"The fundamental issue is that SendGrid’s business model depends on making it easy for legitimate businesses to send email at scale."

I disagree with this conclusion, if not only because other email service providers don't have this issue.

It wouldn't surprise me if something was broken with SendGrid's internal infrastructure. I used to be a SendGrid customer until my deliverability started being affected by this issue. SendGrid took weeks to reply to my customer service messages about resolving this, even though I was a paying customer and was renting private IP addresses from them to send mail.

I finally gave up and closed my SendGrid account in July 2021. Despite this, they continued to send me monthly invoices until May 2022. Multiple SendGrid representatives promised that they had resolved the issue, but it wasn't until one CSR added me to SendGrid's global suppression list that they finally stopped.

>closed my SendGrid account ....continued to send me monthly invoices

I used to run IT for a medium company. The amount of times I saw this with various SaaS companies was troubling. We had hundreds of services some as small as a single manager that demanded X and company wide tools. It was frequently a several months long hassle to get them to stop billing us when we cut ties with them. I wish I kept personal records now it was a minority but definitely in the 15%'ish range.

If the attackers in this case are cleverly exploiting anything, I would bet on aggressive grey patterns like that more than I would US culture wars. Noticing that a company has policies that let you hide in plain sight means that you're paying close attention. Knowing what issues are hot button culture flamewars means you can access literally any American news outlet.

> In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning.

It took 2 years because FFmpeg waited 2 years to send a DMCA notice to Github, not because of delays in the legal system. I think you are conflating different unrelated issues here.

A lot of comments here seem to suggest that we should discount or ignore this paper because the OLPC program had other benefits (increasing uptake of lower cost laptops worldwide, giving children computer skills, etc.). This is a reasonable argument assuming that most people have only read the free abstract, but this isn't the conclusion that the authors come in the actual paper. Instead, they suggest that the program might have been more successful with increased teacher training and internet access in schools.

I was able to access the NBER version of the paper, but it looks like working copies are also available in a number of other locations:

  - https://publications.iadb.org/en/laptops-long-run-evidence-one-laptop-child-program-rural-peru
  - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5391874
  - https://www.ofermalamud.com/research

While that's undoubtedly true, is that really feasible?

Training programs are expensive, and i imagine difficult to conduct across potentially remote areas with underdeveloped infrastructure.

Internet access is maybe more doable now with starlink, but how practical was it at the time? I imagine this varries significantly with region, maybe in some cases all that was needed was LTE modem -> wifi, but if actually new infrastructure needed to be set up, that could be very pricey very fast.

Like everything its all about trade offs, if olpc did those things would they have budget for other things?

the only way to improve education is to train more and better teachers. that's even completely independent of projects like OLPC. asking if training teachers is feasible is simply the wrong question. arguing that it is expensive is the wrong argument.

education and teacher training is the only way to achieve progress in this world. and if training is expensive or difficult to achieve then that's a challenge we need to overcome, not an excuse not to do it.

There are viable alternatives to Internet access, notably offline resources as provided by projects such as Kiwix. I'm not sure to what extent the projects described in OP actively leveraged these efforts with any real effectiveness. If it didn't, those OLPC mini-laptops would've been functionally equivalent to glorified calculators, and the results would be quite unsurprising.

> the program might have been more successful with increased teacher training and internet access in schools.

With teacher training, yes. Internet access in schools would have allowed more propaganda and surveillance, while disturbing the education process.

Why should I have gone to college?

My outcomes would be better if I were just richer, smarter and better looking.

There's a real doubt whether college is a reasonable investment these days. The costs are outrageous and the improvement, for society, seems lacking.

If you want to be richer, smarter, and be better looking, food and shelter security might go a long ways

The math of college still holds true in the US depending on what you major in [0][1].

Most non-college goers are not attending apprenticeship programs or joining union jobs - which nowadays increasingly require a college education [2].

This isn't the 1970s anymore where you can go to the local factory and screw parts by hand - manufacturing, carpentry, metalworking, and other industrial arts increasingly require STEM fundamentals which for most students they can only acquire in some form of college (be it 2-year or 4-year).

I've seen this first hand now that I've been taking carpentry courses at my local CC as a side hobby - the union track apprenticeship program that's part of the CC expects an associates degree at a minimum.

[0] - https://www.ppic.org/publication/is-college-worth-it/

[1] - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60832ecef615231cedd30...

[2] - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf

The OLPC project clearly didn’t achieve its aims, but how would they have known that without trying?

More recently, the impact of smart phones on the developing world has been transformational, suggesting some of the ideas behind OLPC may have been good, but the specific implementation lacking. Thanks to smart phones, developing communities now have access to media in global languages, online education, finance, communication, markets (without having to travel for miles), disaster recovery, health resources and much more.

You can even now see rural villages themselves prioritise phone infrastructure over many things that on the surface seem more important - such as by fixing the phone charger before they fix the plumbing!

Both "flashblooding" and the 2010 paper you mention are explicitly mentioned in the article.

Sorry about that, I don't have a New York Times subscription so I could only read the first sentence or two from the submission article.

Makes me wonder why paywalled articles are allowed in the first place, when most are the visitors aren't gonna be able to read it even.

You're correct, but "hospitals overcounted COVID deaths and the pandemic wasn't that bad" is unfortunately a conspiracy theory: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/how-covid-death-counts-become...

Well, at least they acknowledge there was a pandemic.

There's still plenty of people who don't believe 1,100,000 Americans died of COVID. These same people also wonder why it suddenly became harder to find workers.

I think that when a wealth of other reliable sources don't describe an economist as Marxist, Wikipedia shouldn't give precedence to a single op-ed in the Stanford Daily from 1976.

You're focusing on when the word "Marxist" was removed in 2024, but you might want to consider when it was added to the article (in August 2020, about two weeks after Harris was selected to be the vice presidential nominee): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...

You say it was added in August 2020, but the article was created in August 2020.

Not much of an indictment that additional information was added sometime shortly after the article was created.

It is important to note that the author of this article (and the founder of this organization) is also the owner of notorious harassment forum Kiwi Farms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

The parent comment is an ad hominem attack, plain & simple.

Nothing has been said by the parent about the message: Instead, the messenger is marked as the target in order to take down the message via association.

"Give me the man and I will give you the case against him"

------

About the legislation itself:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401...

It's mainly 3 semi-related parts stapled together. If the person/business/bank is complying with the law:

- 1a) Banks with > $10 billion are blocked from (i) the Fed's discount window lending program, & (ii) the Automated Clearing House Network, if they refuse to do business with them,

- 1b) Banks are required to accept deposits from them & law-complying member banks,

- 1c) The board of directors of banks/credit unions have to notify the state/fed if said access blocking happens,

- 2) (Section 5) Payment networks can't refuse service to them, &

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/401...

- 3) Banks & payment networks have to give them access to financial services

The middle part (2) is what's being focused on in the article.

I'm mostly in agreement that (1) the penalty's too low, & (2) restricting dispense of the law to only the Comptroller renders it ineffective.

(1) is easily solvable with regards to editing the text alone: raise the limit to 50% & $100k respectively.

(2) is also solvable, by striking out "by the Comptroller of the Currency".

The message is an important one, and it deserves advocacy. I have advocated for this specific legislation myself in recent comments. But we've seen in the past what happens when this individual is given attention, and it is difficult to, in good conscience, assist him in attracting more of it.

While I think some details of your anecdote might be wrong (Dick died in early March 1982, which is probably too early for Reed College's commencement), I think it is clear that LeGuin had a lot of admiration for Dick.

She talked extensively about him in a 2012 interview with Wired (https://www.wired.com/2012/07/geeks-guide-ursula-k-le-guin/) and in the introduction to the Folio Society's edition of The Man in the High Castle (included in her essay collection Words are My Matter). In both, she mentioned the Phildickian anecdote that they were both students at the same large high school in Berkeley at the same time, but that none of her friends or acquaintances remember Dick.

> [29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.

The Gwern link is just a PDF copy of an article from a 1975 issue of "Bee World": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1975.11... I can't speak to the journal's rigor in the 1970s, but they seem like a more reliable source than any other mentioned in this discussion.

Also, peer review is almost unrelated to rigor. Plenty of sloppy crap gets peer reviewed, and, for example, none of Einstein's annus mirabilis papers did.

This just suggests that the battery in your iPhone 8 is more degraded than your low end Motorola. This could easily occur if you have used the iPhone more over its lifetime and isn't a good measure of relative performance.