Selling domains is the only revenue model they've offered as far as I know. if they have no intention of making money I'm really curious how they got funding from VCs.
I thought this was a good question for ChatGPT's "deep research," so I asked it to give a breakdown of their corporate structure and profit requirements [0]. I think the result was pretty informative. Took 11 minutes and consulted 24 sources to complete.
The TL;DR is that they are a public benefit corporation and have to balance that benefit (decentralized public communication platforms) with profit.
Well, the EXIF data is going to include the focal length at least, I assume all that data is part of the blob being signed. So it would be pretty annoying to make sure the image aligns with what that lens would capture at that focal length, but yes the "analog loophole" strikes again.
Putting on my suspension of disbelief goggles, I've long desired an internet with more cryptographic provenance, just some way so when people share a tweet on some other platform, I know that string was signed by that author, or some photo published by AP is signed by AP. It's just a real "we have the technology" situation. Keybase.io was moving us in this direction before they got acquihired by Zoom.
Anyway. In this future, my camera would have its jpgs signed with Nikon or Sony's certificate [0][1], art created by OpenAI would be signed up open AI, and images without any signature would be suspect by default.
>Restricting what people can do with the software you write doesn't sound very free
It depends on POV, user freedom or developer/publisher freedom.
To make it easy to understand, I remember a quote from some book where a french and USAian were debating about what country is fmore free and slavery and the USAian says "We are more free since we are free to own slaves"
Is it really theft when an American company sends over the CAD files to a Chinese manufacturer to make it for them?
I know there's some about of corporate espionage where trade secrets got exfilled, but what makes you so certain the majority of Chinese success is from stolen IP, as if electrical engineering grad students can't figure out how to make solar panels from first principals?
Safety of maritime shipping. The US Navy was created because ship captains kept getting ransomed by Moroccan pirates, since America gained independence their ships were no longer protected by the British Navy and became fair game.
I know it's a controversial doctrine, but power projection does have a hand in keeping the peace.
This is a salient point, I don't know how other countries handled it but American schools as an institution were absolutely wrecked by covid, a significant portion of the youths just straight up stopped attending school, and I'm in a bubble but most parents I know are homeschooling at least part time now, when they wouldn't think of doing so just 5 years ago
Does not bode well for the future of informed populi
* The US economy nearly requires a degree for economic success
* US demographics cliff results in a heavy short fall of student enrollments
* US Federal government deeply cuts funding for universities
* US higher education offers remote learning to attract students and reduce costs, much of which deeply lowers the standard of education
* LLMs are deeply integrated into social products including snapchat and twitter
* LLMs are capable of completing a significant amount of curriculum
* The US Department of Education is removed, including teams responsible for tracking academic success on a national and state level
Words like collapse are I think not the right word. But the long term institutional harm of this sequence of events may hit the country very hard. Bringing back factory jobs ain't gonna fix it, if tariffs are even capable of doing that.
The majority of the country never needed college to obtain the success that they have had. I do concede that it is a positive economic indicator though.
Right now Gen Z is coming into adulthood, they are one of the smallest generations. After that is Gen Alpha the kids of millenials, University funding might change to reflect that.
I'm autistic and a significant percentage of my schooling was ignored by me because it held none of my interest. I practically made it a point to intentionally ignore certain information because I didn't see myself having any use for it in the future because I just didn't care about those things.
As it turns out, the part of me that cared about those things just had a stunted development and was behind. Certain subjects like language and history have an emotional and cultural significance that cannot be appreciated through only math. I highly doubt anyone could have explained this to me because I had thought that I was the sole decider of everything ever in my brain. I honestly probably still do think that way.
Its the damn phones and tablets. This abundance of cheap software has really messed up kids attention spans. Computers are a distraction in class and need to be delegated to special times. How do you keep tech out of kids hands out of class?
Anecdote: I grew up on N64 and an era where software was a lot more difficult to come by. As a kid, I'd look forward to buying a floppy disk packaged in a plastic bag held up on a cork board at my local computer shop.
When I got a game on the N64, I would be laser focused on completing it.
I recently purchased a N64 for my niece and nephew who are 8 and 10 respectively. When I was 10 I got Ocarina of time at the beginning of the school year and spent an entire year laser focused on solving every puzzle and completing the game.
Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (and being kids to freakin PHD academics) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
They must try "every new app", see every new thing on Netflix/Hulu/whatever. Maybe i'm just exhibiting old man syndrome but it really shocked me. I clearly remember being that kid yesterday and doing my best to beat the game. I guess the fact that the N64 only ever had about ~380 games in its entire lifespan made a difference. Each title was a special event. Today there is just so much software for the kids to play with.
> Despite my niece and nephew doing reasonably well in school (...) they just cannot sit down and focus on any one game for longer than 15 mins. There seems to be a lack of "perseverance" which worries me.
Have you considered that they might just not find games interesting? Even if they like playing some games, they might not enjoy the game the particular game that captivated you for so long.
Even in your own generation, there were many kids who would have got bored of sitting in front of any computer game for 10 minutes. There's absolutely no reason to extrapolate your experience with your nephews out to an entire generation.
Yeah you are probably right about that but they play a lot of mobile games so my assumption was that they like it at least somewhat? Maybe they are just bored. The PHD father is also a musician on the side so he got them into guitars and drums at an early age but they are wishy washy on that as well. I don't have kids so there is probably something obvious im missing and im probably overthinking it too much. Like I said, im probably suffering from old man syndrome.
I wanted to provide some more missing context since you brought this up and maybe this can spur some interesting discussion. I have been finding that they prefer simpler games like Mike Tysons punch out which really surprised me since I consider the mechanics of that game pretty basic. I got them Super smash brothers, Zelda, Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, super mario 64 and most recently Starfox 64 which they don't even want to take the time to go through the training properly, they get frustrated when they can't move the ship properly and have to press the C buttons to speed up or slow down. They love the easy wins and spectacle of super smash brothers though which is the game they play the most as in every other day. It kinda worries me because it would be one thing if they were striving to excel at smash, that would be cool but they aren't even doing that, just messing around until someone wins. Maybe you are right?
If it helps, I'm older than you and grew up on 8-bits and then progressed to the Amiga. I played games, but even as a kid, my real interest was always programming - I'd usually rather be coding something than playing a game (for me, that is far more mentally stimulating).
I do have very fond memories of certain 8-bit games, but apart from Elite and the Freescape games like Driller and Total Eclipse, they're mostly platformers. I liked some of the classics on the Amiga, e.g. Dynablasters, Monkey Island, etc, but again I far preferred platformers.
However, that was just for that period of time - when I went to uni, I got interested in "real computers" and especially distributed computing, and I missed out on a whole generation of games. Even now, I've still never played any of the Zelda games even though the top-down 2D games would have interested me when I was younger. Even more surprising to me is back in the late 90s, I thought I'd buy Myst on the PC because it seemed like I'd enjoy it because I liked Monkey Island on the Amiga. I never managed to play it for more than about half an hour, it just wasn't interesting to me at that point of time.
Ironically, professionally I'm actually a games developer even though I still don't play a lot of games any more. I'm in that industry because I love programming and experimenting with rendering techniques, and working in that discipline always keeps me on the cutting edge of the current technology. But modern games? Mostly meh, IMHO.
I still do play some modern games, but mostly if they're story based or appeal to my retro side. Things like the Drake and Last of Us series on PS3 that have a great story, or VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy which tap into the retro feelings even though they're much newer. But it's more about an original mechanic for me now - so things like Portal, and I even remember sinking over 80 hours into PixelJunk Eden (a really obscure PS3 game that barely anyone has heard of) which was maybe 10% of my total playtime on all the PS3 games I owned.
Anyway, I agree there might be a problem with your niece and nephew if they are just mindlessly doomscrolling and doing nothing else with their lives. But as long as they also have some hobbies they enjoy, it doesn't really matter if they intersect with yours. Maybe ask your grandparents what games they spent their childhoods playing and see if that's something you'd have wanted to do as a child... I'd guess it probably isn't, or else you wouldn't have spent all your times playing these games.
I haven't heard this particular rumor, not like they have In-Q-Tel connections a la Wickr, but they do take funding from the Open Technology Fund [0] which some of the more righteously paranoid take issue with, being US State Department and all. Same parent as Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America [1].
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