As someone else who does System Engineering, when dealing with ancient protocols, "shall" is extremely difficult barrier to get over since there is always ancient stuff out there and there might be cases not to do it, esp if it's internal communication.
"SHOULD" is basically, if you control both sides of conversation, you can decide if it's required looking at your requirements. If you are talking between systems where you don't control both sides of conversation, you should do all "SHOULD" requirements with fail back in cases where other side won't understand you. If for reason you don't do "SHOULD" requirement, reason should be a blog article that people understand.
For example, "SHOULD" requirement would be "all deployable artifacts SHOULD be packaged in OCI container". There are cases where "SHOULD" doesn't work but those are well documented.
I’m doing some work with an email company at the moment. The company has been in the email space for decades. Holy moly email is just full of stuff like this. There is an insane amount of institutional knowledge about how email actually works - not what the specs say but what email servers need to actually do to process real emails and deal with real email clients and servers.
The rfcs try to keep up, but they’re missing a lot of details and all important context for why recommendations are as they are, and what you actually need to do to actually process real email you see in the wild. (And talk to the long tail of email software).
This conversation makes me think about cornering some of the engineers with a microphone. It’d be great to talk through the specs with them, to capture some of that missing commentary.
In a completely different field, navigating ships at sea, the Collision Regulations which define how people must conduct ships at sea, they use the words "Shall" and "May" to differentiate legal requirements and what may just be best practice. "Should" intuitively means something more like "May" to me
Note "the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course". Gmail and the other big hosters have full-time spam teams who spend a lot of time weighing implications, so I assume the implications of this was weighed.
I feel like "SHOULD" and "SHOULD NOT" are redundant. You end up having to assume someone else treated them as a "MAY". If you control all the endpoints in a private implementation you can just deviate from the standard & not implement a MUST, it's your private implementation. There's thus no difference in public implementations between "SHOULD" and "MAY", and no difference in internal implementations between any of the words. They are therefore redundant, requirements are either mandatory or optional, there's no middle.
AIRMO | FE, FS, ML engineers | Luxembourg | ONSITE
AIRMO is a European climate-tech company using space and airborne technologies to monitor greenhouse gas emissions globally. Our instruments — combining LiDAR and hyperspectral imaging — detect and quantify methane and CO₂ emissions from industrial sites, pipelines, and national infrastructure.
We’re building a global monitoring system from air to space, helping energy companies, governments, and investors take real action on climate impact.
We are hiring a frontend, fullstack and an ML engineer in our new Luxembourg office. This team will be responsible for building out our data platform frontend, that allows users to interact with satellite tilesets and derivative information. You must be located in Luxembourg, or be willing to relocate.
> For the Five Eyes(Canada, US, UK, Australia, NZ) that don’t ever need to worry about conventional invasion
Australia is extremely at risk of conventional invasion, their current independence is a function of alliance to the strongest navy in the Pacific. Without a US that is willing and able to ensure Australia's free access to the surrounding ocean, AU is absolutely unable to deploy enough of their own military to fend of probably even Indonesia, let alone China. The coastline is just far too long, the military assets too few, and the country too depopulated to be able to stop a determined invasion.
I need to push back on your analysis on this. Quite hard actually.
Indonesia lacks the force projection capability to even project an expeditionary force into Northern Australia.
Sustaining an expeditionary force into Northern Australia by Indonesia would leave it incredibly vulnerable to air and sea supply chain interdiction.
With first hand professional domain experience, and without arrogance or hubris, an Indonesian invasion of Northern Australia would be disastrous for Indonesia.
China invading Australia would entail a much more capable, but entirely untested, expeditionary force over much longer and far more vulnerable supply chains.
With just FVEY intelligence support and FVEY forces already forward deployed into Australia, the likelihood of China successfully establishing and sustaining a beachhead to break into Australia with a conventional invasion would be similar to that of Indonesia, due to very long and very vulnerable supply chains.
Unless China glassed Australia with nuclear weapons, any attempt by Xi and the CCP's PLAN/PLAAF/PLA to conventionally invade Australia would be a moon shot too far.
China's fleet steaming south would be severely attrited transitting limited maritime traffic route bottlenecks that would be akin to cattle chutes in a slaughter house, while China's own energy/food/raw industrial materials commercial maritime supply chains would be existentially vulnerable.
That's just to Australia's current fleet of Collins class submarines and tanker supported F35s.
Australia's AUKUS nuclear submarine investment will magnify that current independent threat to China's maritime supply chain.
Which is odd, considering this comedic skit is partially true:
The Indonesia comment was a bit of cheek, I totally concede that it would be disastrous for them. However, I don't think that a conventional invasion is too far fetched IFF USN assets withdraw from the western Pacific.
Yes China has to transit the straits around SEA, but how many Collins does Australia actually currently have available to deny these channels, 1 or 2? Additionally, if this scenario happened and the US was in full turtle-mode, how long do you think AU could sustain those F35s? AUKUS won't deliver actual capability to Australia until maybe 2035 at the earliest, and those subs are too large to feasibly use the channels around Indonesia and Malaysia effectively anyway.
But yes I agree, unconventional attacks are more likely.
I think biggest threat of invasion for Australia is illegal immigration.
It’s happened before, and Australia has used discrete and unconventional means to disrupt it.
RAN could probably surge 3 Collins boats depending on timings of depot level maintenance.
P8 paired with C17/C130 used as arsenal planes to saturate PLAN air defence and F35 hitting hard targets with LRASM would make it a slaughter.
PLAN’s recent live fire exercise in the commercial air corridor between Australia and NZ single handedly justifies increased defence spending for ANZ.
Personally, I think China’s horrible demographic wall it’s about to hit at 100kph combined with a stagnant economy(140+ car makers today that will surely drop to 20 or less by 2035) leaves Xi with plenty of domestic crisis to solve.
The risk is if Xi needs(or needs to create) an external crisis to activate nationalism and deflect away from domestic strike(akin to Argentina-Falklands 1982).
Even Taiwan might be a stretch too far. Xi will need a guaranteed win.
Is Troy rotating out old breaches? Because I have 2 email addresses that were definitely part of leaks (I got notified by the parties that were hacked), and one of them used to show up as compromised on the site, but no longer. The other one was part of the Qantas frequent flyer leak (I got an email from Qantas about it), but this address doesn't show up as part of that leak.
At AIRMO we're building the single source of truth for GHG emissions data, starting with methane. We are developing a suite of active and passive optical sensors for UAS, aircraft and satellite platforms, and are planning to launch our first satellite late 2026.
We're looking for an electronics engineer and an embedded software engineer to join our team in Berlin.
reply