• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Exactly.

    In a horse race, punters tend to spread bets across horses with no bias or favouritism - they place the bet because they want to make money, not because they are invested in the outcome.

    In a political race, people bet for one team because they are ideologically aligned and want to show support.

    If Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to gamble and place bets on their candidate, this creates market pressure and the odds for a Republican win will increase (I.e. get more likely) as a result of that.


  • Betting odds are influenced by other factors beyond the underlying probability, including behaviour of betters and where bets are placed.

    Take horse racing. If a horse was given a 40% chance to win but lots of people start piling money on that horse rather than any others, this creates unbalanced risk for the bookmaker as bets on one outcome need to be balanced by bets on another to ensure the bookmaker makes money.

    The bookmaker will respond to this by adjusting the odds of the popular horse upward to a higher probability, e.g. 60% And that can happen purely through market behaviour, even though nothing about the horse or the track or the race itself has changed!

    So it could be that Trump is the genuine statistical favourite. But it could also be that Republicans are just more likely to gamble and place bets on their candidate than Democrats are.





  • That Cloudflare were justifiably unhappy with the situation and wanted to take action is fine.

    What’s not fine is how they approached that problem.

    In my opinion, the right thing for Cloudflare to do would have been to have an open and honest conversation and set clear expectations and dates.

    Example:

    "We have recently conducted a review of your account and found your usage pattern far exceeds the expected levels for your plan. This usage is not sustainable for us, and to continue to provide you with service we must move you to plan x at a cost of y.

    If no agreement is reached by [date x] your service will be suspended on [date y]."

    Clear deadlines and clear expectations. Doesn’t that sound a lot better than giving someone the run-around, and then childishly pulling the plug when a competitor’s name is mentioned?


  • My biggest problem is security updates.

    The “x years of upgrades” model is okay when it’s for an app, where you can just keep using it with the old feature set and no harm is done.

    But Unraid isn’t an app, it’s a whole operating system.

    With this new licensing model, over time we will see many people sticking with old versions because they dont want to pay to renew - and then what happens when critical security vulnerabilities are found?

    The question was already asked on the Unraid forum thread, and the answer from them on whether they would provide security updates for non-latest versions was basically “we don’t know” - due to how much effort they would need to spend to individually fix all those old versions, and the team size it would require.

    It’s going to be a nightmare.

    Any user who cares about good security practice is effectively going to be forced to pay to renew, because the alternative will be to leave yourself potentially vulnerable.