TIL

I have hopes for Sodium-Ion cells, they should be way more shippable and presumably a better fit for residential power.

But I agree - in the moment, the impact is barely visible, so management would have to put up a fight to spend $$$ on a fix. The way of least resistance is to issue a press release as shown above.

My guess is that every single zero-day patch still requires a colossal engineering and coordination effort to roll out (we'll see how that works out for routers, and whether, e.g., chrome users will become fed up to update their browsers) going forward.

We'd have to work much harder on the supply chain issues, making sure all, including obscure, dependencies are more tightly locked down than before across the entire surface areas of products.

In other words, the LLMs help much more with offense than defense right now. I don't know how to change it now, or how to have avoided it in the first place. This herd has left the stable. Or the Pandora's box has been opened.

From a social perspective, I would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.

Microsoft would not have to automatically and 100% correctly reinstate the account. The goal would be to get high level cases like this one in front of a knowledgable human before the locked account posts angry owner posts complaints in public (If Joe Bloe's defragmentation utility noone has ever heard of and only having 10 installs goes bad, noone would care.)

Here, they don't have to be perfect - you just need to have enough signal-to-voice ratio that employing a very small number of people outweighs the cost to PR and execs to deal with these cases, and to not let accounts get hacked through recovery.

The response from Microsoft [1] is not great, or makes me hopeful.

``` Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's President of Windows and Devices, said both Idrassi and Donenfeld should have their accounts restored "soon."

"We've seen these reports and are actively working to resolve this as quickly as possible," Davuluri Xeeted. "We've reached out to VeraCrypt and have spoken to Jason at WireGuard, they should be back up and running soon."

He explained that both deactivations were executed as part of the Windows Hardware Program's account verification procedures.

The company published a blog in October, giving devs a two-week warning that if their accounts had not been verified since April 2024, Microsoft would issue mandatory account verification notifications.

"We worked hard to make sure partners understood this was coming, from emails, banners, reminders," said Davuluri.

"And we know that sometimes things still get missed. We're taking this as an opportunity to review how we communicate changes like this and make sure we're doing it better."

```

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/microsoft_dev_account...

Given that the baddies clearly can locate ships and see that there's no transponder, and come to the conclusion they need. "Hmm, it turned off transponders and is now moving toward the straight. It's a tanker, and not one of ours, or Russia's or China's. Let's bomb it!"

Also, pragmatically, you could look at the transponders suddenly not showing up anymore as a sign of attempt of passage, especially if they show up later on the other side.

But yes, that would no longer be very realtime.

Seems cheaper than the cigars and cash.

Still, absolutely fabulous. What a time to be alive!

70/10, 7.1-0.1 and srqt(49) also do not return true.

Is there a published SLA for the free version?

https://evernewtransformer.com/pt/how-to-purchase-power-tran...

If I were to desperately need a power transformer, I'd consider going down this route in parallel to waiting for years for a "blessed" one.

E.g., https://lindahongli.en.made-in-china.com/product/SAapQolWVUY...

That's in the ballpark of the Heathrow transformer that blew, I think.

I understand they will be not cheap, with tariffs and all, but nothing the Magnificent 7 or Heathrow could not afford.

It seems to me that (as the article points out) that production facilities are pretty old and production COULD be much more automated, and products improved if there was a will.

However, "Now those firms are seeing a rise in demand for transformers alongside the buildout of data centers for AI, but remain unsure if the trend will continue, says Gonzalez Isla. “Transformer companies aren’t going to open new plants only to shut it down after 10 years of business,” she says."

And THAT seems to be the crucial difference here between the transformer industry and, say, NVIDIA.