How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?

I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.

https://www.codot.gov/safety/shift-into-safe-news/2025/march...

Mostly, though, drivers have just gotten worse. Corner-cutting is one of my pet peeves, and a good example here. I used to see someone cutting a corner across opposing traffic - usually someone turning off an arterial vs. someone trying to come out of the side street - less than once a week. Now, even though I drive less, it seems to be everyone all the time. If they're not cutting the corner, they're swinging wide to the same effect. Ditto for running red lights. Where I used to see one person running it by half a second, I now see three running it by multiple seconds. Turning where there's a "no turn on red" same way. I've stood at a rotary and counted how many cars were not using it properly, endangering others. Yeah, I know, get a life, but the fact remains that drivers are worse.

The only real question IMO is why drivers are worse. I have more theories, of course. Breakdown of the social contract, people under more time pressure, phones (though that was already examined), etc. But those kind of aren't essential to my point so I'll leave them aside for now.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/aut...

"Health Canada has not approved any medications for the treatment of autism."

Are you yourself confusing diagnoses for autism with diagnoses and (this time real) treatments for other conditions? That's the most charitable explanation I can think of, and it still seems a bit hypocritical. Maybe that's where the "flagrant rage bait" accusations come from.

So, back then, most consumers would have been GenX. Millennials would have been between 6yo and 21yo with only the very oldest likely to be buying such things. GenZ wasn't part of any market segment, and Alpha didn't even exist yet. Some of us GenXers stuck with it; at 60yo I still drink a can instead of coffee every day and none of my labs show any ill effects. Maybe we're not the primary demographic any more, but we're certainly still in there.

So ... which of us speaks for all GenX males in the world? ;)

Second, funding models. Because of that network effect, nobody will dump the ungodly amounts of cash on an Amazon or Google or Facebook replacement that they dumped on the originals. They can't grow, so they can't compete, so they can't grow, etc.

Third: regulatory capture. Meta is the clearest example of this, secretly funding PACs and lobbyists to get regulation that they are well able to comply with but no smaller competitor possibly could. It's an effective moat.

"If it was done once it can be done again" is just wishful thinking. It's not generally true, and especially not in internet-facing tech. The soil is already depleted, or even poisoned. Reining in the incumbents is a prerequisite to any alternatives getting on their feet.

* Arranging my whole life around on-call requirements. Bringing my laptop and backpack every time I went out. Designing new running routes that would use every street in a neighborhood and keep me close to home so I could respond within a 15-minute window. And yeah, the drinking thing. It pervaded my life in many ways I hadn't expected.

* Time zones and geography. These were always problematic, but especially during on-call. Often I'd narrow a problem down to a particular component that I didn't know well, so I'd try to contact the sub-team responsible for it, but nobody would respond. Then I'd try to turn the right knobs myself, and as often as not get yelled at for it in the morning. No, my afternoon, because my coworkers were three hours behind and late-commuters to boot. Of course they'd never hesitate to schedule meetings or ping me for trivial things well after my dinner.

I had taken the job, initially working on a project for which I was already a maintainer, because I wanted to avoid becoming an "architecture astronaut" by getting closer to operational reality. Indeed, I did learn a lot about how my own code behaved in real life. I don't have a problem with on-call requirements in and of themselves, but the way people and organizations handle the details is kind of .

BTW isn't the obfuscation of the bots' activity a tacit admission by their owners that they know they're doing something wrong and causing headaches for site admins? In the copyright world that becomes wilful infringement and carries triple damages. Maybe it should be the same for DoS perpetrators.

I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I hate hypocrisy (which this is) and rarely hesitate to call it out. On the other hand I believe "corporate personhood" is absolute bollocks. I resolve this in my own mind by saying that the ban on bills of attainder can be extended to corporations and other entities without declaring them persons. Laws should be statements of principle, timeless and equally applicable to all, not one-off actions targeted toward specific entities.