It's the shape of the grains of sand that's bad for concrete, not the chemical composition. It gets less angular and more round when it moves in the desert and it doesn't bound well with cement. Sand that is good for concrete is rare and making it is expensive. The "bad" sand that is common everywhere is still perfect to make glass.
A compromise for when you want a high quality webcam without spending money or dealing with the downsides of using an "real" camera is to use your phone. A 3 year old iphone/samsung will have a built in camera that is better than any webcam you could find under 150$. When you are pairing it with a PC, you can use the back camera instead of the front facing one.
They either work through OBS or a dedicated app that you have to start on your pc. I paid for an app (droidcam, 15$ for the "premium" HD version and free for SD+watermark irrc) because I was in a hurry but I know there are good free alternative if you have some time to spend trying them.
Twitter is not "trying to solve this problem", they are embracing it and benefiting from it. They are strongly incentivised to keep the bots because it gives them a massive boost in their number of active users and the valuation of their company.
I don't think this would ever change unless they go private with someone that has no intention of selling it. I have no idea how successful Elon would be at removing them, but at least he intend to try to do it.
I don't think that the biggest benefits that Musk is bringing are technical ones, although he can surely afford to mobilize a lot of technical power, but policy ideas. Twitter will be run differently, become less toxic, and hopefully in addition to that game-changing attitude the bot problem can be addressed as well. I don't see how it can get worse, but there's a lot of potential for it to get better. Who knows? I might actually start using it.
> Twitter will be run differently, become less toxic, and hopefully in addition to that game-changing attitude the bot problem can be addressed as well. I don't see how it can get worse, but there's a lot of potential for it to get better.
While I'm an optimist in real life, unfortunately I don't have much reason to believe anything will improve, particularly due to Musk. He is hardly the most reasonable or grounded person. (Mind you, as a twitter user I do hope it improves.)
I think one of his strongest skills is recruiting young engineers who are ready to work harder for him than they should for less pay than they could get elsewhere.
Elon isn't paying for this out of his own pocket. He's not transferring it to some perpetual trust a la the Guardian and the Scott Trust. He's taking it private but there will still be pressure from everyone he's raised money from to make sure they make good.
Mostly, I think this is going to end up being one of the most expensive acts of individual hubris in history. It's strange from someone whose other notable projects have such clear goals. "Moar free speech lmao" doesn't sound measureable, let alone achievable while also making bank.
Bloomberg mentioned two loans to cover the shortfall in his equity swap (one external and one drawn on his Tesla stock), with annual interest payments in the ballpark of $1B each. So Twitter's take home pay just lost $2B of the $4B it nets annually. Losing further market share by re-engineering retweet algorithms to be kinder/gentler looks like a better bet to bury Twitter than raise it.
But mature media giants are supposed to lose money, right?
>The whole point of a loan is that you're willing to pay extra over time in order to have access to more funds at the present
No, that's not the point of these loans at all. They are the equivalent of remortgaging your home to get cash. If need money for renovation and you have a lot of equity in your house you can borrow against it. They are doing the same thing with crypto. They don't want to sell their crypto because they want to speculate on it and they need money so they use it as collateral.
I personably think it's a very stupid idea to invest in something like crypto on credit. Lending your crypto to these morons looks like a pretty good idea if you can trust that the smart contracts doesn't have bugs. You get a stable and guaranteed >5% without all the risks of the stock market.
> They are the equivalent of remortgaging your home to get cash.
It's actually the opposite of remortgaging a home to get cash. Remortgaging a home to get cash is paying a premium to increase the amount of liquid assets available to you; this is the point of most loans. A DeFi loan is paying a premium and _decreasing_ the amount of liquid assets available to you. As you said, it's useful for juicing speculation, worthless for anything else.
> You get a stable and guaranteed >5% without all the risks of the stock market.
I think the long-term risks are actually greater than something like an index fund, since your collateral is all in crypto. The returns are also less than historical index fund returns.
A DeFi loan is paying a premium and _decreasing_ the amount of liquid assets available to you.
No, because from their point of view the crypto they put as collateral is NOT liquid. the entire point is do not sell them but somehow get cash from it.
>Media started glossing over Nazi imagery on the very pictures of soldiers they spread, not even mentioning it.
I think they genuinely didn't know what it was. Even on r/ukraine, they were promoting those picture at the beginning. It doesn't look like any of the more common nazi symbols and and it doesn't have any text on it that you can google.
It was quite interesting to see journalists using those pictures in their articles talking about how there was no nazi problem in Ukraine.
>Not really. There's a certain political party who seems to want to redefine private companies as public commons, all because they don't like their hate speech being censored.
no, it's because it actually became the new public commons. That's where most gets their news, meet people, organise events, find jobs, etc. Politicians and organisations are now using it as their main mean of communication.
How do you think the 2020 election would have gone if twitter + facebook + reddit decided after 2016 that most anti-trump posts should be removed from the platforms for misinformation and instead they promoted anti-Biden content? I think they could easily have made him won by a landslide
This is extremely unlikely. Those platforms are incredibly far from having a monopoly on information in the west. People looking for the other side would have just gotten it from one of the many many other places it could be found.
> 1st amendment means regarding government censorship
that's just a loophole from people who have no argument so they go with the [legal in the US = Moral]. Just because the modern "public space" is now private, it doesn't make it any less bad when the group in charge arbitrairely ban groups of people based on politics, opinion, etc.
whether you like it or not (I hate it personally), the vast majority of the news and opinions that people consume today comes directly or indirectly (eg. linking an NYT article on facebook) from a handful of social media companies. It's getting even worse now that organisations and politicians are using social media platforms as their official channel of communications
I think we have a similar problem with email accounts. Getting your gmail account banned can really fuck your life and sooner or later something will have to be donne to protect people (eg. force them to a have a proper appel system or to hand over all your data +forward your emails for a while after they kick you out).
From the point of view of the investors, there is no risk. If offer is accepted, they get their bags of cash and walk away with hopefully more than what they paid for those share. Musk could shut down the business to the ground on day 1 and they still get to keep their cash (I wish he would).
isn't it one of those "No one ever got fired for buying XXXXXX" type of situation?
Maybe i'm wrong, but the impression I had of Jira is that just like using sharepoint for file storage, the C-level people want it because they were told that's what big enterprise are using. And if it doesn't fit the need of the company and everyone hates it, they just blame the employees or lack of training.
It’s just so flexible that tracking projects and working together is easier with it. Decades of feature requests have made it good for people who want everything made for them or people who want to customise.
Being a leader at the top of the food chain in a company this big means that you get to take credit for a significant portion of the success of company and your paycheck has an extra zero or two more than most people working for you. It's only fair that they have to take the blame for the horrible mistakes that their teams make.
