The FTC is worried that the big tech firms will further entrench their monopolies. They are doing a lot of good stuff lately; an underappreciated boon of the Biden Presidency. Lina Khan looks to be really set on fixing decades of mistakes.
I guess they just want to know if these deals lock out potential competitors.
I feel like the whole Reddit AI deal is a trap. If any real judgment comes down about data use Reddit is an easy scapegoat. There was basically nothing stopping them from scraping the site for free.
Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit’s licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That’s really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.
Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. “Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee.”
Oh don’t worry, they’re not giving him the real spy satellite optics for these flying digital cameras. A low orbit trash satellite cluster that will waste itself in no time is just a nice thing for the DoD to shovel money into.
Each keyhole satellite, by comparison, costs $1 billion.
They are just finally moving on from getting fleeced by the traditional massive defense contractors. Starlink satellites are an extremely cool piece of engineering, and spaceX is one of the most impressive engineering companies in the world. I’m sure these spy sats they are making are fairly advanced
Starsheild is just a satellite bus, which is just sorta like the central building block for satellites. It handles communication, navigation, etc. The government will likely be in total control of the system once it’s deployed.
Probably a lot from star link business but separately, launching a government satellite does not give you continued access to that satellite’s business.
There are about half a dozen small companies working on this but apparently the government is more interested in spending money on a company with zero experience with earth imaging. Dunno how I feel about the USG just putting all their eggs in Elon’s batshit insane basket
My guess is the optics themselves don’t need to be very mind blowing anymore. If this is a constellation, you will basically have the ability to combine many lesser quality images into higher res versions for review, and in near realtime, and from many different angles. Slap some AI upscaling magic in there, some object tracking and things like gait and attribute recognition, and you have something fairly close to ‘Enemy of the State’ capabilities, minus all the BS zooming and looking through walls.
It’s not necessarily imaging as in optics. Could be OPIR, encrypted comms, space to space ASAT, or any number of other things besides just earth imaging.
I assume the hard part here is the deployment of thousands of low orbit satellites at a rapid rate, not the imaging. The government surely already has the imaging tech, it’s getting a swarm of satellites up there what’s no other company has proven able to do.
See Wendover Productions’ most recent video, “The Increasing Reality of War in Space” (from around 7:54); they talk about SpaceX launching unknown satellites and not reporting it either.
oh that’s that same shit that bing does that ends up filling the top quarter of my search results page with useless chatGPT garbage that doesn’t help my search query (both my employer and my school have forced edge+bing as the standard browser and it makes me want to die)
As someone in IT I get an employer enforcing Edge (I don’t do that, but I understand why an IT department might), but why would anyone enforce a specific search engine? That seems bonkers to me.
Well, it’s the system default, and while you can change it during each session or manually browse to Google/DDG if you want, it will always reset the next time you log in… I am incredibly lazy and 99% of the time will smash my super quick search into the omnibar and end up stuck with it until I eventually get mad enough at Bing to force keep a tab open with Google.
Ah, I see what you mean. That still sucks but at least you still have the (less convenient) option of using an alternative. I had understood it as being that they blocked everything but Bing.
Google Search was so good when it came out. Complete polar opposite to the cluttered and bloated Yahoo Search. Haven't really using it for years now because the search results became worse and worse, especially when that rounded edge theme came along.
It is useless in searching for new info, I mostly use it for searching for things I already know/seen, but don’t want to bother with URLs or bookmarks.
Even then, I have to scroll to the middle of the page, to get to the actual results below all the sponsored crap.
No clutter, meant faster loading time, and that was important at the time. Nowadays, you can just type the search query to the address bar, but that wasn’t available back then. Initially, you didn’t even have one of those extra toolbars with a little search box, so loading the search page was the only way. If you do like 50 searches a day, those seconds spent on waiting the page to load really begin to add up.
Ecosia added ai chat which I think runs on the same thing as copilot. I don't see the point though and would like to be able to hide the ai chat option.
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