"Because ISRO actually launches satellites built by students for free into low-Earth orbit, we must ask what these satellites do. It’s been a decade of India launching student-built satellites and it’s been the same decade of our student-built satellites doing very little, if anything surrounded often by deliberately misleading narratives."
"Evaluated herein is one E-TES concept, called Firebrick Resistance-Heated Energy Storage (FIRES), that stores electricity as sensible high-temperature heat (1000–1700 °C) in ceramic firebrick, and discharges it as a hot airstream to either (1) heat industrial plants in place of fossil fuels, or (2) regenerate electricity in a power plant. … We report that systems of 100–1000 s MWh may be cycled daily, and discharged at a constant heat rate typically for 70–90% of the storage capacity. Traditional insulation can reasonably limit heat leakage to less than 3% per day. Preliminary cost estimates indicate a system cost near $10/kWh, substantially less expensive than batteries."
I can agree with you and still be baffled by that response. Knowing the tech underlying a blog and saying using an SSG on a Raspberry Pi is simple are different things.
Free is never free but why does free have to go from quite non-shitty to shitty overnight for no discernible reason? The point is here that "just here to blog" bloggers like me have been able to pay WP to have a custom domain, some storage, some SEO and some SM tools managed by WP – and nothing else. But now, to point a custom domain at my WP site, I need to cough up $180/yr. It's not just the free plan shrinking further, a fact you're commenting on, but that the sole alternative plan lies at the other extreme.
You're profoundly overestimating how 'simple' this is, or even understandable, or how much even most bloggers are interested and/or have bandwidth to understand, what these things are. Whether you're saying they'll need to understand these things is a different matter; so far that hasn't been the case, and is unlikely to be going ahead.
There's no monthly payment option. So it's never $15 a month, it's $180 a year.
Also, what if I don't want many of those features? And I don't. This is why the previous plans, which were more graded, made sense. The annual billing option on the other hand caters to customers in need of all these features, who are also likely to be the sort of people who'd be willing to pay $180 at a go.
It was, right? I hope anyone who's considering designing an alternative keeps this in mind. It was one of the best things about WordPress.com. This is also why I'm currently considering micro.blog.
I agree. Every time something like this happens, I just miss Posterous. I think they had it all right, including the simplicity. Then Twitter bought and shut them down.
Edit: There's its avatar Posthaven but the Posthaven blog hasn't been updated since 2017.
The block editor has been called out for technical problems often but I feel the writing experience it offers should be discussed as well. For example cursor behaviour in the block editor is unpredictable, and with large posts the bloody thing starts to hang now and then.
I assume you must be technically qualified? I don't know a lick of VPS management. If something stopped working as expected, I wouldn't even know what went wrong – leave alone implementing a fix. WordPress.com until now – particularly in India – offered an excellent way out: affordable, reliable, good reputation, and feature-loaded. This plan change is inexplicable, especially also given what Mullenweg says in the interview.
[1] https://posthaven.com/ [2] https://blog.posthaven.com/read-about-how-fly-has-helped-wit...