[-] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Thats right in Paypal and Tesla's cases, he bought them and then gave himself the title of founder, but he did actually found SpaceX. Per wiki:

In early 2001, Elon Musk met Robert Zubrin and donated US$100,000 to his Mars Society, joining its board of directors for a short time.[11]: 30–31  He gave a plenary talk at their fourth convention where he announced Mars Oasis, a project to land a greenhouse and grow plants on Mars.[12][13] Musk initially attempted to acquire a Dnepr intercontinental ballistic missile for the project through Russian contacts from Jim Cantrell.[14]

Musk then returned with his team a second time to Moscow this time bringing Michael Griffin as well, but found the Russians increasingly unreceptive.[15][16] On the flight home Musk announced he could start a company to build the affordable rockets they needed instead.[16] By applying vertical integration,[15] using inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf components when possible,[16] and adopting the modular approach of modern software engineering, Musk believed SpaceX could significantly cut launch cost.[16]

In early 2002, Elon Musk started to look for staff for his company, soon to be named SpaceX. Musk approached five people for the initial positions at the fledgling company, including Michael Griffin, who declined the position of Chief Engineer,[17] Jim Cantrell and John Garvey (Cantrell and Garvey would later found the company Vector Launch), rocket engineer Tom Mueller, and Chris Thompson.[18][19] SpaceX was first headquartered in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Early SpaceX employees, such as Tom Mueller (CTO), Gwynne Shotwell (COO), and Chris Thompson (VP of Operations), came from neighboring TRW and Boeing corporations. By November 2005, the company had 160 employees.[20] Musk personally interviewed and approved all of SpaceX's early employees.[21]

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

You're right they should, and that was (eventually) pulling out the missiles they put in Turkey first which lead the USSR to respond in kind putting missiles in Cuba. So in this analogy that would be Russia GTFO of Ukraine.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

The Hungarian uprising

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (23 October – 4 November 1956; Hungarian: 1956-os forradalom), also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was an attempted countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the policies caused by the government's subordination to the Soviet Union (USSR).[nb 2] The uprising lasted 12 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on 4 November 1956. Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter of a million Hungarians fled the country.[5][6]

Consequently, Hungarians organized into revolutionary militias to fight against the ÁVH; local Hungarian communist leaders and ÁVH policemen were captured and summarily executed; and political prisoners were released and armed. To realize their political, economic, and social demands, local soviets (councils of workers) assumed control of municipal government from the Hungarian Working People's Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja). The new government of Imre Nagy disbanded the ÁVH, declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, and pledged to re-establish free elections. By the end of October the intense fighting had subsided.

The term "tankie" was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.[7][8]

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Plummer was further sentenced to three months in jail for interfering with national infrastructure by taking part in a slow march along Earls Court Road in west London in November 2023. Her co-defendants in that case, Chiara Sarti and Daniel Hall, received community orders.

She did exactly what you suggested, except you havent heard about it because it doesnt generate media coverage, this does.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Wishing something to be true doesnt make it so. I havent seen any credible assessments that Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal is so bad that it would be more that 90% non-functional. That's an insane level of broken that there is just no reason to assume it.

Put another way, way more than 10% of their tanks, planes, artillery and tactical ballistic missiles work, why would you assume that their strategic nukes are significantly worse?

All of which isnt to say we should cower before Putin's obviously empty nuclear threat, let Ukraine release the storm shadows! But to go from there to lol dumb Russians cant fire a single ICBM is just not credible.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

There is no reason to think Russia's entire strategic nuclear arsenal is unusable. It's entirely possible a decent chunk of it is due to corruption and neglect, but even if 10% work that's still 160 city destroying nukes being detonated across Europe and North America if the world goes full MAD. That probably wouldn't wipe out humanity but it would lead to hundreds of millions of people dying. Not something to be taken lightly.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 21 points 3 days ago

woah woah woah, lets have less of this looking at reality here. We all know generative AI is a fad that never works for anything and anyone using it is an idiot, we don't need to have our prejudices challenged

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 43 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

They might not make a profit, but Altman will be able to extract a lot of wealth by using 7% of a billions of dollars valuation. Even if he doesn't sell any he can use it as collateral against loans to effectively turn them into cash.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

But there's nothing to stop a stalker just making another account to follow you if they really want to. I dont see blocking doing much good there as there is no such thing as being able to stop your public posts being viewed, because they're public.

I still think its a bad idea to remove blocking just becuase people want to remove things they dont want to see (like right wing billionaire arseholes) but I dont think giving people a false sense of security is a good reason against it.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

I presumed you were refering to this which was quite high profile at the time.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 83 points 5 days ago

Thats was a. From years before proton, b. from a dev renowned for being linux hostile, c. ignores the fact that linux users are far more likely to be technical and likely to submit a proper bug report rather than shrugging and moving on.

[-] Womble@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago

It was, originally. GPT-2 was eventually released after some push back from openAI and the models prior to that were fully released immediately. Its been apparent for quite a while that OpenAI have been transitioning from a non-profit org interested in pushing technology forward to a VC backed monopoly-seeking company. The big Altman putsch/counter putsch was just the solidfying of that.

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I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”

Global civil society, though, finds it incredibly difficult to reject the free speech argument out of hand, because the alternative is so dark: that a number of billionaires – not just Musk but also Thiel with Rumble, Parler’s original backer, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of Robert Mercer, funder of Breitbart), and, indirectly, billionaire sovereign actors such as Putin – are successfully changing society, destroying the trust we have in each other and in institutions. It’s much more comfortable to think they’re doing that by accident, because they just love “free speech”, than that they’re doing that on purpose. “Part of understanding the neo-reactionary and ‘dark enlightenment’ movements, is that these individuals don’t have any interest in the continuation of the status quo,”

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Earlier this year, a Boeing aircraft's door plug fell out in flight – all because crucial bolts were missing. The incident shows why simple failures like this are often a sign of larger problems, says John Downer.

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In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued that technical progress didn’t mean fewer jobs. He’s still right.

Compton drew a sharp distinction between the consequences of technological progress on “industry as a whole” and the effects, often painful, on individuals.

For “industry as a whole,” he concluded, “technological unemployment is a myth.” That’s because, he argued, technology "has created so many new industries” and has expanded the market for many items by “lowering the cost of production to make a price within reach of large masses of purchasers.” In short, technological advances had created more jobs overall. The argument—and the question of whether it is still true—remains pertinent in the age of AI.

Then Compton abruptly switched perspectives, acknowledging that for some workers and communities, “technological unemployment may be a very serious social problem, as in a town whose mill has had to shut down, or in a craft which has been superseded by a new art.”

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Because Boeing were on such a good streak already...

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Womble

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