I always had a feeling that Bryan and people around kinda took the tech first approach and it never really came to a proper fruition. I think the ambition behind the engineering marvels they did over time was certainly bigger. Dtrace, Fishworks, Joyent, then this... so why is that? Perhaps the fierce refusal of joining the mainstream side (Linux)? Fingers crossed, but...
You've been downvoted to oblivion, but let me add a personal rebuttal for anyone else that finds themselves here: I don't agree at all about "not coming to proper fruition": DTrace was an absurdly outsized success by any metric; Fishworks was if anything too commercially successful (we did nearly $100M of business our first year!); Joyent represented a successful exit to Samsung, etc. I have been extraordinarily blessed to be in the right place at the right time with the right folks several times over -- but never more so than at Oxide: our ambition is absurdly ambitious, but it has never felt more attainable!
All of that said: thank you for keeping your fingers crossed. ;)
Quantum computers are a bit like fusion power plants: they already exist today and are very real, but they're also not very practical and it's an open question if they ever will be practical.
EU is not trying to impose regulation or standardization on highly innovative areas of hardware or chipset design or software design or anything of that matter. They are imposing it for something that has largely been understood and comoditized (electric charging of phones via cable and data transfer using open communication protocol) where there is little room for getting any kind of competitive advantage or differentiation or some significant innovation. Speaking about hindrance of progress is largely far fetched and not based on reality. Things like this are really not blocking any meaningful progress but they indeed are largely abused by enterprises to push proprietary things to consumer so that it can be monetized and consumer locked in the vendor ecosystem.
I agree with you that the only interesting aspect of blockchain is decentralized trust. But decentralized trust is a big thing. It is actually such a massive thing and people will sooner or later realize that. The magnitude of this thing is actually on a level of invention of democracy in social systems. It will change everything. And the application of decentralized trust (read - institution-less systems) goes far beyond decentralized finance.
If we look at the tendency of every single centralized system or organization to end up being either sub-optimal or evil or screwing individual we really have to ask whether there isn't a better way. Consider evolution of centralized political powers, dictatorships etc., consider evolution of big tech companies like google or facebook, consider evolution of big products.
If blockchain provides decentralized trust this can be used for almost evertyhing. And it doesn't really mean that you will run your trustless version of AWS directly on blockchain. For many applications the blockchain is there for trust and system of economy incentives for the actors in the systems (as these two things go hand by hand). The blockchain is not there to do the "business logic"
I don't agree with this point of view. I think that world is slowly evolving towards an age where this point of view is outdated.
There are things for which it makes sense to try and find a different model then traditional profit driven. A web browser is one of those things. It should be a neutral window into a neutral network.
Why doesn't Mozilla try to master donation marketing the way Wikipedia does? I am sure Firefox would have an active and regular donors would the large community of enthusiasts knew that otherwise it would be heading either towards EOL or towards making it commercial
Wikipedia does not require anything like the technical staff that Mozilla requires, and even Wikipedia has struggled to get by with only donations. Wikipedia does not run on end-user devices and does not have to deal with all the things that entails. A critical vulnerability in Wikipedia is a problem for Wikipedia; a critical vulnerability in Firefox is a problem for everyone who uses Firefox, and it needs to be fixed by someone who is not going to suddenly be swamped at their day job. Wikipedia can ignore new web standards that are not useful for Wikipedia itself; Firefox has to support most web standards to remain useful as a web browser.
The best case for a community-driven Firefox would be for big companies to provide support, either in the form of money or in the form of labor. That is more or less the model that has propelled the Linux kernel. Unlike the Linux kernel, there are few if any companies out there who can point to Firefox as a strategically important project that they are prepared to pay someone to work on, especially given the existence of good, actively-developed alternatives (including Chromium for those who require open source).
But isn't the containerization trend leading us to a completely opposite direction ie. scale-out by default and do that not only because of performance but mainly because of how you want to manage your production environment?
Out of the entertainment categories you just listed (porn, movies, music, books, games, sports) I think the porn can have the worst side effects on your life because it directly interfere with a relationship with your partner (many people go for porn rather then for sex with partner) or can demotivate one from searching for real relationships because porn is easier. And that can ultimately lead to worsening one's quality of life.
Do you have any credible, not thoroughly debunked research on this? I don't think anecdotes would be helpful here since most couples I know regularly commission porn of their characters and seem quite happy together.
Oh this actually brings up a whole other can of juicy worms: Forced monogamy.
Almost every culture guilts people into remaining in unsuccessful relationships and makes people feel like a failure if they have to break off a relationship.
"we'd have billions of dollars [1] to spend on something useful." - If companies stopped advertising tomorrow the people doing those ads wouldn't go building space rockets.
