This seems one of the more important comments here - a K shaped economy (Rich get richer up the rising arm of the K and the rest of us are on the down arm)
dominates everything (ie asset price inflation means if you had assets in 2020 you probably still do else good luck) and this just is one of many ways the playing field has tilted towards the richest.
And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and regulations and spending priorities. If “we” choose a different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy can be put back in its box.
For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory Doctorow “developers did not unionise or rebel in time because they thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs”.
Ok I just never imagined that photons hitting camera lenses would not produce a “raw” image that made sense to my eyes - I am stunned and this is a fantastic addition to the canon of things one should know about the modern world.
(I also just realised that the world become more complex than I could understand when some guy mixed two ochres together and finger painted a Woolly Mammoth.)
Your brain does a far more impressive job of fooling you into believing that the image you see of your surroundings in your brain is actually what your sensory apparatus is seeing. It very much isn’t. Just the mechanism to cope with your eye movement without making you woozy is, by itself, a marvel.
Our brains are far more impressive than what amounts to fairly trivial signal processing done on digital images.
That reminds me of the explanation of why sometimes you look at the second hand of a clock and it seems like it takes longer than a second to tick- because your brain is actually (IIRR) delaying and extending the time it sends the image (I think)
- asymmetric social activity
- standing in a crowd social activity
- discovery - curated/accidental/mediated
- directed presentation
- advertising
I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
After 20 years, TV documentaries, long running newspaper campaigns, parliamentary inquiries, finally a smoking gun. And hopefully some jail time, and even more hopefully some way to force companies to admit to wrong doing
However this scandal has ruined one more thing for me - the Hollywood feel good movie where the hero walks into the newspaper offices, lays out the terrible thing the big corporate firm has been murdering people to cover up, and credits roll.
Now we know credits roll for 20 years and people still deny there is anything wrong.
This is why ordinary Russians liked Putin and why the strongman is a popular political figure. Democracy does need a way to fix scandals like this. (Cf the selling of hundreds of millions of pounds of Tyneside property for one pound an acre)
Yeah, I'm amazed that no-one has been prosecuted for fraud and/or perjury. As the Post Office "reclaimed" money from the sub postmasters and execs got bonuses for that, I fail to see how that isn't blatant fraud.
Yes I had forgotten about that - if an exec had knowledge of this contract and got a bonus then … yeah …
My thinking is this is a moral hazard for all large orgs - that if you are an exec in this awkward position you need to know that even after twenty years they will still take your life savings and put you in jail if you don’t blow the whistle.
I am of course not a historian, but whenever some historical (or contemporary political theory) flies against what we know about human nature, I always hold it in deep suspicion
I am struggling with a why for this (other than “huh cool, that will get investors”). All the jurisdiction and regulation arguments and the “we could get the costs down” seem to meet the objection of “for the same investment we could do just as well or better on the ground”.
The one that does not is the physics of the whole thing. I struggle to work out how exactly but being slightly time dilated compared to the ground does not seem like a win, but being able to gather data from opposite sides of the planet slightly faster than cables does seem like a potential win. Most stock exchanges make a significant chunk of their revenues renting out data space, so it seems a possibility.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but since SpaceX is the only launch services provider that could actually put one of these in orbit, this smells a lot like hyperloop to me — an unserious proposal that serves as a distraction and furthers Musk’s aims, and benefits anyone who can get close enough to the piles of cash that VCs will drop on this.
You know what’s easier and cheaper than putting a data center in space? Putting one literally anywhere else other than space.
If you have never played the backwards-lifetime game, you should.
Take your current age and work backwards that same number of days, months and years before your birth. Every year something else remarkable is added.
At my current backwards age, World War II is the best part of two decades away; the UK is still recovering from World War I. Rocket 88, the first rock and roll song, won't be written for nearly another three decades. Women still can't vote in the UK, the Wall Street Crash is several years away.
When my father (who knew one of the most important men in medical history in his younger days and who was working in medicine not long after the NHS was founded) died, his backwards age reached back before the germ theory of modern medicine.
Another interesting game is to use your "oocyte age" — about 32 weeks before your mother was born is roughly when the oocyte developed that led to your egg. In my case this too is before World War II started.
Oh I like the oocyte idea - it’s actually concrete
It reminds me as well that I am a wave - the cells that make up my body have all been formed from food I ate in the past decade or so - my skin my liver my heart my brain. None of it is what is was when I was 18. But I still think it is.
And that reaches back to my mothers own birth is amazing.
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