The archive link should work?
cabbage
joined 2 years ago
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.
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.
As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.