lung

That's so cool, maybe the first time in the history of humanity that we see open source tax software, that's guaranteed to be accurate to the law. For one year at least

It runs Scala / Java, and has docker configs, decent documentation. And an ominous message explaining that some parts were too secret to open source so they had to rewrite chunks of it. Overall, it seems like it was a big project just to get this published, and I am impressed they managed it, given the software team was comprised of 3 different agencies and several contractor firms

Power of what sort?

Yes, welcome

Whoa! You can get energy from gravity and spin?? Who would have guessed

ostensibly

That's just any store

You may find it funny to learn that Signal's early development was funded by an arm of the govt that focuses on distributing ideology worldwide -- US Agency For Global Media (Radio Free Asia and Open Technology Fund)

You may also find it interesting that Trump eliminated this entire agency about two months ago

Why did the USA run all these programs and fund privacy software? Ostensibly to help people in oppressive regimes communicate. To broadcast alternative media

Idk he makes some pretty wild claims along the way

• AI is only going to become more expensive for corps with time. This has ~never been true in computing, where specialized hardware and optimizations trend costs down
• That marketing managers are dumbass easy marks who are wasting their company money. Every half way decent marketing department measures outcomes and knows exactly how much money is generated by their activities

Well...

If you follow the link to fedidb, refer to the "mau" monthly active users. Do some brief math and realize that lemmy.world accounts for about 50% of all active users

Email market share is harder, but many estimate that Gmail accounts for over 40%. Many many orgs use Google apps to make custom branded gmails with their own domains too

This is the typical "business power law" that states that the top player should control about 50%, the second player about 25%, etc. This is just kinda how the world works

Well, thanks for explaining

I genuinely have no idea how to defend tech from big money. The reality is that the startup industry as a whole has been purchased by the vc machine, and success in any venture is highly coupled with your business network connections. They can afford to outpace you: it's play ball or fall behind. There is very much a "silicon valley royalty" oligarchy that cooperates and prevents real threats to their power

The world of tech VC is structured into a heirarchy where smaller VCs make money by selling their risky ventures to more powerful VCs after the company proves itself. It's a pyramid

The case studies are infinite here, but just look at something disruptive like Bitcoin was. The play? Blockstream was given 75m by the banksters to buy up the developers and communication forums. Eventually they were able to obtain the commit rights to the Bitcoin repo, and control the narrative on Reddit. At that point, the revolution was over, and the controlled manipulation to make money began -- a new unregulated space where they could move the price however they wanted

I don't really believe in the fediverse. Why? Because of the business power law: the top entity in any space controls more than the rest combined. Stuff like email providers consolidated. We already see lemmy.world as pretty much "the" instance. Imagine they sell out, which is a very hard temptation to refuse at a certain scale. Or big tech makes the hot new instance and out funds it