paradox2011

Not for me, I've had an increase 🥲

Haha, yeah time travel strays in to deus ex machina territory pretty easily. It can make for an interesting story if done well, but usually ends up feeling cheap and lowering the emotional stakes.

Interesting, I'm working my way through Voyager now, I'll keep this in mind when I run in to those episodes. It makes me think of Stargate Universe too, lots of time travel in that show. They seem to always give you the perspective of the successive version of the group and the "originals" get sloughed off pretty regularly.

Supported and justified by the stockholders isn't surprising. It's the fact that this column writer is so unabashed in their reasoning that surprised me. It's not often that you see regular, bottom level consumers enthusiastically using the same reasoning as a stock holder. Usually they come at it from more of a "they produce great products, they care about providing a great service" standpoint. However, someone who writes articles for a platform called "Apple Insider" is likely to have some level of stock in the company.

I've never stumbled across Apple Insider before, it's quite the apologist for the company. Here's some tone deaf quotes from the article that made me laugh:

"It's true that the buck stops at the CEO, but without Tim Cook, Apple would not have so many bucks."

I guess if you make a lot of money you get a pass for allowing misleading and anti-consumer marketing campaigns?

"If billions and trillions are hard numbers to imagine, here's another one. Apple could, if its valuation could be converted to cash without loss, give every person living in the continental USA a free iPhone 16e — and then 13 spare ones. Each."

I love how they chose to illustrate Apple's obscene level of wealth with how much it could benefit people if they ever distributed that wealth through altruistic giving 😂

Heres a summary of the predictions made, from never all the way up to within the year. It seems to me the closer you get to the dollar bill the sooner the projections become.

"Some experts predict it will never happen..."

"Some experts argue that human intelligence is more multifaceted than what the current definition of AGI describes." (That AGI is not possible.)

"Most agree that AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century."

"Some researchers who’ve studied the emergence of machine intelligence think that the singularity could occur within decades."

Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040"

"Entrepreneurs are even more bullish, predicting it around ~2030"

"The CEO of Anthropic, who thinks we’re right on the threshold—give it about 12 more months or so."

Seriously. It seems like the subconscious anxieties and fears of the writer's mind come through in statements like this and a few others. Whatever positives (real and imagined) there are about the situation, there is an underlying loss of personal autonomy that causes a sense of unease. The thing that's continuing to intrigue me now is: did the writer intend for that to come through, showing the losses a society of that nature would sustain as a commentary on those that promote it, or are they unaware that their words reveal that distress and anxiety? Idk, weird article.

"Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me."

The consensus seems to be that this is a propaganda piece (or at least heavily opinionated by the writer) but I just don't understand how they could write this with a positive frame of mind. The article is a strange mixture of perspectives that don't seem consistent. Bizarre.

You're doing the lord's work 🫡

I'd suggest looking in to it farther. The commenter above basically covered it, but no, beeper is not all closed source. Their hosted server has never been open source, but all the self-hosted bridges have been, and continue to be. You can run your own, open source, self-hosted beeper server, just like you've always been able to. There's nothing embrace, extend extinguish about that.

Where did you read that? The github pages are all still open and receiving updates, you can still self-host the bridges and its under the apache-2.0 license, just like it's always been.

Development is pretty rapid too. I didn't track the features on the updates, but new versions were getting pushed regularly. No mobile app which was kind of a bummer, but the progressive web app integration was pretty good. It felt like a mobile app.

Edit: I forgot to mention the note sharing function, it shares a URL of the note that allows the recipient to view and edit the note through the URL. It was a little janky when compared with sharing a note between two users using themselves app, but it still worked pretty decently.