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Well, he cashed in 2 billion of govt money for the moon mission and that doesn't look like it will fly.

Well, it is flying, it's the "refuel in space" and "re-entry in a manner such that it's reusable" parts which are questionable.

Yeah, Falcon rockets are a regular workhorse kinda rockets. Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced.

I mean they did a fine job there, but nothing to write home about IMHO.

And on the topic of reusability I can't really find much info besides that it is just partially reusable. Not sure what the point of it actually is. I guess what matters is the launch price?

The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.


> The question I still have it, wasn't SpaceX supposed to get USA back on the moon? And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.

AFAICT, SpaceX are not the bottleneck holding this back. Or at least, not the only one.

And they do have something to show for it, just not a complete final version. Starship is not yet fully reusable, and I will not make any bet on if they even can make it so as this is not my domain, but if you skip the re-use it is already capable of yeeting up a massive payload to LEO, enough to do a lunar mission.


> I guess what matters is the launch price?

It’s a commercial launch company. Of course the price matters and it being so much cheaper than the trash from ULA, Russia, etc is why there has been an explosion in new space endeavors (see the bandwagon launches).

> Nothing special about them. NASA could have made their own but someone decided it needs to be outsourced.

“Anyone could have done it bro,” is such an ignorant response. Nobody did it and there was the entire launch industry to collect if they did.

Even if NASA could have, they were derelict of duty in enabling space utilization because they never did it.

> And I heard they got billions in subsidies but have nothing to show for it.

Should probably check stuff before you repeat it. SpaceX has not received billions in subsidies for going to the moon. It did win a contract to do it, which as the name implies has required deliverables.


> It’s a commercial launch company

Its a private startup. It may operate on a loss, leveraged by private equity and government contracts.

Everything else you mention becomes irrelevant. Until we know the costs and operational margins, there is no certainty if they are delivering what they promised.


Sure, but the original Tesla car received exactly 0 Musk input. That was pretty much a done design when he bought the company. And ofc he ousted the original designers and tried to erase them from history. And the model 3 is pretty much building upon that.

AC propulsion was founded in 1992 and began developing an AC electric powertrain then, using lead acid batteries. By 2003 they had three prototypes built, and in 2003 they converted to lithium ion. At this point they were encouraged to commercialize.

Tesla was founded in 2003, and licensed the power train developed above. Musk bought into the company in 2004. Tesla teamed up with Lotus in 2004. The first Tesla Roadster prototype was shown in 2006 and delivery of production cars began in 2008. By 2009 they had made 500 of them.

I don't like the man very much either, but exaggerating the state of Tesla before Musk was involved is silly. Before the Model S, Tesla was very small and it wouldn't have surprised anybody if it dried up and blew away in the wind.


The OG roadster tesla was junk. The early model S was overpriced.

Specs and price of this are perfect, but I want AMD. Guess too picky? Anyone knows of a similar product with AMD CPU?


Something similar to reset PC would be snapshots and immutable systems.

Touch is notorious for there are very few touch sensors that actually have drivers for linux and vendors keep using unsupported ones.

Hybrid sleep... is actually a big problem as it replaced the regular sleep and now we are all in some deep deep muck.

And fractional scaling works fine on wayland, it is a recent feature of the last 1-2 years but seems to have stabilized.


Fractional scaling also works fine for decades in Xorg.


Do you see how the discourse has been shifted here? Some of us have nothing against ads per-se. We care about tracking.

How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? In my case it does not. As the tracked ads are usually worse as they will keep advertising me things I don't need anymore. Context based ads worked fine in the past and I don't really see why they cannot.

Also why does every web store need to show me ads? Don't they make money out of selling things? If they really have to, do they have to invade privacy? This is like walking into a physical store and them doing facial recognition, then showing you tailored ads/inventory. That feels creepy to me.


> How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better?

If you don’t want to be tracked, you shouldn’t be, but how could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards a 50 year old woman isn’t going to be the same ad to show a 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be better than ones that aren’t. You may not like the targeting and think it's invasive, because it is, but let's not pretend the tracking doesn't do something.


A 14-year-old is unlikely to read/look at the same content as a 50-year old woman. That's how contextual advertisement works.


contextual advertising isn't targeted advertising, yes.


Indeed. So no idea what your argument is about.

BTW, targeted ads need to be 100% to 700% more efficient than regular ads to be as profitable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...


Biggest issue with this is the modern web ads don't even work.

You get ads for fridge AFTER you bought one since they now know you browsed them.

What works is content based advertising - so advertise a power drill on a woodworking hobbyist site. No tracking required there. Conversion can be obtained when user clicks a link via redirect. Like in the good ol times.

But this modern approach that massively invades privacy has been sold to businesses and now they require it even though it is probably ineffectual.


> What works is content based advertising - so advertise a power drill on a woodworking hobbyist site. No tracking required there. Conversion can be obtained when user clicks a link via redirect. Like in the good ol times.

This still requires tracking to follow the user through the whole flow, which is required unless you want to be defrauded with fake users at the very least, but also very important to track the actual performance of each ad source.


Why do things that are important to the advertiser trump what's important to the user? I don't care how hard it is for you to track the performance of your ad sources, I just want you to stop tracking me.


Because without ads we're not profitable so there would be no service?

You can't just buy a domain, put your service out there, and expect it to gain traction. Advertising that you actually exist is essential for any service, but especially so for smaller businesses and startups.


I guess you have a point there.

I am trying to imagine a scenario where you just track the actual conversions (sales) and the only datapoint is where your customer originated from, something akin to podcasts/youtube giving affiliate links. That could work right? Or maybe I am missing something. If I am not it feels like the current model only benefits the middle man and is detrimental to everybody else.


It does work, I have seen enormous and well designed tests to show it.


Another backhanded way to forbid opensource solutions? Because now they will argue we need secure booted tamper-proof windows/mac os to make sure the proof is legit.


You can have first party trackers. That is not so hard. Every site onto itself is a first party tracker, but if your developers can't do it there are opensource solutions available to host.


1p solutions still require consent since the analytics banners are also there to enable processing of personal information in the first place (on the most primitive level IP address)


Oh? But the site is processing IP address when the web server logs your visit. Maybe I missed a part of GDPR somewhere, guess I gotta re-read it.


Again, great. Didn't happen and isn't required by GDPR though.


you CAN use analytics! Just need to use first party analytics... it is not so hard to set up, there are many opensource self-hosted options.

I hate how everyone and their mother ships all my data to google and others just because they can.


Let's not deceive ourselves -- first-party analytics are much, much harder to set up, and a lot less people are trained on other analytics platforms.

They're also inherently less trustworthy when it comes to valuations and due diligence, since you could falsify historical data yourself, which you can't do with Google.


The regulation is only concerned with cookies that are not required to provide the service. It makes no differentiation between first party and third party - if you use cookies for anything optional (like analytics) you need consent. So you can have third party non-cookie analytics for example without a banner.


Do you know an analytics service that actually does this? I've seen a bunch of "consentless" analytics solutions that seem to be violating GDPR one way or another because they use the IP address as an identifier (or as part of one).


Can you actually do meaningful analytics without the banner at all? You need to identify the endpoint to deduplicate web page interactions and this isn't covered under essential use afaik. I think this means you need consent though I don't know if this covered under GDPR or ePrivacy or one of the other myriad of regulations on this.


So take the IP, browser agent, your domain name and some other browser identifiers, stick them together and run them through SHA3-256, now you have a hash you can use for deduplication. You can even send this hash to a 3rd party service.

Or assign the user an anonymous session cookie that lasts an hour but contains nothing but a random GUID.

Or simply pipe your log output through a service that computes stats of accessed endpoints.

None of this requires a cookie banner.


I think this scheme still requires consent since you are processing pseudo anonymous identifiers that fall under personal information without the essential function basis. Hashing is considered insufficient under the GDPR iirc. Have you asked a lawyer about this?


> You need to identify the endpoint to deduplicate web page

You can deduplicate but you cannot store or transmit this identity information. The derived stats are fine as long as it’s aggregated in such a way that preserves anonymity


How would you deduplicate without a unique identifier or fingerprint of some sort (which would not preserve anonymity)?


No one needs to deduplicate over a longer period than a few minutes, or a single session. If you need that, then you're doing something shady. If a user visits your site, clicks a few things, leaves and comes back two hours later, you don't need know if it's the same person or not. The goal of analytics is to see how people in general use your website, not how an individual person use your website.

So just take IP address, browser details, your domain name, and a random ID you stick in a 30 minute session cookie. Hash it together. Now you have token valid for 30 minutes you can use for deduplication but no way of tying it back to particular user (after 30 minutes). And yes, if the user changes browser preferences, then they will get a new hash, but who cares?

Not rocket science.


> No one needs to deduplicate over a longer period than a few minutes, or a single session. If you need that, then you're doing something shady. If a user visits your site, clicks a few things, leaves and comes back two hours later, you don't need know if it's the same person or not.

Sure you do if for example you want to know how many unique users browse your site per day or month. Which is one of the most commonly requested and used metrics.

> So just take IP address, browser details, your domain name, and a random ID you stick in a 30 minute session cookie.

That looks a lot like a unique identifier which does require a user's consent and a cookie banner.

> Now you have token valid for 30 minutes you can use for deduplication but no way of tying it back to particular user (after 30 minutes)

The EU Court of Justice has ruled in the past that hashed personal data is still personal data.

> And yes, if the user changes browser preferences, then they will get a new hash, but who cares?

It will also happen after 30 minutes have passed which will happen all the time.

> Not rocket science.

And yet your solution is illegal according to the GDPR and does still not fulfil the basic requirement of returning the number of unique users per day or month.


Is your data retention

1. Necessary

2. Legitimate

3. Proportionate

4. Limited

If so, fire away you have nothing to fear but the limitations of your own compliance people.


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