The problem is not so much the health risk but the overwhelming of healthcare systems and lack of supplies. This isn't a theory, we already know the outcome of not slowing down infection rates fast enough (China, Italy, etc).
That doesn't answer the question though. Ioannidis addresses the worst case scenario.
Lack of supplies, also, is made much worse by closing factories and tanking economy in general, as well as e.g. cancelling blood drives (a real case from King County), none of which are caused by the virus.
It doesn't actually solve the problem, which is something you would have imagined they would have thought out from the beginning.
They basically admit, outright, that their proposed solution doesn't solve the problem:
The ideal would be for this to be completely distributed. Everyone's pod would be on a computer they own, running on their network. But that's not how it's likely to be in real life. Just as you can theoretically run your own email server but in reality you outsource it to Google or whoever, you are likely to outsource your pod to those same sets of companies. But maybe pods will come standard issue in home routers.
Imagine you're an average user: you don't know much, but you've maybe read one of the billion news articles about how Google reads the context of every inbox on their service. Now some guy comes up and tells you that you should put all of your data in the hands of Google.
Totally a good idea.
And can you imagine how bad it would be if this came standard in home routers?
Congratulations, it's 2058 and there are over three billion routers & modems released in 2025 that haven't been patched since, but instead of just being a minor issue like it was when routers and modems did relatively little back in the 2010s, they're containing all of their users' personal data. And that's not even getting into how bad of a concept it is to have a family sharing a single access point for their data.
Note that Solid certainly doesn't dictate you should keep all your data together. For example, it is perfectly possible to have e.g. a 'work' Pod and a 'personal' Pod. Additionally, data within a single Pod need not necessarily be physically stored together.
But yes, Solid doesn't solve all problems, and I don't think it even solves (or will solve) one problem by itself. But I certainly believe it can be part of a solution, and I believe even more strongly that we desperately need one, which is why I'm happy we're at least trying.
(Disclosure: I also work for Inrupt, but views are my own.)
Yeah there are so many moving parts, and so many things vying to be the weakest link.
If we step back and consider what we all have today, it’s amazing we actually have a functional internet. It’s amazing that the script kiddies who are prepared to destroy things for the lols haven’t turned the internet into a dysfunctional cesspit already?
One bit of good news is that Schneier is an authority on the out-of-date router and related problems. I guess whatever they come up with will at least understand the wider threat landscape.
That’s why the protocol is open, so there will be multiple players. They will naturally converge like we currently have but that’s not what’s game changing. The game changer is the visibility and control of what data is collected about you.
Somehow it will. Not sure when. I tire of Amazon giving me ads to things I already bought. Like someone told me they bought something you usually only buy one of like... Random example: a new toilet or something... No I dont need another one the replacement one was fine enough thank you!
What's worse is the blatent lie of "frequently bought together", where they tell you that people frequently buy three different models of the same item, often different brands. It's like, Amazon thinks that people are completely gullible idiots. Then again . . .
Given everything amazon has on offer in the way of machine learning etc. is their algorithm for promoting items you might want to buy as simplistic as "I see you bought a pair of running shoes! Perhaps you might want another pair of running shoes?".
Or worse, you’re looking to sell something that you’d only need once in your life (eg: a PS4), so you list it on eBay, but now you’re getting non-stop ads to buy one.
It takes a little longer every time someone implies ad blockers are “stealing” or that it’s all ok because “it’s the model”. I completely refuse both of these ideas.
Except this is the case where users have made a large cash purchase, and so have the realistic expectation that they are the paying customer and not a pair of eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder.
If "their day comes" and we still don't have a cultural shift that involves paying anyone for content except the largest tech companies (e.g. Netflix), then we'll be even worse off.
Though, that Patreon has any traction at all suggests that a shift is happening or at least becoming feasible.
I'm not sure what the alternative is. You can pick up a newspaper for 20p,or a "quality" newspaper for 50p (UK rates). Would I pay 50p a day to browse a news site? At the moment, no, because I can get my news for free elsewhere, with similar political alignment. I feel like I would pay something for really, really good curation and aggregation of news I'm interested in. But not all the time.
It seems subscription is the only alternative to free and I don't want endless subscriptions to news (be it tech news or what's going on in the world). Because it all adds up. I want to be able to buy stories/news etc. ad hoc as I do/did a newspaper rather than being committed to a month subscription where I may not take advantage of it all the time.
Spotify is an example of a service I use frequently but probably don't use it every day and as such I sometimes unsubscribe from it. I'd love to be able to subscribe to it when I'm using it. Say 25p/30c a day (or less ideally).
Sure it may end up coming out costing me more than a monthly subscription but some months it wouldn't because I don't use it all the time.
I'm all for paying for content but all these subscriptions add up.
AWS has got it figured out, to a degree - more so than media companies. Charge for usage.
It depends on whether they are able to cement their "right to exist" as a business model through regulatory capture and other sorts of bullying as is the case with for-profit medical insurers and car dealerships and likely many other things I'm not thinking of.
The Samsung TV is a physical object that you purchase. It might be true that you don't own the software running on the TV, but you at least own the TV.
After I've moved to Firefox and installed lots of ad-blocking plugins, enacted privacy settings and GDPR options everywhere available and uninstalled mobile native apps (ie. FB, Twitter), I felt like I had defused the whole data-collection-to-advertising lifecycle. By not seeing ads, no matter what Samsung collects, I would be safe or at least disruptively useless for them... until Samsung showed me a small, targeted ad through their TV UI. Resistance is futile.
A simpler explanation is that some people will just "learn" (via googling) the basic SQL they need to get something done. This is not uncommon across all domains in our industry.
I remember that. It seems like there were some restrictions that held back performance in OtherOS mode, though. It was too bad that they didn't keep it up.
Could also be an issue with speaker placement. Most flat panel TVs have a speaker pointing down or backwards at the wall due to small bezel flat screen design.
Yes, this developer has 100s of libraries most of which are just code snippets. That was part of the criticism here, it looks like this guy is trying to take advantage of jr devs without providing any real value.
