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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Oh, that makes all the sense in the world. You’re probably right.

    Even if it’s a dozen companies making cases for every type of museum, zoo, and aquarium, it’s probably going to be a little bit like Chromebooks where the vast majority of different options are going to look the same unless you stare at them right next to one another or are in the industry. Most industrial design ends up pretty samey because that’s what people expect.













    • Wohl and Burkman were sentenced to community service.

    • The charge they pled guilty to was fraud; that they “falsely claimed that mail-in voting would put voters into a database that would be used to collect outstanding debt, track down warrants or enforce mandatory vaccinations.” It doesn’t matter what the outcome was (intimidation or something else), the fraud was the crime.

    • Fox is a slightly different case, as they’re technically press and thus have a first amendment protection that automatically makes any case against them harder. But either way, the lack of prosecution is far from evidence that a crime was not committed.

    • I already identified exactly which law Musk is breaking and with what action. 52 USC 20511 and 52 USC 30101, if you find it particularly important.




  • As far as I can tell (not as an expert), the pitfalls and unforeseen issues are probably pretty much what they’d be for every new battery chemistry: how safe is it? Does it have really bad self-discharge? Is the supply consistent? How does it do at low charging levels? How long/how many cycles does such a cell last? Does it require an unsustainable amount of exotic minerals?

    As well as what they are for any new technology: what is the replacement cost? Can they be installed in existing technology via drop-in or with a simple retrofit, or do you have to replace the entire unit? How long before they come to market? Can they maintain supply to match demand?

    Probably a lot of those questions are business-related rather than technology-related (i.e. “will the companies developing this stuff put enough into R&D to solve these problems before releasing them?” not “do the laws of the universe allow this?”). I am not an expert, but before I put all my chips on solid-state batteries (something I’m pretty confident will be the norm eventually), I would want those answered.


  • What a bizarre headline. No it’s not. It’s proving why FOSS is important. In fact, it’s specifically the non-open part of the project (the servers Automattic owns) that’s the problem.

    Speaking of which,

    Mullenweg has demanded a royalty fee of eight percent of WP Engine’s monthly revenue for continued access to Automattic’s WordPress servers and resources.

    tbh, that’s totally fair (well, the idea of being paid is, I don’t know if the actual cost is). Automattic owns the servers and makes them available to the community, but WP Engine is probably using more than their fair share of it. Probably a better way to do this would be instituting a “free tier” of server access that WP Engine would outcap; after that, either pay your fair share or find another solution.

    Instead, Mullenweg throws a tantrum and tries to make this sound like some righteous fight against opponents of open source, rather than what it is: a for-profit company wanting fair compensation for services rendered. It’s not some moral thing.