Ethereum has a value equal to roughly GM, Ford and Toyota combined. Probably as much as AWS despite the fact that no large company I know of runs their company on Ethereum. The largest things on Ethereum are things like Uniswap which facilities speculation on Ethereum...hehe. What happens to the world if Ethereum disappears? I don't think it misses much of a beat. Ethereum does have "tons of uses and potential"...but it's still just that, and it could be displaced.
Solana with its proof of history and performance sounds extremely cool. The performance relative to network size also looks really good. The general idea strikes me as a great insight, though I have just an intuitive grasp of the idea (I haven't looked into the white paper). Proof of history seems to be based around proof of time -- a fundamental problem in physics (inspired Einstein) is defining time and that usually is via synchrony. It seems here that's defined by assigning a function which takes a certain amount of time and something that can't be pre-computed. I'm not sure how the parameters to compute are determined every second or fraction of a second -- but it sounds like a modified proof of work where the computing and energy burn may not scale as the value or size of the network does (unlike bitcoin to date). Building a network fundamentally around timestamps also makes sense for a ledger. The price of Solana and every other cryptocurrency has gone wayyyyy up this year...no comment about any of that except that for almost all crypto (maybe excepting Bitcoin), it is driven by speculation with limited usage in legal markets and dominant usage in illegal markets. If crypto disappeared from the world today, the only thing that would change is cybercrime would reduce by at least half...maybe more hehe. That doesn't detract, though, from what look like quite innovative technical achievements by Solana!
I care about true privacy and transparency...so I use the Epic Privacy Browser and their ad-free and transparent EpicSearch.in.
The claim in the blog post and by DuckDuckGo "They do not collect or share personal information" can not be true depending on how you define personal information since search ads are localized on DuckDuckGo. Incidentally, DuckDuckGo refuses to disclose what data they send to Bing/Yahoo to retrieve search ads (forget about open source, they're not even transparent). This claim is further in question as their search ads link directly to Yahoo/Bing so they direct your IP and personal information directly to them -- while one can see those links while hovering on the links, it's not plainly disclosed (especially for non-technical users). Fundamentally their business is built on sending your personal information to Bing.
The results in EpicSearch aren't as good as Bing/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo nor as Google...but they are quite close to any intuitive idea of being private and are as good or better at times at least 80% of the time...so from there I'll click on to Bing or Google if I need more results.
Data Handling Transparency? Great discussion in terms of how to "regulate" extensions. I feel that it shouldn't technically be that difficult to put in data handling transparency, basically to analyze the code fast and figure out that this extension sends x,y,z data a,b,c servers named/owned by 1,2,3. That would be a start. Google doesn't allow for code obfuscation, controls the code/calls that can communicate with servers and thus can limit it to be easily found and analyzed, and they host all the code so they can analyze each update/extension and provide an automated "data handling transparency" report for each extension (with comments/details filled in, that may be mandatory, from the extension owner).
Google recently removed several hundred extensions which were found to contain malware. Tons of extensions have been caught saving & selling users' browsing history, notably the ironically titled popular "web of trust".
It's sadly not uncommon for malware hosts to acquire extensions and then use them to inject ads to spread their malware.
The Epic Privacy Browser presciently blocked almost all extensions citing those vulnerabilities and its desire to provide a reliably high level of privacy. It's kept its users safe while Chrome, Brave and other browsers' users were vulnerable.
Interesting. Online, there are differences between say privacy and anonymity. TOR allows ads & trackers but standardizes/blocks a lot of things to provide anonymity (a kind of blending in). The Epic Privacy Browser blocks ads, trackers and lots of things to provide privacy (a kind of hiding).
No ads coming up in my Epic Privacy Browser with adblock & encrypted proxy on :-). Firefox has been copying a lot of Epic's features, but still is far behind their privacy defaults.
No, Mozilla needs to keep focusing on Mozilla and trying to make it better than Chromium. Competition is essential. They're the only ones left other than Apple now that Microsoft has given up.
Sadly it's very common to hear from many reasonably serious potential acquirers before something is consummated. 10 is not unusual I think. It's best to always focus on your business and growing it, assume the acquisition isn't going to close and not getting distracted by it. Avoid any legal or other costs until it's basically negotiated/closed and they're putting some non-refundable closing money down.
It's not so much the difficulty, though yes it is hard, but it's generally extremely difficult to raise capital as a late entrant into an established industry. Unless there's something disruptive. That said, it doesn't take that much capital to build a new search engine with today's computing infrastructure so a few have tried over the past 5-10 years but none were as good as Google (a minimal benchmark). They found a lot of initial interest then died out quickly (sorry I'm forgetting the names, maybe Powerset, Blekko and another). Without doing any "heavy lifting" and also thus not requiring much capital, these so-called "private" search engines have gotten some traction.
Yes, you're basically right...but the problem isn't building your own search engine, it's in getting search ads privately as well as just being transparent and honest about how your service works -- none of which is true for DuckDuckGo sadly. Their business model is built on sending your personal data to bing when you click on ads on their search results page which link to Bing (moreover they say they never send your IP or personal information to a third-party, but presenting an ad on your search results without disclosing that the ad links to Bing may not "legally" violate that clause but it does in spirit). Ads are also localized so even if they aren't sending your IP address (which according to Bing they are supposed to be doing, but in their terms they claim not to), they're sending your location data. DuckDuckGo further refuses to clarify what data they do send (i.e. how accurate the location data is, what is it even) to retrieve search ads. They aren't transparent about how they work and their business model is fundamentally built on non-private search ads from Bing. It's not "true privacy" nor sincere to say you're not saving any user-related data when you're sending a lot of it to firms like Bing who do save it. The only search engines close to being truly private are epicsearch.in (part of the Epic Privacy Browser) and maybe some small, interesting efforts like private.sh, neither of which have search ads.
If you're looking for a book that's both easy and stimulating to read, but that discusses a lot of mathematics in reasonable detail, I highly recommend the novelist David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.
It's probably the best book on mathematics I've read. It's not a textbook the way the Feynman lectures are, but it's stimulating and a good read. Other books mentioned like Visual Complex Analysis or Courant's book are dry and take a lot of effort to get through. Some of the older books mentioned may be great (I've found many older textbooks much clearer than more recent ones), but I personally haven't read them so I can't make a recommendation there.
You can also check YouTube videos/courses e.g. one I found great was MIT Professor Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course -- his videos are easy to follow, stimulating and clear.