I was all for this legislation, thinking the positives outweighed the cost, but after reading the list of affected services, I now disagree.
Why didn't they just legislate that all social media apps content must be like Facebook in 2005. No recommendations, chronological timeline only, and you only see posts from users you explicitly added. That would have benefited everyone forever, and not enabled some small subset of apps to collect your govt id or the law to be irrelevant when the next popular social network comes along.
They effectively banned only the popular cigarette brands, instead of regulating nicotine.
If services would argue this would make them all the same, then add a clause where the user can opt in to have an algorithm shove content at them like now if they are over 18.
This way everyone can use the basic service for true socializing, but the harmful stuff is actually regulated out by default.
Too much money etc for this to ever happen, but geez they could have done a lot better.
First they came for Facebook, and I didn't protest, I was not on facebook.
Here's what's going to happen next: Whatsapp/signal/telegram groups will become wildly popular. Which gives the wannabe-fascists the excuse to ban those as well 'for the children'.
We've seen this salami tactic often enough to know the pattern.
You are too modest! You should start your poem denouncing those pesky spam filters than hinders the honest viagra pill salesmen!
Then you could regret your inaction when google downweighted zit-popping videos, and maybe you have reached the point where it becomes reasonable to regret losing Facebook the genocide facilitator.
There is a qualitative distinction between 'I filter for myself what I don't want to see' and 'The State decides what everyone is allowed to see.'
Not too sure about those zit-popping videos. But in my time, we had rotten.com - so I might be immunized to that kind of stuff. Personally, I find a honest zit-popping video no worse than yet another AI voice going on and on about some non-topic, clearly written by AI as well. I don't seek out either, but the zit-popping at least is over after 10 seconds.
But that's Google curating content. State censorship is something else entirely. Once justified "for the children" or "for security", it never stops at the first target. It grows, layer by layer. We’ve watched that pattern repeat for centuries across every medium humans have ever invented.
Facebook, the genocide facilitator? If we are honest, so has the printing press. Let's ban letters, they have facilitated genocide.
The printing press spread enlightenment, propaganda, revolutions, and atrocities. The State tried to control that too. It failed every time. It will fail with the net, for young people and for old ones.
Repression never works long-term, it always creates pressure that eventually breaks the system that produced it. Historically, societies tend to get worse before they correct themselves, because authoritarian overreach generates exactly the instability it claims to prevent.
Jefferson’s warning about the recurring need to renew freedom wasn’t a call for violence - it was an observation about the cyclical nature of power, repression, and reform. Every attempt to restrict communication has eventually collapsed under its own contradictions, and the internet will be no exception.
I agree that "design" in the title is misleading. The main novelty of this cube is that it balances itself etc, and that was thought of and designed 12 years ago at ETH.
Nonetheless, incredible work by the OP - "I built a cube that balances itself" is already extremely impressive
The Mac Portable was my first computer, which my dad brought back from work but never used. It was on this machine that I learned how to program, starting with Basic (I believe it was MS-Basic back then) and then moving on to Hypercard. Those were the days when knowledge was gained through magazines and the accompanying floppy disks, loaded with shareware. What a remarkable era it was, and how much progress we have made since then!
The Darwin kernel in OSX has more than userland code taken from FreeBSD. "The kernel of Darwin is XNU, a hybrid kernel which uses OSFMK (Open Software Foundation Mach Kernel) from the OSF, various elements of FreeBSD (including the process model, network stack, and virtual file system)" [0]
As mentioned previously, "When Wizard Stay Up Late - The Origins of the Internet" is considered by many as the authoritative text on how the Internet came to be.
For more technical aspects and if you're inclined to sift through tons of emails, mailing lists archives may be of interest
One thing which I've done and which has worked somehow, is to give it away to artists out there.
Make a list of artists (musicians in your case) which you think would like your app. Do some serious research to some contact detail for them. You then write to them and offer them the app for free, through a coupon code. Ask them for feedback. Write casually, like the indie dev that you are.
If they like your app, it's likely they will talk about it, and generate some buzz, which hopefully some blogs / sites will pick on.
And be ambitious with the artist list, send it to top people !!
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