“We’re a startup”

“What’s your plan?”

“Giant mirrors in space to control the sunlight that hits the earth’s surface.”

“Wow, sounds incredibly expensive and of dubious technical merit. What are you asking to make this happen?”

“We need whatever money you have in your wallet right now.”

“And the return on investment?”

“Infinity zillion dollars.”

“I guess I’d be a fool not to hand you all my money.”

“Absolutely. Now… that’s a really nice watch. And shoes. We could get you an amazing return if you gave us those, too.”

What are they supposed to do?

My grandparents spent a lot of time playing tennis and bridge, knitting, and fishing.

Really raises the question of how profitable these scam ads have become.

Also speaks to the addictive quality of social media (or perhaps the grim state of offline society). People keep coming back to these obviously booby-trapped websites to claw at a thin veneer of simulated friendship because they’ve got nothing better to do with their lives.

With this series, we aim to present not just the most complete picture yet of the GFW, but a roadmap for pushing back against the machinery of state censorship.

It’s definitely a deep technical dive into the underlying infrastructure of Chinese internet services. But I’m not seeing any of this in the guts of the article.

Definitely stems the tide, but it’s a long way from “never seen an ad in 25 years”

I’ve had some trouble setting up a pie-hole. It’s an imperfect system and something of a constant struggle between advertisers and ad-blockers.

If you’ve escaped every digital ad over the last 25 years, congrats. I’m reasonably tech savy, use adblockers where I can, and haven’t been remotely this fortunate.

Nah, his complaint was lack of torque.

Maybe just had torque confused with horsepower? That’s been the historical trade-off between gas and electric. Sure, its very easy to get an electric motor to jump into action. But it is comparatively difficult to generate the same amount of power with equivalent fuel density.

A gallon of refined gasoline packs insane energy.

Much of which is lost to heat when combusted, which is the historical hang-up.

Not that batteries don’t have their own heating problems. But the benefit of batteries is that they’re an engineering problem we can solve with miniaturization, which we’ve become incredibly good at. We’re at a soft ceiling in terms of engine chemistry. Petroleum is about as refined as we’re going to get it. Combustion’s math is what it is. Improvements to the efficiency of modern engines have stalled out as an automotive tool, even to the point that a gas engine powering an electric capacitor in a hybrid yields performance improvements over the gas engine just spinning the wheels directly.

What could he have possibly been trying to say?

I mean, the general appeal of ICE engines is the fuel, not the engine. Gasoline is generally more energy dense than lithium.

Generally speaking, I don’t check the age/gross karma on an account unless I’m suspicious. And by then… plenty of older accounts with lots of karma are HailCorporate to the gills. Nevermind the mods.

I just can’t take anything on that site seriously

“At least” is doing some heavy lifting

Words do not compute. Issuing a $1T IPO to Sam Altman.

@Grok What happened?

Critical support to the brave mujahideen fighters hosting Lemmy from an independent web server setup.

But building oracles and such is gross.

You’re talking about a religion whose entire foundation is built on saints and prophets. The whole Jesus story is a big deal because it is fulfillment of prophecy.

The who AI pope question was insane.

It’s certainly heretical to the Catholic Church. But fits comfortably in a bunch of New Age and Technocratic Futurist Protestant understands of their faith.

Ah. Hence the age old adage: “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got”.

Nonsense. Grok’s been a confused, masochistic mess since at least June.

Remember when God said he didn’t want idols made

You are about 1700 years late to this argument. Christians reconciled with iconography some time in the Byzantium Era.

And after Protestantism? FFS, can you imagine what Joseph Smith would say about an AI Prophet, after spending half his career reading discs out of a hat with special sunglasses?

I think some of you younger folks really don’t know what the Internet was like 20 years ago.Shit was up and down all the time.

I worked on a project back in 2008 where I had to physically haul hardware from Houston to Dallas ahead of Hurricane Ike just to keep a second rate version of a website running until we got power back at the original office. Latency at the new location was so bad that we were scrambling to reinvent the website in real time to try and improve performance. We ended up losing the client. They ended up going bankrupt. An absolute nightmare.

Getting screamed at by clients. Working 14 hour days in a cramped server room on something way outside my scope.

Would have absolutely killed for something as clean and reliable as AWS. Not like it didn’t even exist back then. But we self-hosted because it was cheaper.

proceeds to list 3 separate providers

Just don’t look to hard at the market share or the client composition, sure.

The issue is more so with companies that choose to use cloud providers. They’re the ones attempting to cheap out because they don’t want to pay infrastructure costs.

I mean, do you tell people they’re cheaping out because they hire a plumber rather than spending eighteen months learning to DIY every pipe in their house? There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with outsourcing to cloud services on its face. A couple big warehouses at strategic points in town specifically designed to operate as central hubs for digital traffic makes far more sense than every single office building having a dozen different floors with two IT guys of dubious quality in a badly ventilated closet manning cobbled together rack space.

For anyone downvoting, I’d love to hear what “democratizing” the internet means, how it would work, or be functional.

One of the more successful American models for publicly owned and operated data infrastructure:

EPB of Chattanooga, formerly known as the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, is an American electric power distribution and telecommunication company owned by the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee