It’s not that surprising once you know that their goal is to be completely independent for their US for their military equipment.

It includes the nuclear bomb, missiles, fighter jet, aircraft carrier, submarines, even space capabilities (even if this last part has been lacking a bit lately).

They don’t have the US military budget but they want the same level of technology without any ties to the US.

It means that they are exporting a lot to compensate for the high investments they are pouring into military technology.

Here is the share of global arms export per country.

Germany, Italy and the UK are also big exporters but still behind France.

France’s military industry is having wet dreams thinking about it.

If the US pulls out of NATO France becomes the biggest arms exporter of NATO and I would expect other countries will become less enthusiastic at the idea of buying US weapons systems.

I have a synology NAS with all my documents and family photos. I’m using the synology drive app on Linux and synology photo on android.

All of that is backed up on Backblaze

In the meantime Arianespace divided by 3 their number of rocket launches

It looks like they are still selling almost 7000 copies per week !

https://gamalytic.com/game/427520

Astronomer hate this simple trick to ruin all observations.

More specifically SpaceX got a contract to bulls the moon lander for NASA.

So SpaceX is going to land in the moon.

I would look into the Surfaces, you can find a cheap second hand one and install Linux on it.

Yep, I think we pictures are becoming a valuable as text and it is fine, we just need to get used to it.

Before photography became mainstream the only source of information was written, it is extremely simple to make a fake story so people had to rely on trusted sources. Then for a short period of history photography became a (kinda) reliable sources of information by itself and this trust system lost its importance.

In most cases seeing a photo means that we were seeing a true reflection of what happened, especially if we were song multiple photos of the same event.

Now we are arriving at the end of this period, we cannot trust a photo by itself anymore, tampering a photo is becoming as easy as writing a fake story. This is a great opportunity for journalists I believe.

I really don’t have much knowledge on it but it sound like it’s would be an actual good application of blockchain.

Couldn’t a blockchain be used to certify that pictures are original and have not been tampered with ?

On the other hand if it was possible I’m certain someone either have already started it, it is the prefect investor magnet “Using blockchain to counter AI”

I think a fork happening in a few years would be great, right now the app still need a bit of polishing but they are quickly improving it.

Yes, having a purely non-profit foundation from the start would have been better.

But, for me, it is still a better option than Signal or Matrix for messaging.

Signal is great but they need 10s of millions every year of donations. It means that they rely on the generosity of wealthy individuals to keep going. I’m worried it is not sustainable.

Matrix is better on this aspect since everything is open source, but the UC is not great on my opinion and I don’t fell comfortable switching to it for regular contract with family and friends. To be fair it’s been a while I haven’t used it so I downloaded Element but I am blocked on the account creation (the verification email is not arriving).

To compare I tried creating a new account with SimpleX and in less than a minute I was ready to chat. They rely on investors for now and don’t have a clear business model which is worrying but they are developping fast this way and being fully open source anyone could fork it at any time. The UX is great despite being heavily focused on privacy and security and have features that no other app have, you don’t need an email or phone to chat and if they ever start to enshitify someone can fork it.

Do pragmatically I think it is the best alternative right now and I am curious to see how they evolve.

FAQ SimpleX funding and business model

https://simplex.chat/blog/20240814-simplex-chat-vision-funding-v6-private-routing-new-user-experience.html

Right now it is investors and donations.

SimpleX as a very user friendly interface, uses decentralized server, does not requires your phone number or email and the server is really easy to set up (but not needed, for the regular user it just looks like any other messaging app)

Edit: I forgot to say that their app AND servers are open source.

If the tech bros really wants self driving transportation we can give them that:

Self driving subway, goes 75km/h in the city center, fully electric, convenient, consistent, safe.

Boeing was the most expensive bidder for this program.

Using off the shelve components is not an issue, even NASA does it but they have very precise procedures on how to select them.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/cots.pdf

Yes, it’s better for safety and health reason.

Plus 30km/h is in the speed range of bikes, so it become much more accessible to bike around in the city and more people start to do it.

About noise, above 30km/h electric cars are as noisy as gas powered one.

It’s better but not the panacea either.