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.

It was under subsidy, but I got about double what I was going to get about 6 months prior. There are 50kwh units going on AliExpress for about $12k AUD outright so I think there's been another step down in per-cell costs which is tickling through.

I'm waiting for a price cut to make outright purchases a bit more affordable but with a wholesale electricity service plan adding another say 100kWh probably works out.

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

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...

Since when they were partners to Micro$lop? First, it's thug like behavior taking the ability to run code on our own computers without their approval. Second it's even more evil justifying this behaviour by calling the developers "partners".

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.

It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).

I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.

   SELECT
      id,
      full_name,
      IFNULL(age_verified, acc_created < DATETIME_SUB(CURRENT_DATETIME(), INTERVAL 18 YEAR) AS age_verified,
   FROM 
      google_accounts

Seems cheaper than the cigars and cash.

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.

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