Discovered this on an old Apple 2 in the 90s. Loved the basic physics of things like flying inverted or flying down low and then releasing a bomb while pulling up into a steep climb so the bomb would fly more laterally to a target.
Just listened on the radio driving the kids to swim class! I'm curious, does anyone think the show For All Mankind provided any peer pressure or influence to help propel NASA to this moment?
It’s a fun idea to consider, but I suspect the true push is due to how capable China is proving to be in spaceflight. They’ve got plans for a manned mission to the moon and are eyeing the same craters at the Lunar South Pole as we are.
While the outer space treaty forbids claiming territory in space, it doesn’t forbid building a base and putting a “Keep Out” sign on the airlock.
As a huge fan of Ron D. Moore’s shows, and especially For All Mankind, I don’t see how it could possibly have (or have had) any meaningful impact on NASA or NASA-adjacent efforts. Especially Artemis.
The current administration has worked hard to reduce overall energy supply to enrich specific suppliers. There's a lot that can be done to increase energy independence, but increasing energy independence is clearly not a goal of the administration.
I have long wondered about the market size for privacy-focused apps. Sure, plenty of people don't know or don't care to value that, but if there are enough, maybe you could have a whole set of apps that emphasize they are not seeking world domination or selling out to the highest bidder, and a major selling point for using them would be that they are not < your expected chat/dating/photo/social site >.
Am I too idealistic? If such apps are not aggressively seeking hyper growth, it seems like these more trustworthy services could be deployed to cheap servers and let people use them for cheap without having to resort to selling user data.
Even if they were initially trustworthy, it's surely only a matter of time before they start wanting/needing to make (more) money and start abandoning their principles in pursuit of profit.
If a company wanted to, they absolutely could include something along the lines of "If we violate the terms of this privacy policy, we owe all affected users $1000" in their Terms of Service. Pointing a gun at their own head to prove that they're serious. Companies don't do this, because they are cowards.
How is that a low trust signal? It's grounds to sue. Crank the number up to the limit of small claims in whatever jurisdiction you're based in.
If it was legal to say "If I break this oath, you can fucking shoot me" in a contract, I'd suggest that. The entire point of the exercise is "we promise do the right thing, and to keep us honest we have set up a system by which you can destroy us if we violate that promise".
Corporations can't swear on their life, as they have no life to offer. They can swear on their cash, and by such their ongoing existence.
> The real problem is how to trust that a "privacy-focused" app is actually privacy-focused
I think the real problem is actually that legislative bodies will make privacy focused apps illegal. California AB 1043 is an example of what can happen.
On one spectrum, you have privacy -- at one extreme, the most private of people don't even use social apps, they are traditionally private people. At the other extreme, you have the highest consumers of apps -- the people who demand sharing the most.
On the other spectrum, you have technical acuity -- at one extreme you have people who can audit software they use and verify that it actually does what it says -- at the other extreme, you have people who have no clue and will believe whatever is convincing.
Given this, the market for "app that enables sharing, but has privacy controls, and is verifiably so" is a tiny circle somewhere in the middle of this grid.
Not privacy-focused, but OKCupid itself fit many of your requirements when it first came out. It wasn't aggressively seeking hyper growth and barely marketed outside of existing SparkNotes and SparkMatch users. It was just a few math nerds at Harvard that wanted to model human romantic compatibility by categorizing you into a shareable cutely named personality type, and they bolted on crowd-sourced questions to see if whatever they hadn't thought of themselves might be relevant.
Ten years later, the social media revolution is in full swing, the relatively small service they built that had catered mostly to nerds was suddenly lucrative, and they sell to Match Group and this happens.
To be entirely fair to these guys, I don't think they came into it intending to sell out as their long-term goal. But four guys who got into data analytics in college also didn't find themselves as their mid-30s approached particularly wanting to run a dating service for the rest of their lives, either.
Whatever happened to FetLife? If any dating service had to be privacy-focused, that was it.
Users who want to be private and are willing to pay extra for it are necessarily highly valuable for data brokers and advertisers. So incentives always push towards betraying them eventually I think.
Is that true? Not arguing, just curious. I would imagine that the highly valuable users are those most likely to buy things, and people that into privacy would be fundamentally more likely to also go to extremes to block that advertising, but this is very much not my area.
Open source developers are wildly idealistic. In the rest of the world, I have finally internalized...
1. Most people say they care about privacy... but won't spend even $1 for it. They care about their privacy about as much as an open source developer cares about user experience. Just extract the tarball, it's not that hard.
2. Most people don't care about technology and want it out of their lives. They don't want to know what sideloading is. They don't want to know how to discern safe from dangerous. And they aren't wrong. How many open source developers know how to drive manual? Car enthusiasts have just as much of a righteous claim to attention, after all. The model railroad enthusiasts are also upset by our community's lack of attention. Every enthusiast, in every field, hundreds of them, are upset by lack of mainstream attention, and this will never change.
3. Linux and open source software in general are not even close to being popular on the desktop. Gaming and web browsing is a tiny subset of what people buy PCs to do, and Linux isn't even close on the rest. Even the gaming success is so niche it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (Switch 2 outsold 3 years Steam Deck sales in the first 24 hours).
4. Some of this optimism was deluded from the start. Like when Stallman said we can defeat proprietary software with open source, then openly admitted he had no idea how any open source developers could afford rent. "If everyone works for free, while the big companies stop working, we could get ahead" is gobsmackingly naive and it's honestly astounding anyone fell for it.
> Most people say they care about privacy... but won't spend even $1 for it.
Maybe they are smarter than you and noticed that trust is being violated constantly so paying for it in no way means you will obtain it and is just a waste of money?
The problem is that large-scale use of the Internet for social networks and for organizing meetings in real life is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. It works for small, tight-knit insular groups, but as soon as you expand the scope of the network to include acquaintances and friends of friends you'll eventually find a connection to someone who cares less about privacy than about making a buck.
If we had a sort of "federated" system we'd still have this problem because you might always find yourself federated with someone who just wants to sell the information.
It's a cultural problem within this hyper-aggressive version of Capitalism that we've adopted, that even data about people has value. Until we decide as a culture that this kind of data sale or data use is shameful and unacceptable we'll be in this situation no matter what technical solution we adopt.
Gift article link to the Houston Chronicle exlusive. “This gives me big Uber vibes,” said Hannah Bloch-Wehba. “You’ve got a company that goes into a new jurisdiction and acts like it’s not subject to the law in the jurisdiction because it’s doing something slightly different than what the law is meant to cover, they’re expanding really quickly and trying to get market share.”
I visited a friend in Sarajevo in 2014. Lovely small walkable city in a little valley, enjoyed the food and did some of the tours of old war sites inside the city and on the edge of the city. It boggled my mind then that the locals warned me not to go hiking through the pretty forest out of town because of land mines; it was hard to believe a country in Europe would have that problem in the 21st century!
European wars now all feel like a throwback to the 19th century. Even the maximally horrific wars of the 20th century feel outdated in light of trade being so much more efficient.
Economic aggression is a whole new kind of warfare and plenty destructive, but just saying "you stand on some dirt and we will kill you over it" is a pure waste.
People keep comparing the war in Ukraine to World War II, but they seem to imagine themselves to be Napoleon. Maybe France could have gotten richer by winning, but today that kind of attack is just lose-lose.
From America, the Yugoslavian war felt like re-fighting some Medieval grudge. I'm sure it made some kind of sense to them at the time.
I had never heard of the Zone Rouge, so thanks for sharing! I grew up in the USA in the 80s, and as a child, the first time I remember hearing of the problem of lingering landmines was in reference to countries such as Cambodia. Later I lived in Africa and eventually visited other continents. Of course I remember hearing of the war in Yugoslavia when growing up, but a dozen years ago when I visited Sarajevo, I certainly felt sad when the Bosnians told me about the ongoing problem because it felt like something I would have expected to be cleaned up by now in a developed country. Definitely a strong lesson on the long-term costs of war.
I'm very curious if they're going to ditch Google by providing on-device search. A monthly Open Crawl is under 100 terabytes, and if you clean that down to raw text and deduplicate and maybe pick out what you don't care about, the dataset might already fit onto my iPhone. They could do a lot without making a network call and reach out to a server for anything the device doesn't have, but a lot of user queries might never need to leave the phone. In another couple years, storage will be even higher.
I was hopeful for on-device AI too but any AI processing so far sucks up the battery, heats up the phone and most importantly isn't even nearly good enough. Without a breakthrough in battery, chips or the models and algorithms the way forward is thin clients that connect to some servers close to a solar farm or nuclear energy plant.
A couple months ago things were different. Try their stronger models. Gemini recently saved me from a needle in a haystack problem with buildpacks and Linux dependencies for a 14-year-old B2B SaaS app that I was solving a major problem for, and Gemini figured out the solution quickly after I worked on it for hours with Claude Code. I know it's just one story where Gemini won, and I have really enjoyed using Claude Code, but Google is having some success with the serious effort they're putting into this fight.
You can certainly do that in Houston. Food from anywhere is something we have more of than most American cities, and you don’t have to wonder if you’ll be able to get a table in the restaurant tonight. But if you like living in densely populated London, you might not prefer how spread out Houston is. I do love visiting London to experience a totally different world from my usual daily life.
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