"Social media" is dominated by billionaires far more than "traditional" media ever was.
Zuckerberg is worth 10 times what Rupert Murdoch is. Musk 30 x. And Murdoch is a huge outlier. Most traditional media is barely holding on by a shoestring.
I think the answer is that there needs to be, like gas stations, substantial retail/dining side-quest stuff set up to get revenue. If you don't have working chargers, people won't buy your hamburgers and pop. Or whatever.
Likely though this market is going to need some regulation/standardization.
In the end though, the demand is sporadic. Supercharger use is only for a minority of use cases (road trips) for a small segment of EV users. I've had my Polestar2 for 3 months and have yet to use one. It will never carry the same revenue possibilities as gas stations, esp as battery sizes go up.
Agree with your thoughts. To add - I've taken my Model Y on many roadtrips and have been to many superchargers. A solid number _are_ at restaurants/shops/etc. Some aren't -- but there are so many chargers that usually you can alter the planned route to include a longer charge wherever you want.
Not only will batteries get bigger, but chargers will get faster. Most of my stops now are 10-15min so often there's not really a need for any side-questing. Tesla recently added a supercharger-specific leaderboard for their in-car Mario Kart clone, which is super cool. I think we'll see some growth there for that kind of thing, but the market is obviously much lower than gas stations/etc
I've been paying for Kagi for the last few months and I guess the compliment I could give is: I have it on some machines but not the other and I don't really notice? when I'm on the kagi one other than ... no ads and no ads-ranked results
Which, frankly, I'm willing to pay for. I think it's a good product.
No ads, privacy of searches, and ability to filter junk sites is why I pay. I think the google results can be good but they are drowned out in this noise and constant reminder I’m seeking help from a malevolent agent.
How much maintenance does running a private instance take, and would you say it should be fine to run from your own IP? I've been using Kagi for ages, but I wouldn't mind a fallback that does better than DDG.
Not much? I mean, I set it up initially to use as an LLM search tool for agents. That required me to use a specific version of SearXNG due to a JSON bug. My exact docker command is here:
I run this from the directory where I want to store the data on windows (hence the weird PWD thing). I also use cloudflare tunnels and have the internet facing website, https://sear.mydomain.com, pointed at http//localhost:9017. I set up all my cloudflare tunnels with email authentication. My token lasts a month (but is configurable to whatever time frame you like). My traffic is strictly mine, so it seems to be working ok.
Its basically no maintenance after this setup. I can mess with all the settings (except results format) from the main interface.
Because I can configure exactly which search engines to index, no ads, use it for my local LLM's for search, better image search (maybe not better, but totally different results), a bazzillion tweaks and mods. I don't have to pay Kagi for the same results or keep track of how many searches I have left.
I mean, it's something I'd consider. I have a little ARM SBC here that I run Plex and Immich etc on. But Kagi makes it very easy for a not terrible price -- not much more than the monthly power bill for a little server -- and they also do more than just grab from other search services as they _do_ have their own crawler (unclear how much it's used for results?) and have LLM stuff which isn't terrible.
Also as a former Google employee... I dig the idea of contributing funds for some competition in this space.
Okay, fair, none of the competing modern theories which have any academic acceptance. Like, I don't think anyone _but_ Hindu nationalists go for the out-of-India thing.
I don't think it's fair to dismiss the OIT hypothesis as a Hindu nationalist thing. I wrote some more about it in a comment on this article, but it actually just seems like the most likely explanation given the evidence.
Arguing the archeology, genetics, and (grudgingly, it's barely a science) linguistics is totally fair but I'd like to see more open-minded debate on the data.
The Mitanni (1500 BCE) and the Tarim Basin mummies partially Indian DNA are important points to address, but the Sarasvati river dating has to force a dramatic re-think of how Indo-European languages spread.
I am reluctant to engage with this, but... Sigh...
I have to ask... How do you explain the Anatolian languages?
Or what seems like a very clear progression: Sintashta -> Andronovo -> BMAC -> Indo-Aryan.
A long history in the subcontinent that predates BMAC does not imply linguistic continuity.
There's such an overwhelming set of evidence linguistic and materially... there's a reason why, yes, it's just Hindu nationalists/fundamentalists parroting this position.
Splitting the argument into two pieces is most concise:
1) Sarasvati river paleochannel radiocarbon dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit (<=3000 BCE)
I talked about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330343
This is by far the strongest piece of evidence that the Kurgan model for IE language diffusion, which has Indo-European languages entering India circa ~1500 BCE, is grossly incorrect.
We now know the Sarasvati, the most prominent river mentioned in archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit texts, began to desiccate and disappear in 2600 BCE. That desiccation process is actually mentioned in later Sanskrit works like the Mahabharata, in Sanskrit that has significantly linguistically evolved.
There are hundreds of urban sites along the now-dried Sarasvati riverbed which have now been discovered, like Bhirrana, with cultural continuity back to 7500 BCE. But let's steelman the Kurgan model and assume there was a replacement of this advanced urban society's language by IE-speaking Steppe nomads, that left no archeological trace whatsoever. This still means that Indo-European languages were in India at least by 3000 BCE, making this the oldest attested Indo-European language in the world.
I would challenge you to explain how the Sarasvati paleochannel evidence doesn't completely break the Kurgan model. Even leaving aside the Sanskrit corpus which does not remember any migration or original homeland of the Aryans before India.
2) Anatolian languages (1800 BCE)
The earliest hard chronology of Hittite is the Anitta text of the Kussara (1800 BCE). The linguistic analysis (such as it is, linguistics isn't the hardest science, much less so than radiocarbon dating) implies this IE branch diverged early. Like the dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit to at least 3000 BCE, it's likely the Hittite language was evolving for hundreds of years before this.
Did IVC settlers directly migrate to Anatolia? Was there a cultural domino effect spilling out from the IVC to the BMAC, then either north through the Caucasus or south through Iran / Mesopotamia? We don't know.
We do know there were widespread cultural and economic ties between India and the Middle East at least as far back as 3300 BCE. IVC seals and finely-wrought carnelian beads were discovered in the royal Sumerian tombs in Ur, and many texts described the thriving economic trade between these two regions. Indian DNA has been found in Syria in 2500 BCE. The Mittani in ~1500 BCE are an even clearer example, with Rig Vedic deities, a military elite, and a horse-training text that are distinctly Indo-Aryan, not even Indo-Iranian.
In other words, cultural and human diffusion from India to the Middle East was already happening hundreds of years before the first attested Anatolian IE language is found in the Hittite.
And we know it was happening in the other direction (east) as well. The Tarim Basim mummies had Indian genetic markers, implying the Tocharian branch of IE may have also arisen out of India.
The IVC culture had a bigger population than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. It was an advanced and urbanized culture. There were major environmental shocks that caused mass migrations. There has been migration out of India from at least 3300 BCE to the common era with the Gypies / Romani.
Is it so hard to believe IE languages could have come from such a place?
> Did IVC settlers directly migrate to Anatolia? Was there a cultural domino effect spilling out from the IVC to the BMAC, then either north through the Caucasus or south through Iran / Mesopotamia? We don't know.
Except the directional flow of what you're describing here is exactly opposite of what the archeological evidence shows.. with clear material cultural continuity in an eastern/south-eastern direction from the Black Sea to south Asia.
It's likely that when the Indo-Iranian languages arrived in south Asia they were already in the process of heavy fusing with local cultures, esp in the BMAC. References in Sanskrit writings about events that may precede Sanskrit speaking doesn't prove anything. There are plenty of cases of elite language replacement, and it's likely an elite class spoke IE and potentially even translated and wrote down non-IE oral histories.
Cultures are not necessarily languages or "peoples." Language replacement is a common phenomenon. India can be India with an insanely long deep amazing history that the world recognizes as rich and powerful and ancient... without being the origin of one of the languages spoken there.
In any case, non-IE languages continue to prosper in the subcontinent, and probably did even more so among regular people back then. Which is very much not the case for the central European region, unless you count the crazy linguistic patchwork in the Caucasus (which is heavily divided up by mountains).
Anatolian divergence happened very early, so much so that it has an entirely different gender system than all other IE languages. And lacked common IE words related to horse riding, chariots, metal-working, etc. By the time of the written documents you describe, it had already diverged into several distinct languages, implying a long history in the region. Likely a founding population that made its way around the Black Sea on some path.
And a similar phenomenon to India: established itself as a local elite over a population that spoke a different language, and kept oral histories and eventually wrote in their own language about the gods and stories of the people they fused with.
Anyways, the strongest evidence is in the common IE vocabulary -- esp around plants and animals -- which is strongly biased towards the temperate climate around the steppe.
You're not explaining how the Sarasvati river evidence, which is radiocarbon dated, does not fully contradict your position.
Do you really believe, in good faith, that the most parsimonious explanation is that a small group of IE-speaking nomads entered India 500+ years after the Sarasvati was drying and population centers had been abandoned, then re-purposed the entire history of the "native" population, wrote themselves completely out of this re-purposing with no memory of where the nomads themselves came from, and then at least hundreds of years after that re-wrote the story of the desiccation of the river (in significantly evolved, non-Rig Vedic Sanskrit) to read as if it was occurring then, ~1000+ years after it actually occurred?
Occam's razor here is clear.
The Rig Vedic speakers were in India when the Sarasvati was a fully flowing river pre-3000 BCE, they documented the drying of the river in later Sanskrit texts, and the Rig Vedic IE corpus was created by at least 3000 BCE based on the radiocarbon dating of the Sarasvati's paleochannel.
Reading the abstract is a lot more pleasant than the article, which rambles.
Sounds like the author is supporting a theory that horse-riding spread along with Indo-Iranian languages (Sintashta culture) rather than earlier. Which doesn't seem crazy to me.
Horses were definitely livestock for a long time before that, kept for meat and dairy. They were very useful on the steppe because unlike cattle (which were imported from elsewhere), they can dig through snow to forage.
I think it's more that there's a more drastic/stricter version of the Kurgan hypothesis that sees Yamnaya migration + Horses + Indo-European language spread as all one packaged good, spreading in a rapid wave from the steppe.
Whereas this author is arguing that the horse part happened later.
We already know the cultural-linguistic spread was more complicated than Gimbutas' original theory. That's not really controversial.
And this article doesn't even question that horses were domesticated in the Black Sea and Pontic Steppe, just that it happened later than Anthony postulated.
There's no "political" angle here. GP commenter is out of line, and dragging culture wars crap in where it doesn't make any sense.
The MIDI support in _all_ the emulators I've seen has been fairly... not-great... overall. I should look again but I remember reading through the source for Aranym around this and being pretty disappointed.
I've used STEEM to run Dr T's fairly extensively, with Midi I/O routed to either VSTHost or Reaper running as a midi rack, using loopMIDI and never really had a problem other than the occasion where I forget which way is in and out and end up with loopMIDI disabling ports due to feedback loops.
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