I’m not typically one to “vote with my wallet”, and I think it’s very impractical to do so with all of big tech.
I do however tend to buy products and services that align with my values and shy away from products and services that go against my values. For example, I’d be more inclined to buy a Tesla and install home solar panels then I would be to buy a VW because Tesla is emissions free and VW lied on their emissions tests. VW lost some long term customers because of that incident and Tesla is continuing to attract new buyers that are concerned with climate change. Due to this trend we are able to deploy more electric vehicles then government regulations require.
I imagine if you wanted to 100% stop buying or using products from FANNG (+Microsoft & Twitter) it would be impossible without doing anything short of living completely off the grid.
Imagine, you ditch your smartphone. You switch to Linux. You stop using _search engines_ because all of them use Google or Bing in the backend. You abandon Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, GitHub, and Gmail. Before you go to a website, how do you know if they are going to load an asset from AWS or GApps? Maybe the server loads an asset from AWS and redistributes it to you, so you can’t just blacklist IPs. How do you know if your Bank’s ATMs are using AWS? Or your hospital’s digital records? Eventually someone you do business with will do business with FANG and you’ll be indirectly supporting them.
Also “management” and “devops” needs to trust every dev to push out a high quality update. Twice daily deploys don’t happen if QA goes through a 48 hour test process for every release.
Physics engines and graphics engines take a lot of resources. Games that invest enough resources to develop their own highly detailed physics/graphics engines are almost by definition AAA. So what you’re suggesting is that AAA games should spend less time/money on the thing that makes them a AAA game.
It’s okay that AAA games exist, because there is still room in the market for games like Factorio, which has experienced a long and successful life.
I know plenty of people benefiting from the stock market with average and less than average IQs. This is a matter of classism not intelligence. If you have enough money to invest your benefiting, and the more money you have to invest the more you are benefiting.
Of course, there are a few outlier founders, CEOs, and stock traders that are benefiting much more then average. What separates these outliers from others isn’t IQ, because there are plenty of people with very high IQs that are doing about average economically.
One small design suggestion. You should include a battery so that if the electricity were to go out you could still see the time or be alerted at the time of the alarm.
Dr. Fauci’s salary is good but not fantastic for any person with an MD. Considering his level of expertise it’s safe to say he could make much more in the private sector.
The fact that public roles pay less than private roles opens them up to corruption and makes it harder to attract the best talent. Go look for tech jobs available at your local and state government and you’ll start questioning who would take up such a position.
It’s very risky to build a service that relays directly on the API layer of other commercial services. If any of there chat apps change their APIs to stop Beeper traffic then they will lose users. Some services will cause a larger loss than others.
I think the economics are simple. The company is two devs and they charge $10/month. If the costs are $4/month/user then they need 83k users to clear a quarter million a year in profit per dev. This isn’t a unicorn, but it has the potential to bring in good money while it lasts.
I purpose the phrase “deceased loved ones” is an editorial spin on the technology that missing Microsoft’s goal. If the goal is to revive a dead mother as a chatbot we can say that has a high probability of landing in the uncanny valley. Perhaps it’s just to train cooperate chatbots to have celebrity personalities, and dead personalities sell for cheaper than live ones do.
Exactly. Reimplementing GitHub is not building a rival to GitHub. Like Wikipedia the value isn’t in the platform but the content hosted by the platform. Until there is a critical mass of open source software hosted Chinese GitHub provides very little value.
In the west we had a critical mass of open source software and then built GitHub. This is putting the cart before the horse.
That greatly increases the level of sophistication.
The article doesn’t say that the emails received were “@harvard.edu” only that they appeared to be valid Harvard ids. That means she made a judgement call that the email were legitimate, but it doesn’t give very many technical details on what she judged that call on.
How do we establish trust in a virtual world? There are a lot of cues in an meatspace social interaction that can trigger a “gut reaction” one way or another on trust. In digital interactions it’s significantly easier to be social engineered.
I wonder if there was some tax evasion happening...