Assuming you only use them with your phone and computer and don't have a CD player or something.
I guess that's my question, what other devices are people using? I'm just curious where people need to remove the dongle because maybe I have bad imagination but not much comes to mind.
I listen to music on earbuds on my phone on the go, a laptop at a cafe, and on my computer at my desk - all these have USB-C.
Even modern DAPs like Sony Walkman have USB-C as they are typically based on Android.
That leaves all the "legacy" devices that only a small minority use - home hi-fi stacks, vinyl record players, iPods, CD players, minidisc players?
They’re just responding to the market. The vast majority of people don’t care about this. Personally, I’d rather have two minutes more battery life than a headphone jack.
It’s annoying to have non-mainstream preferences in an area where economies of scale mean every product needs to have mass market appeal. But you might as well complain about the tide coming in.
It's objectively not a popular feature or something the vast majority of consumers are looking for.
Most people prefer Bluetooth because you don't need to deal with annoying wires getting tangled, ripping your earbuds out, etc.
Again, it's not that the market asked for the jacks to go away, they just don't care. And when there's something that consumers don't care about, companies tend to remove it. The jack takes up volume. Not huge, but on phones every cubic millimeter counts. And it's one more thing that can break.
And if you really want a jack, there's a $9 adapter you can just keep attached to your headphones. So everyone wins.
The survey asks whether people care about the headphone jack, though – it asks whether it's in the top three features they care about.
I care plenty about the headphone jack but still reluctantly bought a phone without one (which I regret) because I have more than three requirements to balance. I expect that the users who did include the headphone jack in their top three features still care that e.g. the screen, battery and radio are all in working order as well, despite not being in their top three.
> Most people prefer Bluetooth because you don't need to deal with annoying wires getting tangled, ripping your earbuds out, etc.
Thanks for this summary. I feel sad to be in a minority who prefer wired headphones. For me it's because all their failures you listed are issues I can understand and mitigate. But when bluetooth goes wrong, what do I do? Usually:
1. turn off both devices and then turn them back on again
2. try to reconnect
3. if step 2 failed, give up and try again another day
I don't learn anything. I feel infantilised and helpless.
Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people stick to same-brand or trusted brands -- AirPods "just work" with iPhones, in ways that other Bluetooth earbuds don't always.
I understand the figured sense that you describe. It reverses the logical suite of cause and effect. Instead of describing the true cause (Apple chooses to drop the jack) and the consequence (customers "don't care", which I believe is wrong), the conveyed message blames those without a choice: "customers don't care, therefore we should drop the jack".
The survey that you link is built on the premise that "you can pick only three things at most" as a manipulative trick. And since the headphone jack doesn't make it to the top 3, you use it as claim that consumers do not care about the headphone jack. This is not reasoning or stating objective facts, this is just a cop-out.
My claim is that the vast majority of consumers still need at some point in their use of their phone a way to plug 3.5 jacks into their phones somehow, and just put up with the enshittified new way: either buy some bluetooth adapter dongle, or a USB-C low quality DAC, or just give up and find a different solution.
"few customers care" is not the democratic ideal you make it sound to be.
It's the same as glued batteries, unrepairable phones. Few customers making it an absolute criteria for their phone choice still doesn't make mean the majority sees it as a positive thing nor they agree. At the time on the android side, only Pixel and Samsung's lines were serious about the camera or international NFC support, moving to other phones just for the jack came with huge compromises that had nothing to do with the jack itself.
It’s a competitive market. If removable batteries mattered to a lot of people, some company would take advantage of that to make a lot of money.
Feature combinations aren’t immutable facts of nature. Manufacturers make a conscious choice about what to include. If a good camera and international NFC combined with a headphone jack would attract a lot of buyers, don’t you think Samsung or Google would make a phone like that to better compete?
It’s nothing to do with “democratic ideal.” It’s about understanding that companies want to make money and if a feature is desirable, they will leverage that in their quest to make money. Some may fail to understand what their customers want, but all of them? It’s not plausible.
The "???" is "hey, Apple are doing it! since we already copy so many ideas from them, let's shave a few cents on the amp and jack receptacle, and if anyone complains, just claim that it's the trendy thing to do now".
And why didn't any of the multitude of phone makers say "turns out that people actually want a headphone jack, let's spend a few extra cents and steal all of our competitors' customers"?
Almost like there were at least three other features more important.
The most important letters in English are E, T and A. I'm sure you won't notice if we remove H from all keyboards, right? After all, the survey says it's not in the top three. And given a choice between a keyboard without E and one without H, nobody buys the one without H, proving they really don't need the H.
Why wouldn’t some keyboard manufacturer realize that a lot of people actually do need all of the letters, sell a keyboard with all of them, and make bank?
This theory that people want headphone jacks and phone makers won’t provide them makes no sense. It requires phone makers to be so cost conscious that they’ll remove a desirable feature to save a few cents, yet simultaneously so clueless that they won’t take advantage of consumer preferences to beat their competition. This sort of thing happens with individual companies, but not with every single company in a competitive market with many competitors.
I don’t know why people can’t just accept that they have a minority preference. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m sure it’s far from your only one (I have plenty of my own, just not this one). There’s nothing wrong with general complaints that the market doesn’t cater to your minority preference. But arguing that it’s actually the majority, when it plainly isn’t, it just weird.
Because a large number of “everyone” is buying keyboards from your competitors. If you make a keyboard with all the letters, you’ll get more of those sales.
No, I wouldn’t but a keyboard with a tm key because I don’t care about having such a key. Pretty much nobody would. That’s why such keyboards aren’t made. You’re making my argument for me here.
Counterpoint: if, instead of differentiating yourself, you copy Apple, nobody will fire you for that decision, even if it sucks.
Bonus: now that neither you nor Apple are including the jack, consumers resign themselves to a worse user experience and just buy your product (or theirs).
The source is the fact that very few phones have them.
There isn't some grand conspiracy to keep headphone jacks out of phones. Why would they do that? You think Samsung or Google wouldn't jump at the chance to sell more phones by putting in a headphone jack, if that would actually help them compete? No, the reason few phones have one is because few people care about it, at least enough to influence their purchasing decisions.
There are plenty of examples of market failures in the world where lack of competition or information prevents consumer preferences from being reflected in product offerings. But smartphone hardware is definitely not one of them.
I see the point for ultra slim phones. Except the only phones that are slim enough to have their thickest point thinner than that have only started to come up recently.
Imagine the same argument for USB-C: at some point phones will be too slim to allow for that port, should every maker start dropping it right now ? That would be nonsense.
On adapters, it's no panacea: you still want the USB port available. Split adapters exist, but most of them only allow for charging, and the charging rate is also usually miserable.
You could say people who appreciated that should just eat it and feel in their bones how much the world doesn't care about them, that would be fair. Now staying sour about it is also one's prerogative.
PS: The biggest part for me is every other devices I own still having a pretty good jack. Laptops still have it, game consoles, VR headsets, TVs, high fidelity portable players, cars etc. So keeping around a very good headphone pair is still an enjoyable thing, except for the damn phones. Even in XL sizes. They're the only one needing a dongle, and regardless of the price that sucks.
On slimness: wouldn't an alternative implementation be to "do the Magic Mouse" and put the USB C port on the back of the phone instead of the edge? Alternatively I could imagine MagSafe alignment / charging magnets plus an NFC like inductive communication (or contact pads) to allow for a range of "snap on" peripherals for phone backs that could be implemented on devices thinner than a USB C port.
If we really engineer around the same connector with extra thinness the best bet could be on partly open ports: if the phone covered 75% of the barrel circumference by left out the other 25% exposed I assume it would still work.
I see it through the same lens as the cassette players like the Toshiba KT-AS10 that left part of the cassette outside for the absolute minimal footprint:
Phones are already way slimmer than they should be. Now we have top-heavy "slim" phones with huge bulges for cameras*, 50% less battery life, reduced performance because of thermal issues, glued together in favor of screws and rubber seals, wasting weight and space on additional strengthening and internal routing.
Just because people think it looks neater than the more practical alternative.
The S2 had an amazing form factor - also with a small bulge, but at the bottom. It's a thousand times nicer to hold and carry than pretty much anything that came after. The S5 was fine too (waterproof AND you could pop open the back to swap the battery, if you can believe it!)
It's silly how much more ergonomic phones feel that don't have to compensate for an extra half millimeter.
* Many phones had this, but it's getting really bad now. Older phones typically also had the lens recessed to protect it, with a slim border around it. No more space for that now.
I'm not even sure people think that. Apple's marketing department thinks that, and other company marketing departments seem to be implementing some kind of master-slave architecture, where they are slave instances to Apple's master server. Does anybody really check specs and deliberately choose the thinner phone? Or do people just buy new iPhone regardless of whatever decisions they make just because having the last iPhone is cooler? Of course, I don't know, but I somehow really doubt it's the former.
The DAC in Apple's $10 adapter is higher quality than most "audiophile" DACs because Apple has a larger R&D budget and is better at manufacturing than the entire audiophile industry combined.
Same for Google's, though it's slightly less good iirc.
They aren't perfect - the maximum volume and impedance are pretty low so you do need an amp to electrically drive insensitive headphones.
nah, they are on par with other $10 chinese DAC, which is quite achievement for Apple tbh. I guess Apple decided to not apply "Apple tax" to those dongle.
DACs are very cheap. The BOM gap between "This DAC barely works" and "It won't sound any better if we spend more" for a headphone DAC is probably a dollar or so. This isn't some 1980s analogue technology where we need to spring for the best materials to get good results, and the components needed are all readily available from many suppliers today.
The problem (for the bank) is they are now liable in the UK[1] if you are defrauded because someone installs malware on the phone. There's basically zero upside for the bank to allow customers to use F-Droid, since probably 0.0001% of their customers would do this, compared to a vastly greater number of customers being tricked into installing random malware on their phones.
Accessibility settings are a tricky one since that's a separate law. I wonder if they whitelist screen reader apps from the official app store. Anyway that's not the case in the original article.
From the bbc article, the number of fraud rose 12%, and you're presuming 0.0001% would be using F-Droid. Is preventing that an efficient ("reasonable") action from the bank ?
risk management is all about what the bank is willing to trust.
in this case it decided it was risky because have any information on the provenance of your overlay, but you could source an overlay from somewhere they trust, like the default app store.
This is an analogy that is very appealing, which is precisely why I feel it sends the fundamentally wrong message.
There is not one single puck in the web search field, and we actively don't want that situation in the first place (want no monopoly or cartel). There should be at least 2 if not a ton more. Everyone focusing their attention and resource on a single thing is the absolute worst case scenario.
I also hope the future of search is not where every existing player is looking at. That means there is no disruption happening, money straight dictates the winner and nothing truly innovative is expected.
Even "skating where the puck will be" is essentially following someone else's play. It can be fine, but I'd prefer to focus on the person actually acting on the puck, where they're trying to lead the game.
I've heard of orgs going through a batch of certification partly for their own education and partly for the push and pull with their dev rep.