Sort of, they are being built to power AI models which do all kinds of things, but yes definitely advertising is part of it. Ads are mature now though, these mega corps have fine-tuned their products and squeezed every last advertising penny out of their audiences that they can, there isn't as much new stuff to build in that area now.
> t I don't see how we're going to make the world a better place for everyone by letting billionaires basically do whatever they want with their toys without checks
There is legal recourse to get people to pay for real damages — civil penalties. This is used all the time. Perhaps too often, but that's a different conversation.
SpaceX would be perfectly happy to pay penalties proportionate to the real damage the FWS is worrying about — literally, the rocket landing on a whale, which has approximately a 0% probability. But they aren't allowed to take that (nonexistent) risk and then pay for anything that went wrong.
> There is legal recourse to get people to pay for real damages — civil penalties.
Musk has the money to take any case to the Supreme Court, the court is controlled by Trump who is friends with Elon now. Any case against Elon will probably get thrown out or ruled in Elon's favour.
If Elon can buy the Supreme Court, why can't he buy a mid-level Fish and Wildlife employee to expedite the FAA review? That would be cheaper and less illegal, you'd think it'd be the first choice.
FAA doesn't care if they blow up the tower, as long as SpaceX can explain why it happened and show that it didn't cause undue risk to the public.
People freaked out and said the same thing after IFT-1 dug up the concrete underneath the launch mount, and yet the investigation was closed within 6 months and SpaceX conducted IFT-2 2 months later.
IFT-1 presented no danger to the public at all and it still took 6 months. That’s a long time to an actual technology company attempting to innovate. The FAA slow walks SpaceX because of Musk’s political views, it’s not even an “open secret” just a fact of life. Their only recourse is to shine a light on the FFA so the public can see the politics in display.
The time for the mishap report of IFT-1 was reasonable enough, they had a pretty serious issue in that the booster's FTS turned out to be insufficient. It also took them until the end of July to repair the pad and test the new deluge system. By mid-August they submitted their incident report to the FAA. The investigation was closed in early September. This was something even Elon admitted, saying that retesting the FTS would probably be the limiting factor for when IFT-2 could fly because it didn't destroy the vehicle as it was supposed to.
The unreasonable delay you might be thinking of, was between the FAA's closing of the investigation in early September, to the IFT-2 launch in November. That was under pretty similar circumstances to now, Fish and Wildlife Services was taking forever to do its part of the job, SpaceX went to Congress, the resulting pressure forced them to get things done faster.
> Hilariously confused. Tech is different from Big Tech, which is yet further different from Big Ad Tech.
Big Ad Tech has been a money spigot for R&D in both hard and soft tech. This comes via M&A but also spawning a generation of VCs willing to fritter away adtech money on fun hard tech startups.
There is not a big source of VC funding for hardware startups that doesn't come directly or indirectly from Big Tech / Big Ad Tech revenue and valuations.
Elon Musk doesn't have an army, and Brazil does. So the guys with guns win?
China made it clear that boycotting a country doesn't accomplish anything. Nobody supporting Elon on speech is upset that he bluffed and lost... that's life.
The fact that anyone takes what Musk says about free speech at face value is astounding to me.
The number of shenanigans that have occurred on Twitter to make some speech both freer and less free depending on the ideological bent of its operator is so voluminous that it cannot be easily counted.
I don't really know what it is that Musk does on his platform or why he does it. The Twitter-Brazil incident however is about free speech. Brazilian constitution says that any and all censorship of political speech is prohibited. These were political accounts. This judge, a government official, ordered their banishment from the platform. Political censorship.
I’m not familiar with the specifics but a cursory examination indicates that the accounts were publishing libel.
Libel is not now, has never been, and will never be protected speech.
It also seems that Twitter failed on at least one occasion to appoint legal representation and I don’t know if that means counsel or a business point of contact so if this was whatever Brazil’s version of a default judgement is, that makes it even dumber.
Regardless, if someone (in this case Musk) throws their lot in with people who unambiguously attempted a coup d’etat in the name of free speech, they should be examined more critically than usual.
My examination indicated it was all due to "fake news" as determined by these judges. This is the first time I'm encountering the libel/defamation argument. I suppose it's impossible to know since I didn't witness it in real time and everything is secret.
I don't believe what happened was a coup attempt. They occupied Brasília buildings, that's the standard brazillian protest, happened many times before. They wanted the military to seize power, and the military refused. They didn't try to seize power for themselves, they wanted the military to rule over them. That's a valid political position. A coup attempt is the military actually trying something. An actual coup is the military succeeding at it.
Devil's advocate: what the government says only matters because of fear of repercussion if they're not heeded. Because they're the guys with the guns, and the (increasingly under Lula) exclusive right to use them.
> Elon Musk doesn't have an army, and Brazil does.
You're kidding, right? Brazilian army? What a joke.
Besides, Musk is friends with US politicians. Recently showed up in a photo besides Trump himself.
After this Twitter debacle, I've seen news about some republicans proposing laws that would deny the passports of foreign officials which implement censorship. A law that more or less targets these judges. A law that is essentially beneath the notice of most americans. It caused these brazilian judges here to basically throw a temper tantrum in public. "Unacceptable", one of them called it. As if there was even a single thing he could do about it.
Every year the US puts us in a little copyright infringement watchlist, so it's not like they don't care when our actions affect the american economy. I wonder how they feel about a brazilian judge outright stealing millions from american companies via completely arbitrary fines for not complying with orders whose legality is questionable.
> The right-wing turn is absolutely disgusting and should be shattered as soon as possible with prejudice.
Do you understand how you are the problem here?
Silicon Valley didn't care about politics until politicians started getting involved and attempting to impose censorship regimes, aggressive unrealized gains taxation, and killing crypto assets. Tech startups were find being ignored.
But as you illustrate, you can't ignore DC if it chooses not to ignore you. If people like you want to use the power of the state to "shatter" anyone you politically disagree with, well, of course the tech companies will hit back.
> then it should be easy to author your own paper that proves whatever is "obviously true". Or maybe reality isn't so easy?
Yes, this is my point. It's very easy to publish papers which say anything, if you don't mind that the results are junk or fraudulent. This is why most science is un-replicable, and you should have low confidence in a randomly selected paper, especially if the results conflict with bayesian expectations.
It's actually very hard to perform and publish good science.
My own (anecdotal) experience tells me that increased social media use is directly proportional to increased bad feelings. Common sense tells me that increased bad feelings over time leads to bigger, worse bad feelings.
My experience agrees with you. At the very least, I had no idea how many of the people I grew up with were as stupid, shallow and bigoted as they are until I heard them announce their opinions on social media. I may not have hung out with many of them after high school, but at least I still sort of had some respect for them.
I trust science completely, it's all we have. I don't trust the people doing the science.
In the same way that you can trust laws, but not most lawyers. Medicine, but not certain doctors. It's not the scientific method that's at fault, it's its abuse.
"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it," - Jeff Bezos
> African nations began to speak with one voice on the issue, pushing the UK hard on the issue of decolonialisation.
I wish the journalists had a little more sophistication on this. African nations began to push the UK on this because China and Russia understand that Diego Garcia is a critical port, and made investment + aid/ bribery + weapons (China / Russia respectively) conditional on forcing the issue.
In other words: The African nations have no agency or legitimate motivations of their own, and are just doing what China and Russia bully them to do. Apparently they don't even appreciate the significance of the military base on those islands. It is left for the adults in the room (Russia and China) to think and operate on such a level.
Of course no one here is naive, and we all know already that external operators have their influence, and (though the commenter provides no evidence) it's certainly possible, likely even, that such influence came into play here to some degree.
Nonetheless, the commenter's phrasing and implicit attitude toward these nations seems weirdly patronizing and, well, colonial.
African voters, to the extent that they have any vote at all [1], have vastly more important things to care about than a tiny island in the Indian ocean. I would in fact bet a lot of money that vastly fewer than 1% of African voters, in any country, know about the Chagos Islands at all.
But this is a red herring. Their leaders know all about the issue (which infinitely broader than the matter of those specific islands of course; the supposition that it's just about "a tiny island" being a straw man in itself), of course; and have made their position very clear:
The African Union on Thursday hailed the “historic political agreement” between the UK and Mauritius regarding the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands.
“This significant milestone marks a major victory for the cause of Decolonialization, International Law, and the rightful self-determination of the people of Mauritius, bringing to an end to decades of dispute,” African Union Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat stated in a message posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Yeah but when $dictator shows up on tv and talks about figthing $bloodyColonialists at the UN, it's uncontroversial (regardless of the issue being fought) and takes time from talking about his embezzlement/corruption/etc.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they can go cap in hand to $bloodyColonialists and ask "do you want me to shut up? Give me $something".
This requires no shadowy influence from this or that supposed Great Power.
This all just speaks in favor of decolonialization, does it not? When decolonialisation is complete the $dictator won't be able to use it as a distraction, nor can it be a source of corruption. And apart from that it's a noble and objectively good goal in itself.
No, because they will always find some phantom menace of colonization to complain about.
Look at the Chagos Islands themselves — they were literally not inhabited until Europeans settled them. There's no "decolonization" narrative here, because there's no native population.
Once the UK leaves the Chagos islands, it will be about foreign aid with strings attached, or IMF loans, or foreign investment in farmland, or whatever. It's not a solvable problem.
> they were literally not inhabited until Europeans settled them
Decolonization is not simply about removing troops from here or there, it's about taking responsibility for actions that enriched $motherland at the expense of $colony. French and British colonialists moved people to Chagos for their own profit, and then (together with Americans) ejected their descendants from what had become, by then, a homeland; pushing governments to take responsibility for these actions is the moral thing to do.
There is no amount of "decolonizing" the UK can do that will put an end to the grievances. As long as African warlords want to blame their problems on someone else, they will find a way to link it in some nebulous way to lasting inter-generational damage by ex-colonizers.
> There is no amount of "decolonizing" the UK can do that will put an end to the grievances.
That's not true. Plenty of decolonized countries just go about their business, once the outstanding issues are solved; or even when they try to stir shit, nobody listens to them.
Here though we do have an outstanding problem that needs to be solved. Once the islands go to Mauritius and the expelled population is resettled, there will be nothing left to complain about in that particular area. Obviously, thanks to the sheer size of injustice perpetrated in colonial times, there will be plenty left to complain about elsewhere. The only answer is to solve problems with goodwill, not to bury our heads in the sand pretending our ancestors never did what they did.
Huh? I had the impression that the entire international community (sans UK, US & Israel) has been pushing for this for years, and quite insistently since the 2021 ITLOS judgement. Also, the US will keep it's base as part of the settlement.
Apart from this being pure speculation, where exactly would they build it? The archipelago has a tiny land area and the only atoll suitable for building a base is kinda already taken... Also, the primary strategic importance of Diego Garcia is to support US operations in the Middle East, where China has never interfered to any significant extent.
It actually represents the scenario where they invent a revolutionary superintelligence that doesn't kill the VCs investing in the firm, and allows them enough control to take profit. In the top range ASI capacity outcomes, the sand god does not return trillions to the VCs.
This actually represents only the narrow "aligned" range of AI outcomes, so it makes sense it's a small one.
Judging by the ones I have met, the VCs probably believe that any kind of superintelligence would by definition be something that would like them and be like them. If it wasn’t on their side they would take it as incontrovertible proof that it wasn’t a superintelligence.
> interest rates are also hurting LBOs which shouldn't affect startup acquisitions but does affect PE
Reasonable hypothesis, but not quite. LBOs' share of American buyouts has been falling monotonically since at least 2015 [1]. Buyouts have increasingly been smaller add-on acquisitions, with tech dominating activity.
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