Given the state of Mozilla I hope the EU is debating “do we build our own browser or something to replace web browsers?” Likewise for a web search index.

The big web exists because 1) VC money, 2) massive surveillance rewarded by lack of privacy laws in the USA, 3) US hegemony, and 4) cheap energy and a stable climate. All of those are going away. Most of the big sites are like an 18th century sugar plantation owner’s formal garden and pet composer, they lose money or barely break even but M$, Google, and Facebook have so much money that they don’t care. Then one day the plantation owner hears that Saint-Domingue is free or the colonials are in revolt, and a few months later the servants are told that economies must be made.

And how does a 23-year-old whose parents run a Chinese restaurant have >$600,000 to found a company? Austria is a conservative country with a lot of old money and laws that are not friendly to small speculative businesses.

Founders’ credentials include a PhD, experience developing software, and being ranked #4 in League of Legends (European edition)

It does look like the facial recognition in the support.apple.com link is opt-in!

I am told that Apple, DropBox, etc. have done this for years, often in the name of “fighting CSAM” or “helping you organize your photos”. https://support.apple.com/en-us/108795 Agree that its a very good reason not to touch corporate cloud services and to not let people take digital photos of your face even if they promise not to share them! I do not trust any company with physical assets in the USA not to be penetrated by three-letter-organizations and data brokers.

We did quite well with few long Internet videos 20 years ago, and we will do well again 50 years from now when the corporate Internet has collapsed like the Qing Dynasty or the East India Company and the Internet is decentralized, low-bandwidth, and solar-powered

They don’t like to talk about solar panels and battery technology do they? But those are obvious examples of a technology on the vertical part of the S-curve right now. And computing is not just hardware (Moore’s Law and blue LEDs) but also algorithms like A* or ActivityPub Protocol and software like Google Search.

It reminds me of the “infinite scroll” archive of a Substack blog which also freezes or crashes if you search a blog with a few hundred posts so fortunately they don’t encourage you to post often (picks up note card) um, although they encourage you to post often

Stripe the payment processor published a book asking “what if bubbles are good and necessary? Was it economically rational to discover America?” The authors have a startup called Anomaly Capital. https://press.stripe.com/boom

Scroll down to the book by a Dwarkesh Patel who interviewed all our favorite people.

I have never seen slop on Mastodon, but I often see it when I am logged in to Facebook (both suggested by the websites, and shared by people).

"You know, I never defrauded anyone,” says Sam Bankman-Fried

“You know, I never sent the boys across the Isonzo without believing we could win,” said Luigi Cadorna