Alex

We still have a lot of slag heaps in the top of some of our local hills. They make for some interesting mountain bike runs but they aren’t exactly diverse in floor coverage. Some pits are now tourist attractions but I don’t know what ongoing work is done to maintain the abandoned ones.

Nice. A friend of mine built one with ball bearings: https://youtu.be/40DkJ9vt5CI?si=2TupxpdiZkEg3nVB

What do people expect? Those servers aren’t free to run and they’re is only so much VC money to burn. That said I wouldn’t pay the various subscription levels that are currently being asked for. I pay for API use which is basically pay as you go. It also makes you think “does this task really need the non-free tier to complete?”.

I assume that is too cover the intelligence officers monitoring the Russian milbloggers.

I can imagine it but it certainly won’t be practical to implement in our lifetimes. There are certainly some observatories that benefit from being based in space (optical and infrared) and even gravitational detectors such as laser interferometers. However aside from the wide capture area radio telescopes need large amounts of compute to separate the signal from the noise. The amount of data that needs to be processed makes space based radio observatories very hard to implement.

Maybe the dark side of the moon will make a decent observatory one day but we haven’t set foot on the place for decades, let alone built anything so complex.

You would be hard pushed to build something like the SKA in space given it spans multiple countries and a significant arc of the earth.

Magic Wormhole - it’s been around awhile but it’s super useful for moving files from your internet connected server to your phone without going through multiple hops copying stuff to you local machine and finding a cable.

That’s how it starts. Before you know it you’ll be buying no-name smart bulbs from Ali Baba and investigating custom firmware for full local only control.

Very binary, much wow.

Quite. Go to the big services that know how to moderate and maintain (and importantly pay for) a public square. But also encourage the interesting ones enable federation for wider coverage.

There are some advantages to algorithms for discovery - it’s certainly is more user friendly. It’s just a shame they tend to enshitify or become toxic. Bluesky seem to offer an API of sorts to plug in feeds you create. Perhaps open algorithms are more accountable?

They won’t directly support it because in their view the Google Play process is a more secure way of verifying they supplied the binaries than is possible of f-droid. If reproducible builds were possible maybe there could be some mechanism to verify a given binary is built from a given commit of the source tree.

Other way around. Loyalty cards have always been about getting that sweet sweet data about customer habits.

When did this change? AIUI creators got a larger cut of YouTube premium views compared to ad share.

My Organic maps has a download screen for the maps which regularly update outside of the app itself.

I think you underestimate how much storage those tiles take up compared to the vector map data.

The data updates are handled separately in app

Won’t it? I thought you just needed to enable the apps you want. My fdroid AntennaPod is certainly usable in it.

So similar to premium bonds? Usually those are government backed though.

The phrase “no loose lottery” should be a red flag right away.