The word of mouth was real. I was working in tech at the time, and had Google recommended to me by a mate. I tried it, and it rocked. This would be about 1996, I guess, somewhen around then.
Every techie converted to Google, and we converted our friends and family. Sure they got media coverage, but remember at that time journos had very little clue about tech and relied on their techie friends and family for tips about what was going on. And, obviously, the internet was the big story at the time. I would absolutely not be surprised if it turned out that Google paid nothing for media coverage and were fighting off journos clamouring for interviews.
As far as I'm aware, PageRank was a completely unique innovation that no-one else had done or tried before. There may have been imitators, but they never got the traction that Google did.
By 2000, and AdWords and all the rest, Google was already the dominant search engine, at least with tech folks. SEO was just beginning around this time, because of that dominance.
And yeah, Gemini is an also-ran, despite all the money and tech expertise Google have thrown at it. It'll be interesting to see if they cancel it, like they have other products that have not done as well in the market (G+ being the classic case). Same for Meta (and, well, Meta).
Personally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society.
We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust.
Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareholders is an increase in share price, effectively speculation rather than dividends as the method of returning value to shareholders. So we're incentivising companies to be constantly pushing their share price up (rather than paying decent dividends), which does bad things to both the company and the economy as a whole.
It's not how the system was intended to work and we find ourselves on a treadmill of constant growth that is killing everything good.
Valuing anything by its expected, long term value is just accurate. You'd consider the longevity of, say, a garment when you purchase it. The fact that a car has a lot of miles in it, and therefore will need replacing earlier, is something that any reasonable person will consider with its valuation. We spend money educating children not because of the value of the knowledge that second, but the expected value in the future, including how it'll be useful to learn other things.
So of course we price businesses based on the expected long term value of the shares, as best as we can guess it. But the fact that a company degrades in value as it "overgrows", and engorges itself to become an entity that can't innovate or do anything efficiently in itself goes into the price too. It's not as if a place like IBM doens't want to grow: We just know they won't.
As for speculation rather than dividends, I suspect the real medium why this happens isn't just need for infinite growth: Again, as growth expectations slow down, price moderates: See Paypal vs Stripe. The issue is mroe of a principal-agent situation, as it's very difficult for the median shareholder to, say, force Zuck to stop spending money on the metaverse. And it's not just at the top level: We have a lot of incentives in organizations for people to push for more hires, even when there's very little value to be had. Anyone with a long career can see how much less tense a growing company is that one that has decided its headcount is stuck for a long time, or possibly shrinking.
Principal Agent problems are just much more annoying to put a blame on, because instead of being able to blame some exec all on their own, we get to look at ourselves too, and how what is good for us differs so much from what is good for employers too. The blame is spread thinly, and the behaviors that would lead to more efficient companies are also worse for workers. Then it's suddenly people easier to like, and we don't like where "try to be profitable at the most optimal size" takes us.
Isn't it much simpler than that? Dividends and profits are taxed. Reinvesting to grow revenue isn't. That's why you see companies doing stock buybacks; prevents them from paying taxes, prevents their shareholders from paying taxes.
When humans are involved the waters are pretty muddy and the forecasts of possible growth rosier than reality. Seeing companies losing money hand over first while those same companies get insanely high valuations is common enough that these are obviously short term money grabs before the house of cards collapses.
Imagine valuing Google in early 2000s on its revenue and dividends. It would have nearly zero value, but if you bought then you knew it was going to be one of the biggest companies in the world.
Only boring stable companies that have no growth like Coca-Cola make sense only valuing without further growth.
So speculative fiction, making this basically gambling since the entropy for picking a "winner" is so high. For every Google there's a hundred others that had similarly brilliant ideas that either flopped or failed to monetize. Your anecdotal example is just retroactive survivorship bias.
Agree, but Coca-Cola has plenty of value despite being "boring" and "stable".
The post I was replying to was saying that SpaceX had no growth and therefore little value. That's a mindset that sees companies as speculative assets that are only valuable if their price is set to change in a way that a speculative profit can be made.
SpaceX is making money and doing well, the business fundamentals are working out, and it is valuable because of that. If it turns into a boring, stable, company then that's a good thing - it's less likely to spend $10B of shareholder funds chasing some sci-fi pipe dream (instead of, say, spending $1B testing its assumptions first) in the hope of continuing to be valued as a "high-growth" stock.
Coca Cola indeed has a lot of value its market capitalization is USD 76 billion making it one of the 30 most valuable companies in the world!
The problem with SpaceX is that its valuation is almost entirely driven by its expected future growth. For 2025 SpaceX reported EBITDA of USD 7.5 billion. Other mature aerospace companies (Lockheed, Northman, Airbus, Boeing etc.) are currently valued as ~19x EBITDA (i.e., Market Cap / EBITDA is ~19x). But SpaceX is being valued at 166x EBITDA (USD 1.25 trillion market cap / USD 7.5 billion EBITDA).
What drives this difference in valuation? The answer is quite simple, investors expect the EBITDA to grow and quite rapidly. EBITDA could grow via higher margins (EBITDA margins is EBITDA / Revenue, and for SpaceX it is already a decent 50%), but even at 100% EBITDA margin (i.e., zero operating cost) its valuation multiple would b 83x EBITDA. So the only way to justify SpaceX valuation is if its revenue grows and gorws rapidly.
A quick back of the envelop calculation would shows that investors expect SpaceX revenue to grow at minimum of 65-70% annually for the next 5 years. If the revenue grows at less than that the investors are unlikely to earn a good return on their investment.
People have been speculating on future returns since forever.
The East India company (an example of capitalism gone very very wrong) was speculatively founded with £4m (in today’s money) and went on to corner half of global trade.
This rose-tinted past of honest capitalism did not exist.
You’re free to invest that way if you want. You might one day wake up and wonder why your Blockbuster Video shares did so badly. But Netflix seemed way overpriced.
Investing in future prospects encourages companies to plan for the future, rather than extract what they can from the present. The stock price is a big motivation for execs, so they can only invest in R&D if the market understands why it makes sense to spend money now in expectation of future profits.
The fact that capitalist systems require unbounded growth for "success" is the real society killer, but crazy valuations is definitely a concrete symptom of this as we reach growth limitations; we're now pushed to "just assume" that the growth is still plausible when it's clearly not to keep the status quo.
I am in a gravitational field. I have no idea what my acceleration is, I just know that I feel 1G (I could be falling in a stronger gravity and only feel 1G, or I could be climbing in a weaker gravity and feel 1G). The only way of determining it is to see if I'm moving relative to the stuff around me. Even then, that's not definite - I could be in an elevator and everything around me is also accelerating.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just pointing out that there are circumstances where "you can determine your acceleration without any external reference" isn't true. You might even say that this is relative to your circumstances ;)
According to general relativity, you (and the ground) are accelerating at 1g, and feel weight because your inertia resists that acceleration. If you jump off a cliff, you'll stop accelerating for a bit, until the ground hits you.
Edit to reply:
> I am standing on the ground. I feel 1G acceleration. My speed is not changing. How much am I accelerating?
You are accelerating at 1g through curved spacetime. Newtonian "speed" behaves strangely in curved spacetime.
> According to general relativity, you (and the ground) are accelerating at 1g
I don't believe this is correct. If I lock two rockets in opposition to each other, they aren't accelerating. They're pushing at each other. And their propellant is accelarating away. But their displacement and orientation are unchanging, which means their velocity is zero which means acceleration isn't happening.
Similarly, the normal force resists your gravitational force to produce zero net acceleration. (An object at rest in a gravity well is its own local frame.)
> If you jump off a cliff, you'll stop accelerating for a bit, until the ground hits you
I don't believe this is correct. In GR, free fall is still inertial motion. You're just free of fictitious forces and thus following the curvature of spacetime.
As I understand it, in GR acceleration is indistinguishable* from gravity, so while you're on the ground feeling 1 gee, you're being accelerated up at 1 gee, and so is the ground.
When you're in free-fall, that's when you're in a non-accelerating frame, even though a non-relativistic description** would say that you are, in fact, accelerating.
Caveat: I only do physics as a hobby, neither academically nor professionally, so take with appropriate degree of doubt.
It is correct, and you're also right that two rockets tethered to each other would not feel acceleration. The acceleration we feel in Earth's gravitational field is affecting our speed, though - it's slowing down the speed at which we move towards the future.
You say later that you think gravity and acceleration look the same but cannot be the same , which is funny since that’s exactly what relativity says: if two things are indistinguishable from each other even in principle, then they must be the same. Which is what led Einstein to realize that gravity really is just a curvature in space time. Hard to wrap your head around that! But if you study relativity, you eventually understand what being relative actually means.
You need to take into account your entire 4-vector for speed. You don't just have a speed in the 3 spatial coordinates, you're also moving thorough the "time" coordinate, and that is happening at a slower pace near a large mass like the Earth than it would of you were far away from here.
Not really, no. The ground isn't moving. I'm not moving. I get that if the ground wasn't there, I would be moving, but that's not the same thing, I think?
Like I said in another response, I have always been told that acceleration is change in velocity over time. If my velocity is not changing, I don't understand how I'm accelerating?
I do understand that gravity exerts a force that is indistinguishable from acceleration, which was my original point. But that doesn't mean it is acceleration.
You can always hold an accelerometer in your hand. If you did so now, assuming you're on Earth's surface, it'd register approximately 9.8m/s/s pointing in the upward direction.
You could also perform one of many historical experiments, such as dropping an object from an elevated height with careful timing, or rolling a round ball down a gently sloped track, and so on.
I don't think I understand the difference. I have always been told that acceleration is change in velocity over time. Is that wrong? Are there other types of acceleration?
I used Hugo, told the marketing people to send me a markdown file and I'd load it up to Hugo. That was clearly too painful for them. So I told them to send me a Word doc and I'd convert it to markdown and load it up. That was too painful. I told them to send me an email with the words and images and I'd work out the rest. That was too painful.
They got some marketing agency to rewrite the entire marketing site in Wordpress, and then we had to implement some godawful kludges to get our backend to redirect to their shitty WP host for the appropriate pages. It was awful.
But the marketing folks were finally happy. They could write a blog post (that no-one read) themselves in the actual CMS and see it go live when they pushed the button.
We spent thousands, in a cash-strapped startup, dealing with this bullshit.
It's more like, through the combined use of drones, sea-drones, and anti-ship missiles, backed by the productive might and surveillance capability of NATO, against a weak Russian navy. Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
> Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war.
Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer.
If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those)
To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat.
the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)
In addition, they're doing some very shady stuff re: captchas and accessibility, most likely running some secret patches on their server that they're not publishing in their source tree.
Every company or entity changes over time. Codeberg is great, but with more people using it for free, without donating, and worse, more people abusing the service with some bs AI generate code, malware, etc, more expensive will get to keep it running.. for now they have money, but as e.V in Germany, you survive either from members or from donations.. So use Codeberg, but most important, support it!
What's the trade-off between this and ActivityPub?
I might be being cynical but I think I've seen this story play out before. Did Bluesky genuinely believe that AP wouldn't work for their use-case, or did they want to own the protocol?
A couple of pretty good reasons (except the one about lexicons IMHO), but I don’t think it’s reasonable to believe the maker of a 15th standard was “right” about not using the previous 14s. As far as I understand, all the use cases described in OP’s article can be fulfilled with ActivityPub.
I’d love to see an article showing use cases in both AtProto and ActivityPub and showing why AtProto is the superior choice.
(To me, the hype for AT protocol vs. ActivityPub feels like the hype for DevEnv vs. Nix – I’m slightly upset that the latter isn’t taking off because the former decides to do its own thing and not contribute to the base projects. I’d love to be convinced wrong!)
Wide C2S and ActivityPods support would address most of what led to the creation of AT. Lacking that, they made AT.
The rest is revealed in the developer community. AT and AP followed similar timelines for the first year or so, then diverged.
The main thing I heard from AP devs is that it's hard even before dealing with Mastodon quirks for any meaningful connection to the AP network. AP's early developer energy looks like AT's now, except AT's has been sustained for years and is only growing.
AP hasn't even managed a second conference, and that's where all the big AT stuff started at its first one. For example: Streamplace was new and awkward to use last year. This year, it was the official streaming platform with three simultaneous streams and had integration with the official ticketing system. I can't even list all the AT platforms people used to coordinate, trade info, etc during the conference. None of them had to deal with a clunky API since it's all JSON in a standard format on your PDS through a standard interface.
This is the best question, because my gut is that "feature" that it touts over AP is much more a dangerous bug.
This is "take it with you."
What "take it with you" does in the ATProto way shores up and makes more robust the permanence of what you post. Sounds good, but also potentially harmful in terms of surveillance et al.
The ActivityPub approach is less robust and theres more room for deletion and non-reliability. Which in some ways is bad, but also helps in terms of "plausible deniability."
In other words, if you're Big Brother, you much prefer ATProto.
A system where people derive a mistaken sense of privacy seems more dangerous. AT is getting something in permissioned data that's closer to what people think they get on AP.
On one hand atproto has content-addressed storage and portable identity that AP still lacks (but could have!), on the other hand atproto is far more centralized. The data layer is decentralized but everything on top is effectively centralized. Phrases like "practical decentralization" and "credible exit" are used to describe this design.
This all depends on fantasy tech and/or totalitarian control of tech.
Who verifies that the person verifying the child's age is actually authorised to do that? Who verifies that verification? And so on up. This needs a chain of trust that can only end up at government. And that chain of trust will then be open to being abused by shitty politicians.
What mechanism in (e.g) Linux is responsible for implementing this age verification so that it cannot be tampered with (or trivially overruled by a sudo call)? Which organisation is legally liable if that mechanism doesn't do its job? How can we stop someone from overwriting that mechanism with their own, in an open OS that is deliberately designed to allow anyone with root to change anything on it?
What you propose here is the death of open computing. And I personally believe that we would be much better off as a species if we kept open computing and just taught our kids how to handle social media better.
> What mechanism in (e.g) Linux is responsible for implementing this age verification so that it cannot be tampered with (or trivially overruled by a sudo call)? Which organisation is legally liable if that mechanism doesn't do its job? How can we stop someone from overwriting that mechanism with their own, in an open OS that is deliberately designed to allow anyone with root to change anything on it?
This one is easy. You just don't require all devices to do that. The parent isn't required to give the kid a general purpose computer. You don't need to prevent every device from running DOOM, only one device, and then parents who want to impose such restrictions get the kid one of those.
- The line between "general purpose computer" and "not that" is weird. Android is an implementation of Linux, after all. Probably the best example is a Steam Deck. It's just Arch Linux, you can get to a desktop on it no problem, and you get sudo access and can install whatever you like on it. Are you saying that Responsible Parents should not get their kids a Steam Deck?
- And that raises the point of how responsible are we making parents for technical decisions that they do not necessarily have the knowledge to implement? If a child works out how to circumvent the age restriction and look at boobies (or whatever) and an authority finds out, are the parents liable? Are they likely to be prosecuted? Isn't this just adding more burden and bureaucracy to the job of parenting?
> Are you saying that Responsible Parents should not get their kids a Steam Deck?
I'm saying Authoritarian Parents should not get their kids a Steam Deck. If the kid can run arbitrary code then they can get a VPN and access websites hosted in Eastern Europe and then any of this is moot because there is no law you can impose on Facebook to do anything about it.
> If a child works out how to circumvent the age restriction and look at boobies (or whatever) and an authority finds out, are the parents liable?
No, because the parents rather than the "authorities" (who TF is that anyway?) should be the ones in charge of the decision whether the kid can look at boobies to begin with.
The devices that offer a mode that blocks all unapproved content are presumably going to advertise it. If you buy something that doesn't say it has anything like that, and then it doesn't, that's the expected result. If you buy a device that says it does and then it doesn't, now you have a bone to pick with the OEM.
The word of mouth was real. I was working in tech at the time, and had Google recommended to me by a mate. I tried it, and it rocked. This would be about 1996, I guess, somewhen around then.
Every techie converted to Google, and we converted our friends and family. Sure they got media coverage, but remember at that time journos had very little clue about tech and relied on their techie friends and family for tips about what was going on. And, obviously, the internet was the big story at the time. I would absolutely not be surprised if it turned out that Google paid nothing for media coverage and were fighting off journos clamouring for interviews.
As far as I'm aware, PageRank was a completely unique innovation that no-one else had done or tried before. There may have been imitators, but they never got the traction that Google did.
By 2000, and AdWords and all the rest, Google was already the dominant search engine, at least with tech folks. SEO was just beginning around this time, because of that dominance.
And yeah, Gemini is an also-ran, despite all the money and tech expertise Google have thrown at it. It'll be interesting to see if they cancel it, like they have other products that have not done as well in the market (G+ being the classic case). Same for Meta (and, well, Meta).
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