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davidw
Joined 67,541 karma
Me: http://www.welton.it/davidw/

Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/davidwelton.bsky.social

Email: davidw@dedasys.com

Book reviews: http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com


  1. > getting the peace prize

    Maybe if they can pinpoint its whereabouts at a specific time when it's not heavily guarded, they can send a team to snatch it with minimal casualties.

  2. Sadly, companies like Apple don't have quite the resources that local credit unions do, so they can't do that kind of tech support. Apparently...
  3. It's not a binary on/off thing. It's a lot, lot worse right now.
  4. I feel like it's time for a new direction in tech. Open source was a lot of fun (because I was young), but then it sort of became the default for a lot of infrastructure. I liked PG's take on startups and some cool ones came out of that era. But now the whole thing is collapsing on itself and "Silicon Valley" is broadly becoming disliked if not reviled by a lot of people, with cartoonish figures like Musk, or Joe Lonsdale calling for public hangings. The sense of wonder and innovation feels gone to me. It's still out there somewhere, though, I think, and it'd be nice to recover some of that. LLM's owned by megacorps aren't really where it's at for me - I want to see small teams in garages making something new and fun.
  5. > does keep a close eye

    "kept", I think.

  6. And in any event, to be extra nitpicky, the mountain climber guy depicted is representative of neither the western frontier, nor the western front.
  7. As someone born and raised in the western US, I think of "western front" as WWI, not the westward expansion of the US. There are different terms for that.

    The famous book refers to WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front

  8. The 'western front' was a lot more like the ending of Blackadder than a place with a lot of rapid innovation, from my understanding of history.
  9. Health care is the more complicated one of the examples cited, but housing definitely is an 'own goal' in how we made it too difficult to build in too many places - especially "up and in" rather than outward expansion.

    Stuff like this isn't Wall Street or Billionaires or whatever bogeyman - it's our neighbors: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...

  10. I wouldn't really trust either one. Plenty of big companies have known how horrible their own products are, like cigarette companies, or fossil fuels. We'll probably learn about social media companies in a few years.

    That said, just because a product comes from a big company doesn't mean it's bad either. I want to see independent research.

  11. > But at least it wasn’t bought by Larry Ellison

    There are already noises about FCC or DOJ leaning on things in order to 'correct' that.

  12. If Google does it, maybe it'll work out for my small business, right...?
  13. I don't know about the phrase, but I share the sentiment. The owner is a racist promoting racist things. It's not a 'public square' because he controls the algorithm, so it'll never be a 'fair fight' for those who disagree with him.
  14. Depending on how much of a bubble it is. When things really heat up it's sometimes more like "just send it, bro".
  15. I think Biden was sort of the last gasp of trying to "turn the other cheek" and show by deeds and words what an inclusive, forward thinking administration looked like.

    I think a lot of people are now done with that, and are looking to burn down some things, figuratively speaking.

  16. And beyond laws and customs, people need to be involved and pay attention to politics: "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance"
  17. I wasn't discussing 'the presidency'. I'm saying it's easy to get involved - especially so for the local races that matter more to most people's lives in any case, where things like zoning and school curriculums are decided, or where money either gets invested to further fossil fuel infrastructure or for cleaner things like bikes, walking and transit.
  18. It's incredibly easy to get involved with people like Mamdani or Seattle's Katie Wilson or so many others, if that's your political angle. The same is true on the other side.

    We should be encouraging people to be more involved. That helps shape outcomes.

  19. Who you work with certainly matters, but it does show that it's incredibly easy to get a foot in the door with a lot of political things.

    People complain so much about politics as being this completely foreign and detached thing. But it's not if you put a bit of effort into it.

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