Sol 3 is a Class-14 Deathworld on what used to be a thirteen-point scale until they found it.
Not only is the planet very geothermally volatile with active volcanic systems AND feature violent and chaotic weather systems…
“Earth” is the deepest gravity well they’ve ever witnessed chemical rocketry successfully achieve orbit from.
The biosphere is teeming with pathogens, so much so that the sapient population’s own bodies rely on symbiotic microbial colonies in order to digest nutrients among other tasks.
And the macroscopic fauna are ALMOST as scary as the microscopic stuff: every biome packed with highly adapted predators.
At the top of this complex carnal carnival of carnivory, the “humans” who live there are unstoppable pursuit and persistence predators highly naturally gifted in ranged combat that historically used to just WALK their prey to death. The animals which ancient humans consumed could sprint to temporary safety, but humans will catch up, ALWAYS catch up, and the prey will still be tired when they have to sprint again. Eventually the fatigue outpaces them, and humans catch up for the last time. Just walk right up and bash them with a rock, they might not even have to throw it: dinner is ready!
Furthermore, it’s not just the highly volatile oxygen that all the animals there breathe… Sol 3’s atmosphere also even contains a constant background presence of radon. The biosphere is passively resistant to some levels of radiation. One of the cities was consumed in the fallout cloud of an exploding nuclear fission reactor(they STILL use water to cool their municipal fission reactors even now!), and although the humans fled, the animals that stayed there are FLOURISHING. Deformed and mutated, but thriving.
I always feel a sense of dissonance (I think that’s the right word?) when I see posts like this. Everyone seems to be talking about this, but I haven’t noticed a difference. Honestly, when I look up something, what I’m looking for is usually in the first few results. Not really sure how to feel about my experience being so different from others.
Are you pretty consumercentric, or do you have some niche interests as well? Google is great at basic tasks and delivering product results and promoted content, and if that’s what you’re usually looking for it probably works great for you. People have trouble these days trying to find the specific stuff. Google used to really excel at this in the past, but now it’s buried under pages of promoted content or pages SEO gamed to the top but not being very helpful
My writing is more Babobeh-bopbopahdop-babababa Babedi-babobeh-babopbedop-bababapi Babedi-babobeh-popbopbedop-babobeh Bopbopbedop-babobeh-popbopbedop-bababababehdi
Their current userbase is not their target userbase. They are trying to reach a more mainstream audience but all of their attempts to monetize are seen as useless by their current userbase.
They want to increase revenue w/ ads - A loud swath of FF users are tech savvy and have adblocking enabled
They want to pivot towards AI - A loud swath of FF users see AI as gimmicky
I’m willing to bet that the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren’t the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla. People in online forums talk a big game about wanting to pay for products and not be the product. But it seems like people don’t really want to pay any meaningful amount of money for a browser.
the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren't the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla
I went to donate to Mozilla when I switched back to it from chrome early last year. It said on their website by the donate link, which was very difficult to find, that the proceeds from those donations did not go towards firefox but towards their other projects.
I don't know if that's the case today, but there was no way to contribute to firefox directly when I sought it out, or at least not in a way I could find. Maybe it was a stipulation of the Googlegeld, idk.
They really should be copying the success of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia
Step 1: Be hilariously wealthy from prior investments and businesses
Step 2: Do a thing nobody has ever done before at a time when interest rates mean money is free
Step 3: Blind luck
I'm not sure how they're supposed to reproduce those at this point.
Yeah, the amount of money they get from donations is so tiny compared to what they need for developing Firefox, that they don’t even divert it for Firefox.
They use it for activism, community work and in the past, they’ve also passed it on to other open-source projects, which are also important for the web but don’t have the infrastructure or public awareness to get donations directly.
Big difference to the Wikimedia Foundation is how much money they need. The Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox) has around 750 employees.
Optimistically, only 500 of those are devs and work on Firefox. If you pay those a wage of 100,000 USD, that makes 50 million USD of costs just for wages.
Firefox has less than 200 million monthly active users, so everyone using it would need to donate $0.25, or alternatively 1% of users would need to donate $25, yearly.
That’s a lot of money to hope people donate, and this is a very optimistic ballpark estimate.
I don’t understand why cryptocurrency isn’t an accepted solution to this. Open firefox, attach wallet, drip $0.25/month/user. It’s good for tiny transactions.
They tend to be more authoritarian. That means they’re more likely to prioritize in-group above all else.
There’s a book about authoritarian personalities I was reading a while ago. It talks about an experiment where they did like a model UN, but secretly sorted all the authoritarian types into one game and everyone else into the other.
The authoritarians ruined the world. Like, nuclear war. When they got a do-over, they still fucked it up.
The other group basically cooperated and solved world hunger.
Authoritarians probably shouldn’t be allowed in positions of power. The GOP attracts a lot of them.
I feel like this has been done. There was an AI generated “debate” between Biden and Trump that was mostly swear words. But it was trained on their speeches and was mostly gibberish and insults.
Edit: It was on Twitch, and users could add inputs and questions.
Maybe do robotics (likely in a simplified way; surely “robots for dummies” is a thing?) and have them make their robots compete in some sort of competition at the end of the year.
I’m not even a competitive person at all, but when our school had us compete on Popsicle stick bridges, I had a ton of fun. Creative projects with a clear, real-world benchmark at the end are really fun.
Other people have computers - friends, family, etc… Libraries, hotel and apartment lobbies, community centers, etc., frequently have them available for free use.
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