It got worse.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/elon-musk-vs-organic-farmers-bastrop/
As it turns out, Elon Musk had a bunch of farms + horses from all the land he bought in the 2022-era. Elon Musk was actively trying to get rid of horses on his new property.
Its not that Elon Musk was going to “buy her a horse”. He had tons of spare horses and was looking to dump them onto someone else.
Richard Cory
A surprising poem on a dark subject matter. Perhaps one of the best poems that demonstrate how mysterious other people are and how hard it is to truly connect with strangers.
No one is talking about automated theorem provers (see 4 coloring theorem) or symbolic solvers (see Mathematica). These tools already revolutionized math decades ago.
The only thing that came out in the past year or two are LLMs. Which is clearly overhyped bullshit.
Newspapers were always partially advertisement driven.
But I think everyone would agree with me that Newspapers were better when a substantial base of their $$$ came from their subscriber base.
Nothing is absolute in the world of money. There’s always additional sources of money elsewhere. From this perspective, I think we can argue that purely advertisement-driven media is what is most dangerous. Search is an important part of modern digital media, so thinking of the economic realities of funding, and how those economic incentives shape the website and future business is important.
Maybe it fails, but Kagi is trying something new. And that’s good enough as an experiment for me. I dunno, maybe I’ll revisit the idea in 5 years or so, that’s really not much money in the great scheme of things.
At very least, Kagi now has a “Fediverse search”, and now that “search-lemmy” seems to have died, I need something like Kagi to more easily search Lemmy.world and other Fediverse locations. (Google ain’t so good at this yet).
I’m just gonna plug “Kagi” here.
Kagi is a paid search engine. Yeah, sucks that we have to pay for good or decent search results, but… as the economic models of the internet change, we need to change with them. I’ve personally lost faith in freemium ad-supported websites in general.
Its an all-stock deal.
Meaning its down to like $47 Billion, last time I checked. As the stock price drops, the cheaper the pay package gets!!
Elon Musk sued the founders of Tesla for the right to be called a “Founder” of Tesla. Then he fired the founders and pretends that he’s the one who innovated everything.
Elon Musk goes on for the next 10+ years to become the richest man in the world with over $100 Billion net worth. As it turns out, faking it works. Well… until you need to design a new car and the best Elon can do is make a Cybertruck.
I mean just that.
Open source developers are not paid in money. One of the other major motivators is ideology, so that becomes a major motivator in practice.
I mean, I don’t have much problem with people disagreeing with me. But I’m pretty openly pro-capitalist, though I’m not a dumbass libertarian.
I recognize the need for the “capitalist edge cases” (externalities, monopolies, etc. etc.) that must be regulated and fixed for the system to work. I also recognize that we’ve failed to regulate externalities (ex: CO2 emissions), and failed to regulate monopolies / anticompetitive behavior (see Google).
So I’m a “capitalism works, but only if we work to make it work” kind of person. I think at the moment, Reddit and many other social networks are falling into the well known and well studied failures of raw capitalism, but somehow today’s society has forgotten all the 1910s era solutions that we did (ex: Jungle, etc. etc.) where we regulated the hell out of the shitty behavior and fixed the most blatant problems, for the better of America.
We just gotta do the same thing today.
Overall, I accept that the commies / tankies were here first, and the history of Lemmy makes it clear why that happened.
Lemmy, the social network, started off as a leftist hangout spot.
From the perspective of “Open Source developers who are anti-Reddit pro-Fediverse”, it makes a lot of sense for Leftist/Communist and anti-corporation leaning people to hang out.
After all, the more extreme the viewpoint, the more driven to action (ie: write tens-of-thousands of lines of code and release for free) people get. In some regards, its the nature of Open Source + volunteer effort to attract a more extreme ideology. IE: Free Software is driven by ideology, not by money. So you get ideological people, especially when the software is small and niche.
The July 2023 Reddit Blackout was a big challenge for Lemmy’s old community and the new community, as the new community basically “invaded” a large scale leftist hangout spot. But hopefully we all learn to work together and the nature of our neighbors moving forward.
I think anyone here (likely everyone?) is at least on the anti-corporate anti-Reddit side of the discussion. Which is enough of an alliance to keep us together, for now.
It does mean that we’ll have to keep up with the far-left old-timers on this network who wish to push their viewpoints. But they are the legacy and the start of Lemmy in some respects, even as the hypergrowth (starting in July 2023) has moderated the community pretty severely.
Incredibly odd choice of weaponry.
RIM-7
Ground-to-Air anti-missile missile. Always nice to see more missile defense.
and AIM-9M missiles for air defense;
Wait wut? Wikipedia says this is the famous “Sidewinder” missile, an air-to-air missile. This suggests that Ukraine is getting ready for air-to-air engagements.
Wikipedia says these are short range Air-to-Air missiles, AIM-9 specifically being the well known “Sidewinder” missile. This suggests that Ukraine is getting ready for air-to-air engagements of some kind.
including .50 caliber rounds to counter Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS);
Some kind of anti-drone system I’m not aware of. Good to see them trying to work on anti-drone.
Airfield support equipment;
There’s clearly aircraft support coming in.
The layoffs were known last week though.
Sure, the news is finally talking about the layoffs, but people were locked out of their badges and complaining last week about this. So now its official today, but it was public knowledge last week when that price declined dramatically.
So the employees were nominally on the books until today. Big woop. They stopped working a week ago and complained about it online. You can’t hide a mass of 10,000+ sad and angry employees talking shit about Tesla. The stock moved on that before the official layoff announcement today.
Zoom out about a week.
Its fair to say that last week, TSLA was oversold and is now bouncing back from that. But the -55% profits and -$2.3ish Billion FCF are bad numbers.
TSLA is down from $180, where it was just a few weeks ago. $140 prices this past week apparently was too low, but there’s no chance in hell that TSLA goes back up to pre-Q1 announcement numbers. Q1 2024 was awful. Declining sales around the world in all major areas: China, Europe, AND USA. They’re weak everywhere.
The 13th month should be called eleven, because it’d come after December (10), our 12th month.
I stole this line from someone else, but its great.
Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.
You might want to see who they threw into WW2.
Hint: It was the Ukrainians. The ability for Ukrainians to survive is epic. Still, we need to support them to minimize their pain, we don’t want them to suffer WW2-like losses again or be forced to bear such burdens for Russia in the future.
Any obvious poison-pills could be amended out though once debate starts. And I think that Democrats are unified enough that the small group of Hawkish moderate Republicans would support the amendments to fix the poison pills.
I dunno, I’m somewhat optimistic here. I think Johnson actually screwed himself over. This kind of “split” will prove to the American People that Republicans are against Ukrainian aid.
Johnson is from the far-right, who were collectively against “Omnibus” bills and whatnot. Johnson might actually be working with his morals / ethics here, and is biasing him towards this obvious error in politics. I think we should just accept the gift, if possible. I recognize that Johnson controls a lot of debate here, but if Johnson can promise behind close doors that all four of these bills will get “proper” treatment (ex: amendment process, debate, etc. etc.), its hard for him to screw this over.
Johnson’s main ability is killing the debate before it gets started. If he lets regular order debate the bill, it basically leaves his hands and can be changed for the better.
Or maybe I’m overly optimistic? But I’d rather be optimistic and accept a potential win, than pessimistic and reject this possible win for Ukraine.
Dual SIM (2 physical cards)
With the dawn of eSIM, I’m not sure if Dual physical-SIM is very useful.
Last time I went on a trip, I just downloaded an eSIM + kept my physical SIM slot.
I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of personal computing device would fit in these power envelope.
I dunno if this is what I want, but I like the idea anyway. ESP32 is like 500mW class or so (very rough estimate because I don’t care to look it up right now lol). So you can get more than 24-hours of processing with 4x AA cells or 18650 Li-ion.
I feel like there’s something ‘under’ the classic smartphone that might still be useful as a personal gadget. But alas, smartphones are an always in your pocket device today. Bluetooth keyboard + Phone would be a more practical note taking application.
Maybe this same thing, but instead as a minimalistic SSH shell for computer IT tasks? I like the design of this things keyboard at least.