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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • This grant was originally not going to even allow satellite providers - the idea was it was going to go to hundreds of small fiber and wireless ISPs who needed the money to build infrastructure to rural areas that is not profitable on the face of it.

    A one-time grant like this isn’t going to make or break Starlink - they’re not building anything infrastructure with the money (the satellites burn up in a few years and need to be replaced - are they going to need ongoing grants?), so basically it’s just giving free money to SpaceX. Whereas if the money went to a company building fiber or wireless repeaters that money would pay itself back over and over again and the fees would just pay for maintenance


  • "RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps"

    If SpaceX had bid on a lower tier of service that they were actually capable of delivering, they would have been fine.

    This grant was not designed to fund the development of new technology, it was designed to build infrastructure (fiber, 5G, WISPs, etc) and they were originally going to exclude satellites from the bidding completely. The companies who would have used the grant to build fiber or set up point-to-point wireless would have had no problem meeting the requirements since it’s all proven technology.






  • They sell access to data (i.e., ads) - that is far more lucrative than selling the data itself. Only companies that are bad at tech just sell the data (credit card companies, retail, etc)

    Cambridge Analytica was far more stupid - that was them just giving away data for free. Their old Facebook Apps APIs were wide open to collect whatever for free for anyone who would use your app (CA made those “do this fun quiz and invite your friends!” kind of FB games) and the APIs just said “we require you to delete this data when the user is done with the app” with no way to enforce it







  • the CPU architecture is not as directly tied to the software as it once was

    Yeah it used to be that emulating anything all would be slow as balls. These days, as long as you have a native browser you’re halfway there, then 90% of native software will emulate without the user noticing since it doesn’t need much power at all, and you just need to entice stuff that really needs power (Photoshop etc), half of which is already ARM-ready since it supports Macs.

    The big wrench in switching to ARM will be games. Game developers are very stubborn, see how all games stopped working on Mac when Apple dropped 32-bit support, even though no Macs have been 32-bit for a decade.