It sounds like electricity prices went up in Pakistan because supplier costs went up, not due to rent-seeking:
> The sharp depreciation of the Pakistani rupee combined with falling electricity demand — in part due to the rise in solar — have pushed electricity prices upward. Russia’s war in Ukraine added an extra layer of pressure as gas prices increased.
Pakistan's economy has been so bad for so many decades, no one wants to invest dollars into the country. The way the Pakistani government was able to set up power plants in the last decade was to give sovereign guarantees that investors will get fully paid back even if the power plant turns out to be economically unviable.
This means there is an agreed number in dollars that power plant investors get per year, whether the power plant sold 0 units or all possible units, and irrespective of the Rupee denominated price of electricity. They call it capacity charges.
So on this parameter alone it is in the interest of the Pakistani state to encourage demand as much as possible so power plants are used at full capacity. Unfortunately, there is a trade off. Many power plants are run on imported fossil fuels. So increased electricity demand places incredible strains on Pakistan's dollar reserves, which approached zero about 3 years ago. Similarly, fossil fuel price increase destroys the Pakistani economy, because something like 60% of imports are just fossil fuels.
Renewables cause similar problems in the short run, but hopefully in the long run they will be beneficial. Long run here means till after all the foreign power plant owners have been paid off in about 15 years.
I guess the security hole is that “allow connecting to localhost” might sound like an innocuous permission, but it becomes increasingly risky as you run more servers on local ports that have no other protection.
The permission itself doesn’t tell you anything about what powers it might grant. You need to know how all your local processes work to determine that, and most people have no idea.
It’s too generic for users to make reasonable decisions about. And that means that servers on localhost really should have authentication. Connecting client A to server B should be explicit.
But the person you replied to was talking about Redis's goal, and I don't think it's likely their goal had anything to do with having a competitor to themselves around. Even if they did want that, they could've just bankrolled (or engineered) a fork; changing a license to one that causes your largest users to do the work themselves is a rather roundabout way to do it.
I can almost kind of see the large users needing to work together on a replacement, meaning that replacement might as well be open-source, meaning Redis can get future improvements that were funded by the fork users (who Redis was upset wasn't paying them) as a semi-vindictive, semi-useful goal. But it's still roundabout. If that was really the plan, it could've been articulated better in this postmortem to make it clear the "goal" bit hadn't just been BS'd.
This blog post is from March. They later figured out what happened and it’s more mundane: Waltz accidentally saved the reporter’s email to his iPhone contacts because his iPhone suggested it after an email was forwarded to him. [1]
That’s a vulnerability all right, but not a security bug in Signal itself. Having every employee manage their own contacts is bad for an organization’s security.
Maybe Signal having UI to distinguish between organization members and outsiders might help make it more suitable for work use? It might require OS support, though.
Signal has no concept of organization. It’s not a tool for corporate use which is why the government developed its own secure chat application precisely for this reason that had this feature
One possible complication is that there’s quite a lot of waste that’s tolerated in pursuit of fashion and variety. (For example, Ross Dress For Less specializes in liquidating excess inventory.)
So I wonder how that plays out? My guess is that retailers take fewer risks when ordering, sticking with products that they know they can sell, even if prices are higher.
They could, but not necessarily. I think what OpenAI is getting is cooperation - that is, their search engine isn’t blocked. No money needs to change hands.
My guess is that once they're entrenched firmly enough, OpenAI will ask for money. First sell the free thing then once people rely on it enough, start charging.
It’s too early to be of much interest to outsiders, but impressing people likely isn’t the intention. By announcing that they’re talking, they don’t need to keep its existence secret anymore or worry about it getting into the news at some random time as a “secret project.”
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