rainwall

A great example here is Taylor swift, one of the first billionare performers. Her parents were both insanely wealthy stockbrokers, who moved to Nashville from a 15 acre farm in Pennsylvania to support her music carrear. She started door knocking at 11 years old in Nashville until she got her first contract at 14. Her family could afford to uproot and move a 1000 miles to spend 3 years directly supporting their preteen daughter attempting to break into country music.

Taylor clearly has a lot of talent and is a hell of a performer, but even without all the direct contacts like a Winslet, intense wealth gives you amazing tools to win at life.

Ehh, dont bet on it.

So right wing terrorism strikes again. Big suprise.

You joke, but my first “lets make facebook, but…” comment was from an electrical engineer buddy that wanted to use matlab. That was the whole pitch. “Facebook, but matlab.”

It did not go far.

Likely cloned Netflix’s “netflix in a box” design, where they drop a large 200TB+ NAS in thousands of different CDN datecenters with their most popular content cached so that total traffic is minimal across the internet at large.

Spotify mainly being music with very little video likely makes this even easier.

A true classic. My only regret is that I cant link it in the original shockwave.

The above prices arent something you will see in a bike shop. Entry level bikes from large brands run around $800-1200 or so in my area. The common price for “good” bikes at my local shop range from 2-6k. Add 1-2k for electric versions.

$150 for a bike is walmart pricing. These are commonly called “BSOs” in cycling circles, i.e “bike shaped objects.” The components, from the frame to brakes to wheels/etc are all either no name or wildly shoddy, and arent assembled by bike mechanics, so they often aren’t put together correctly. They generally aren’t recommend for safeties sake.

Dentist’s notoriously ride 12k carbon bicycles, to the point thats its a meme. The type of bike that bike ships put in the display window to get most people to come in and buy the common 2k ones.

The running joke in biking circles is that when you see someone in full lycra on a very high end bike, its a dentist fresh from the tooth mines.

You want even more shame here? They made Winget by basically copy/pasting a solo dev effort called Appget back in 2019 after stringing the dev along about a possible Microsoft job.

Then, during the annoucement of winget while they lauded other windows package managers, they barely mentiom his app they copied nearly 1 for 1.

They have lost a dozen court cases in as many countries. They are still up.

Thats not ambuguity. AI will be opt out in firefox, which is them abandoning core principles like user choice and privacy.

They can do that, but playing like they aren’t by redefining well established terms in UI/UX is disengenious, and cuts right through the “we will earn your trust back” messaging made by the same dev.

No, go deeper into that mastodon thread.

The dev has a really hinky defention of “opt-in” thats basically “yes we push all this on by default and realize it will be the norm for most of our users because of that, but you technically dont have to interact with it so thats opt-in.”

Somehow, eventually having a buried menu option that “opts out” of AI is also part of how it will be opt-in as well? Its a self serving mess of rationaliztions and doublethink, no matter the claim on the tin.

“On by default unless you run down a setting buried in a menu” is the thinnest type of optional in computing.

The piece is just rife with the Nazi shit the whole org was up to, but its explictly clear that editor is hip deep in it.

Very good piece from the student journalists.

They have had a dozen or more lawsuits/police actions against them. They are already enemy #1 in piracy terms, so I expect they are okay leaning into it and doing more good for the world.