Reminds me of Lord Vetinari from Discworld, reading sheet music instead of listening to adulterated performances by fat sweaty men squeezing the music through some tubes.
Executing the code in your head removed from the nuances of hardware, CPU architecture and compiler versions seems like a virtuous pursuit (?)
yes, but that is not the point. The point is that countries pursued uranium reactors as a priority to produce plutonium for weapons. It did not / does not have to be this way, and the conflation of all nuclear reactors as either being at risk of meltdown or linked to nuclear weapons has resulted in the current situation. The green movement did us all a disservice by choosing not to clarify the difference, and here we are in 2026 still burning coal, which continues to produce more radioactive waste than all the nuclear reactors ever built - and released directly into the environment!
There are many claims that Thorium fuel cycle is nuclear proliferation safe, it is safer but not perfectly safe. Uranium-233 bread during the Thorium fuel cycle can used to construct nuclear weapons
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances."
Many nuclear energy opponents require absolute nuclear proliferation safety.
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.
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