Investors who don’t bother reading past the letters A and I in the prospectus.

How is Worldcoin still a thing?

The headline’s a bit misleading. The drive is a plasma thruster, and the company found that by adding Boronated water to the exhaust the plasma would fuse with some of the boron creating a kind of afterburner effect, not a sustained fusion reaction. It’s kind of interesting as a way to boost the performance of the plasma thruster, but not “OMG it’s a Fusion Drive!!!” interesting.

Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) has been working on something like this for several years. Trust Cafe is supposed to gauge your trustworthiness based on other people who trust you, with a hand-picked team of top users monitoring the whole thing — sort of an enlightened dictatorship model. It’s still a tiny community and much of the tech has to be fleshed out more, but there are definitely people looking into this approach.

No.

It was kind of a difficult read for me - things just hit a little too close to home for me, and the resolution was too perfect. I’d still recommend it though - at the end of the day it’s still Kim Stanley Robinson, and he is an absolute master of hard social-scifi.

Every time I read a story about some billionaire getting angry about their private jets being tracked I recall a part of the Kim Stanley Robinson novel Ministry for the Future, a (very) near-future tale about how a few global climate catastrophes wreak such havoc that regular people start taking extreme measures – for example randomly shooting down passenger aircraft for months, causing the collapse of the air travel industry. I have to imagine that the 1%ers are thinking about that too now.

I wonder if content should carry some license automatically. Like if you agree to the TOS of an instance, your comments are automatically all licensed as CC:BY or CC:O or the more restrictive license of choice of the instance owner.

One of the video clips has Doom Guy shooting at a Baron of Hell :)

Are there any self-hosted twitter front ends? Something that would still use your account credentials (or maybe shared credentials) but would cut out all of the cruft, kinda like piped for YT?

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more of a push for B Corp style corporate governance in tech considering how many tech leaders claim to be working for the greater good. There are plenty of options for doing well and doing good at the same time.

🤣

I don’t think so. Most of the big LLMs have guardrails to prevent them from spitting out hate speech.

A lack of real penalties for these companies just means they have no incentive. If they can make $1B on your data and then maaaaayyybeeeee have to pay a $50M fine because of a breach, why wouldn’t they continue doing that?

There are two in my area and both have the same problem: there will be a single non-pro bank of 8 self-checkout lanes, and then a bunch of empty lanes, one or two of which will have cashiers. Of the 8 self check-outs , one or two are always broken, so that leaves 6. Add in a bunch of large/heavy/bulky items that are hard to scan and now the line for self check-out is pushed back into the store, blocking multiple lanes and aisles. And as soon as you have certain items in your cart (molding/lumber by the LF, loose fasteners, etc.) you need an assistant to come help you anyway. Maybe it’s just the customers in my stores, but it’s just a terrible, slow, inefficient process.

haha no, seems to just be a coincidence.

There’s a thread from last week where some other alternatives were discussed: among them

• Nuggets: News & Conversation: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nuggets-news-conversation/id6462796101
• Feeds & Fediverse: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/newsbite/id1478566472
• Feeeed: https://testflight.apple.com/join/ixRrWfQL
• Feedly: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feedly-smart-news-reader/id396069556
• Perplexity https://apps.apple.com/us/app/perplexity-ask-anything/id1668000334
• NetNewsWire: https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

I think the concept of a “mixed reader” that can pull in Big Social / Fediverse / RSS and other curated sources has a lot of potential (Nuggets is the most interesting one to me here)

I know this isn’t the most popular opinion, but I love self-checkout systems when they’re available and used correctly. My local supermarket closed 2 10-item-or-less lanes and put 6 self-checkouts in the same space. I probably make 2 trips/week to the store for fewer than 10 items, and being able to check myself out has been a huge time saver. There are still another 8 lanes with cashiers for larger shopping trips. If the supermarket can avoid the race to the bottom thinking of "well, we replaced 2 lanes, maybe we can also replace the other 8), it’ll be a nice compromise.

Now contrast that with my local Home Depot, which typically has 1-2 cashiers MAX at any given time. They have turned the checkout process into a tedious pain in the ass, and I’ve more or less stopped shopping there as a result.