Not too long after Parler was kicked off AWS, I was on a call with hundreds of representatives from power utilities about a modeling tool we were transitioning to. It was mentioned that the tool was hosted on AWS and someone suggested they have a fallback plan in case they got kicked off like "other companies".
Elon Musk's companies are doing great under the democratic administration he publicly rails against. He's back on top of the richest list. Peter Thiel's portfolio seems to be doing great. PLTR is up 350% in the past five years. Facebook altered it's policies in a pro-conservative way by allowing falsehoods in political ads, and they're doing fine. Right-wing content has flourished there for years. Oracle and Larry Ellison are doing better than ever. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are financially healthy and not in crisis.
Now twitter is doing badly, but that's not because of their political slant, it's because they're operating the business with ideology first, business acumen second approach. That's not politics, that's plain old bad execution.
None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.
About Musk, once he took over Twitter, that mostly solved the Social Media "Free Speech" problem, because as long as the most popular gathering place in the world is free we're [mostly] all free. So you're right, there's lots of reasons for Conservative optimism.
> None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.
None of those businesses are part of the culture war, or if anything they're 'woke' businesses.
Thiel doesn't make money being conservative, he makes money on venture capital and running a big government surveillance business. Larry Ellison makes money price gouging on licensing. Elon Musk's main source of income is a 'woke' EV business. Rupert Murdoch makes money on tabloids, of which Fox News is just one flavor - and the tabloids are arguably 'woke' as they mainly pitch conspiracy theories that the 'normies' don't know about.
Twitter under Musk is no more free speech than it has ever been. They comply with the vast majority of censorship requests from authoritarian governments[1]. They most recently rolled over for Brazil's demands and are now fumbling their execution on paying the fines Brazil levied against them. Musk also censored Ken Klippenstein's account when he published a link to his Substack article about the JD Vance opposition research dump. So no, "free speech" on Twitter is just a slogan and a marketing campaign for low information news consumers, and it's working.
I wasn't classifying those businesses as "part of culture war" or not. I'm just saying it's a fact that conservatives have been, and still are, under attack, and are nonetheless "winning".
Insofar as Musk not being a Free Speech Absolutist (which I'm not either), that's not news to me or anyone else who knows and respects him like I do. Musk is doing everything he can to keep legal speech from being censored, whereas the prior owners would cancel people permanently for trite trivial things like a mis-gendering (that wasn't even done out of malice), or simply claiming there's two genders.
Regarding Democrats getting censored themselves: While I'm a strong advocate of Free Speech as a general rule, I think after what the Democrats did for a decade (on censorship) they SHOULD be forced to reap what they sowed. So for example, I would've been perfectly in favor of Musk, as a one time act, permanently cancelling everyone who had in the past called for censorship of others. Those people didn't want Free Speech when they held power, and thus they are the ones who don't deserve to have Free Speech after they've lost their power.
Actually, it seems like a great time to get involved with the grid (at least in the US). In order to comply with FERC Order 881, all transmission operators need to adjust their line ratings based on ambient temperatures with hourly predictions 10 days into the future by mid 2025. Seems like that would present a great opportunity to work directly with the ISOs (which have regional models and live data) on improving weather data.
I’d expect the opposite. All companies controlling equipment that is part of the “Bulk Electric System” have to be NERC CIP compliant and are audited regularly with large fines for non-compliance. Doesn't guarantee perfect (or even good security) but it’s more likely to be a priority.
It also perverts incentives such that no utility will communicate perhaps helpful information to other utilities or government when said information can leave them liable for fines.
Until there's some kind of hold-harmless agreement, the various industry & government security information sharing groups can only be of limited effectiveness.
The management at the utility doesn’t want to be recognized for being a deficient operator that doesn’t meet standards, so they hire employees to ensure they are compliant
A fine is a black eye for a utility where people pride themselves on the reliability of the service they provide
Making logins required to view twitter was the ultimate bed shitting move. The whole point of twitter was to be a broadcast medium. Tweets were viewable without following or logging in. There is a huge vacuum in that space now.
For most (social media) platforms really. Management believes it would force users to sign up, but in reality the platform just becomes less relevant because of that limitation. Not even talking about search crawlers.
An all around stupid decision. That said, if management is that shitty, the platform probably won't be attractive for long anyway.
Facebook/Instagram were successful despite that to a degree, but this decision probably still did a lot of damage to their relevancy and user numbers.
I don't really agree with that. Facebook was originally about mirroring your real-life social network. In the mid 00's nobody was trying to get likes from strangers on Facebook.
Instagram is closer to broadcast, but it was always closely tied to the mobile app experience and the "follower" mentality. People didn't really share links to Instagram posts in other online venues in the beginning.
Twitter was always unique. It existed before smartphones, and there was a good chunk of years where people without smartphones would read twitter posts on desktops. Its producer/consumer distribution is much more skewed, many twitter users never post. Tweets were always getting posted to places like HN, reddit, discussed in news articles, etc.
I think Twitter's (former) position as a broadcast medium à la TV, radio, and newspapers is unique among social networks. There's a reason why Twitter was the place for journalists, politicians, academics, fire departments, web service status alerts, etc.
> Facebook/Instagram were successful despite that to a degree, but this decision probably still did a lot of damage to their relevancy and user numbers.
FB/IG/Whatsapp have half of humanity logging into their services once per month, so I'm not sure how much better they could be doing if they didn't have a login wall.
Meanwhile, Twitter (with no login wall) never broke 500mn. Like, personally I totally take your point about status updates but I'd have used my Twitter account a lot more if I'd needed to log in to see the content.
I'm really curious how this would've looked if he'd taken a mid-range budget approach to vision instead of being able to throw (tens of?) thousands of dollars of industrial motion capture cameras at it. Something like 2-4 global shutter cameras, all running a similar vision filter to what he first demo'd, feeding a kalman filter/state estimator to determine the ball's position. I can't blame hime for following the mantra of "don't build what you can buy (or get from a sponsor)" but it would be cool to see some affordable solutions (or attempted solutions) to this problem.
(I'm the person who made it) Yeah that's fair, but at least for me I wanted to focus on the interesting part of "making a foosball robot" which is the "foosball" part, not the "fiddle with a home built vision system that doesn't actually work" part. I realize this is a bit ironic given my channel name though haha (From Scratch).
Shows fuel mix, load, and price data for all of the ISOs. It's been really exciting to watch lately because you can see the huge uptick in solar and battery deployments in markets like CAISO and ERCOT.
I have a Google Photos album (shared with a few close family members) that automatically adds photos of my daughter and syncs them with the Aura frames her grandparents have. We've had this setup for the last two years and it works really well. I think it's literally the use-case Aura is targeting.
I don’t use Google any more but it looks like they have the same functionality for iCloud. I’ll have to give that a try since it’d be perfect for our older relatives.
You're dead on about rigid mounts for the pedals. One of the first issues many sim racers run into with regular cheap pedals and a desk mounted wheel is that they pedals slide once you start braking hard. And with load cell pedals the expectation is that you'll be using even more force, so that problem will just get worse.
As for pedal mounting location, many pedals can be top or bottom mounted if your racing chassis allows for it. However, floor mounted pedals offer the same performance as top mounted, match the majority of purpose built racing cars, and are simpler to mount in a sim racing chassis.
