Flambo

plausible: check

testable: TBD

falsifiable: TBD

still, 1 out of 3. not bad!

if you won't deny a thing to someone it's pretty hard to sell it to anyone

Relay or decrentralize it maybe.

The thing I read about this earlier said Signal is super against decentralization iirc. Or at least against federation? Are they different?

Hey, I'm fully on board with your defense of social media, but I think in this case the commenter is just saying "i miss the social media we had before they started calling it 'social media'". Even 2004 facebook fits this description, and I'm inclined to agree. I miss social media when it felt more like IRC and craigslist, when facebook was a glorified personal guestbook, etc.

if you ever feel so inclined, all you need to make your own tortillas at home is:

1. masa flour aka specially treated corn flour

2. a stovetop and a pan for cooking

3. a plastic food storage bag

4. something with a flat bottom, ideally transparent

5. water

the bag of flour typically has instructions for how much flour and water to mix. you can mix it by hand and form it into balls by hand. the size of the balls only matters if you care about the tortillas being "the right size".

From there, you press a ball flat, toss it on an already hot pan over medium heat, flip it after a couple of minutes, and remove it after a minute more. to press the ball flat, place it under your flat-bottomed transparent thing and mash on it until it looks tortilla-shaped enough for you.

the plastic food storage bag is optional/recommended to stop the tortilla balls sticking when you press them. cut the food storage bag open along its seams and remove its zipper if it has one. what you have left is a single sheet of plastic with a seam/hinge in the middle.

it might be sounding like a lot but it's really just:

• mix flour into wet balls

• mash flour in your "press" made of random flat dishes and a plastic bag

• cook the thing a little

• eat

if you iterate on those 4 steps a dozen times, you'll be out like 50 cents of flour and you'll have produced at least one satisfactory tortilla. and it'll be so, so much better than store bought, you'll think about it every time you have store bought tortillas therafter.

We need to be more efficient with what we make

We need to make stuff with the goal of not having to make any more of it at some point. Currently we have an economy that gives no shits about what is made so long as it sells more this quarter than last.

Either we need a magical wave of enlightenment to change the priorities of those who control the means of production, or we need to change the structure of our economy and its incentives to make "build to last" a winning strategy.

So tl;dr he/his team did two things:

1. argue the way AI uses content to train is legal
2. provide artists a tool to prevent their content being used to train AI without their permission

On the surface it sounds all good, but I can't help but notice a future conflict of interest for Zhao should Glaze ever become monetized. If it were to be ruled illegal to train AI on content without permission, tools like Glaze would be essentially anti-theft devices, but while it remains legal to train AI this way, tools like Glaze stand to perhaps become necessary for artists to maintain the pre-AI status quo w/r/t how their work can be used and monetized.

this is a grievance i've needed validated for a long time. tysm

it's such a wild example of feature creep, and yet it's not quite the wildest example of Star Citizen's feature creep. When Roberts' funding exceeded his wildest dreams, he should've changed nothing from his original pitch and simply delivered that. For reference:

Original funding goal: $2 million US

Funding by end of Kickstarter campaign: well over $6 million US

If they finished the project with a $4 million surplus, great! They'd have ample budget for post-launch support, and maybe even for some free post-launch content updates to improve goodwill. If that'd gone as planned, the dude'd be sitting on a whole new generation of goodwill.

Oh, and we'd have a game like this:

Pick up jobs as a smuggler, pirate, merchant, bounty hunter, or enlist as a pilot, protecting the borders from outside threats.

A huge universe to explore, trade and adventure in

Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want

Actions of the players impact the universe and become part of its history and lore

Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions

If caught alone in an online ambush, send a distress broadcast to your friends and if they’re nearby they can jump in-system to save your bacon.

You wanted proper Newtonian mechanics. You got it! Spaceships adjust their trajectory and orientation just like the real thing.

10X the detail of current AAA games (as measured in polygons)

Range of scale never seen before in a game - ships from 27m to 1km scale, all at same level of detail

Support for Joystick, Gamepad, Mouse, Keyboard, as well as HOTAS, flight chair, rudder petals, and VR

the cardinal rule regarding “in-game purchases” is: Players who spend money purchasing in-game credits will have no advantage over players who spend time!

Instead they immediately pivoted to a pay-for-ships funding model and let the scope grow to seemingly every one of Roberts' wildest whims

The tech demo is cool. Realization of no-loading-screen transitions from surface -> atmosphere -> orbit -> microgravity -> docking with another ship is wild. Being able to watch your pilot and gunner do a space battle from out the window, while you go walking about the ship is wild. But having it be only a tech demo for this long is so disappointing, and having the focus pivot from singleplayer-with-online to online-with-singleplayer are significant disappointments.

funding timeline: https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Crowdfunding_campaign

original pitch/campaign: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015042706/http://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/

corporations can’t seem to ever accept a limit for themselves.

This is the result of competition. When success is measured relative to others, it's forever a moving target. Under this definition of success, self improvement is equally effective as sabotaging another. And as we can see, it's not just businesses sabotaging one another. If a business can get away with sabotaging its own consumers, as it can in the case of a monopoly, a cartel, or regulatory capture, it will.

It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated

It's also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it'll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.

strictly speaking it's

here’s a gift card so ~~you can give us that money back again~~ we can keep your money but give you something for free later.