cabbage

The archive link should work?

I’ve been seeing Mike McCue and his projects around a lot, and listening to him quite a bit in !dot_social@flipboard.video, but I never really understood how he had the resources to do all his stuff.

He started Paper Software to make it possible to visually display 3-D information in web browsers and then sold the company to Netscape for $20 million in 1996.

In 1999 he co-founded Tellme Networks, a pioneering effort to create what had been described as a “voice browser” and make it possible to receive internet information via the phone. That company was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for a rumored $800 million.

Gosh.

This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established.

That does sound like a problem.

I never managed to touch type on qwerty, so I guess I had nothing to lose in that sense.

I made the change in my late 20s, just before I started writing my PhD thesis. I figured if I was going to do a lot of writing, I might as well make it as efficient as possible.

I taught myself Dvorak. Didn’t buy a new keyboard or anything, just practised a little every day in some app I installed on my computer.

Took me maybe a week before I switched to Dvorak full time, and maybe a week more before my writing was as fast as it had ever been on Qwerty. It’s absolutely worth making the change.

Referring to the song Sweetheart Like You:

Steal a little and they throw you in jail Steal a lot and they make you king

As the headlins in the article I linked earlier kindly informs us, half of all active satellites are now from SpaceX. And it’s increasing fast. If other companies enter the scene and start competing, the earth will be orbited by a shitload of useful satelites launched into space by billionaires with a penis complex.

Governments are supposed to provide services for their population. Some of these needs might justify launching satellites. It is not unproblematic, and I would rather see it being governed by an international organization, but at least it’s being done on behalf of people.

Companies launch them to make a profit for the fat wallets of their stakeholders and CEOs.

They are not the same. Pretending they are is, as you so nicely put it, weird.

It’s incredible it took them this long, considering how obvious it is. But good - it’s nice to see at least one thing getting less and not more shitty for once, however tiny.

They just need to capitalize the surveillance capabilities. Find a way to convince users they need access to everything on their phones in order to sell them first class convenience. Once you’ve done that there’s plenty of money to be made.

You can do that all by yourself, no AI needed!

So we will have a bunch of trash circulating the earth, left there by opporunistic billionaires. No thank you. What they have done to the night sky alone is a crime against all of us as far as I’m concerned.

And to think that lower orbit is not interesting any more now that NASA wants to build a telescope on the moon is beyond me.

If it is you probably wouldn’t be thrilled to find out how.

There are a number of concerns, from hindering science by blocking pictures taken by Hubble to flat out malfunctioning and crashing into the ISS. For every new satellite the risk increases. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/satellites-spacex-problem-space-pollution

But also, we cannot have so many god-damn satellites polluting the night sky. Starlink should never have been allowed to get up there as a private actor in the first place.

It’s a tricky situation, as international cooperation would be extremely difficult to maintain, especially during situations like the Ukraine war. But having private companies compete to fill the orbit with space waste as soon as possible is hardly a good solution either.

confused European sounds

Information here is public.

That said, there has been problems of people scraping random fediverse servers and causing a lot of traffic, in turn sending a huge bill to the owner of the instance.

We don’t have money, so ransom attacks are unlikely.

If it’s state actors and cyber warfare, which I think is fair to suspect, we’re probably way under the radar. We’re not quite critical infrastructure just yet. :)

For the lols attacks could happen anywhere, but this is not that.

I think it’s the first time in my life I routinely check in on the stock value of a company, and it’s pure Schadenfreude.

While most news media keeps on endlessly reporting on what politicians say, tech and law commentators by definition focus on what is being done. In a world where what is being said is not only irrelevant, but flat-out weaponized, this is the only kind of reporting that matters.

Never gave this much thought. I’ve been considering subscribing for Kagi again, but basically they are paying for a Google API subscription, meaning that Google directly monetizes my Kagi searches?

To be completely honest, I’m less worried about privacy and more worried about what kind of world I’m contributing to with my internet usage. I Mullvad sends money to Google for every search, it’s probably not for me.

Switched to Qwant now - rather Microsoft than Google, and at least they are working on their own engine.