You have to actively maintain a state of ignorance to say this isn’t different. Go look at all of the public reporting starting in January about the way appointees in the Pentagon, DOGE, etc. blew through the normal policies and procedures controlling access, clearing people, or restricting sharing.
For example, this wasn’t just “oops, I used the wrong number” but Hegseth getting a custom line run into a secure facility so he could use a personal computer of unknown provenance and security:
That’s one of the reasons why one of the first moves they made was to fire CISOs and the inspectors general who would normally be investigating serious policy violations.
This isn’t “big government”, it’s the attitude that the law is a tool used to hurt their opponents and help themselves but never the reverse.
Done. Texts can be sent to email addresses and texts can be sent via email, and you can dictate texts and have them read back to you with text-to-voice.
I think most people will just think it's weird and ignore it?
The wording could obviously be better, it should use softer language with a note that if you're sure the email is correct then you can ignore the letter.
But the general concept of trying to detect unused email addresses seems valid.
Win8.1 x64 required double-width compare and exchange instruction support, so people who bought Win8 for a CPU or motherboard that didn't support it had to downgrade to the 32-bit version or lose support in 2016.
Win7 updates from 2018 onwards required SSE2 with no warning.
Win11 24H2 and later won't install on x86 processors that don't support the x86-64-v2 baseline.
From my experience it seems to happen all the time. Settings reset, uninstalled apps reinstalled, firewall settings erased. I went looking for the Windows 10 patch that deleted the Documents folder if you had remapped it to another drive, and it was hard to find an article due to all the other times their updates have also deleted people's Documents folder. This was the first time I recall it happening: https://www.engadget.com/2018-10-09-windows-10-october-updat...
Interestingly enough, it doesn't matter in the slightest if some times the excuse is actually true. The intuition is good to have at all times, as Intel's founder Andy Grove used to say - "Only the paranoid survive".
> hence the existence of Occam's razor.
Occam's razor has nothing to do with the topic at hand, you're probably thinking of Hanlon's razor which is a dumb idea 99% of the time, regardless of what actually produced it - stupidity or malice.
I find more and more that those who wave around Hanlon’s razor are doing so to keep something from being looked upon too closely. As if to say, “look any closer and you’ll be cut”.
Be it flying monkeys, boot lickers, or the abuser themselves. It’s a thought terminating cliche that's designed to stop to critical thinking and minimize the act and reduce the response, making it seem though it were a forgivable mistake instead of a deliberate action.
Because as you said: regardless of malice or stupidity, the harm is real.
There is no way to know if you are applying Occam's razor correctly because we always have invisible cultural assumptions that are hard to escape.
Relevant story: my mother grew up in the Soviet Block where they taught her about American Segregation in elementary school. She said she and all her friends immediately dismissed it as made-up propaganda
In that case she was wrong. But I think the intuition is the correct "rule of thumb" to take. By your application of Occam's razor, you would end up believing most propaganda the Soviet education system pushed as long as it offered a simpler explanation. I don't think that's a good intuition to have either.
Song shuffling has been broken for ages now. It used to work correctly, like shuffling and dealing a deck of cards, only reshuffling and redealing when the entire deck has been dealt (or the user initiates a reshuffle).. Now it's just randomly jumping around a playlist, sometimes playing the same song more than once before all the songs are played once. I have a feeling that money is involved somehow, as with everything else that's been enshittified.
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