Elon Musk is still one of the world's richest people, giving him the freedom to do whatever he pleases. Instead he's spending time getting red and nude over the popularity of his tweets. Twitter's engineers investigated "whether Musk's reach had somehow been artificially restricted" and when they found no such thing, Musk said whinged that "I have more than 100 million followers, and I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions". When one of the engineers referenced a Google Trends chart showing how how relatively little the public cares, he fired the engineer and "instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended". This anecdote says everything you need to know about the bloke - gigantic wanker and one of the worst posters to ever exist. Couldn't shit out a good tweet if his life depended on it. Totally devoid of talent in the content arena.
Starlink has been an incredibly useful tool in Ukraine's resistance against Russia's fuckwittery, so it's a bit weird to have all of a sudden, Gwynne Shotwell, Starlink's COO, get up at a conference and say Starlink was "never meant to be weaponised". While they're cool with Ukraine using it "for comms", they never intended for it to be used for "offensive purposes" - likely talking about controlling/monitoring drones over the internet. SpaceX has taken steps to "limit" its use in Ukraine but hasn't given any details on what is or isn't allowed beyond saying "there are things that we can do, and have done" when asked. Someone's gotta be forcing SpaceX to filter their service in this way as they had no moral issues with Starlink being used "offensively" by Ukraine for months. What changed? Anyways, Amazon got FCC approval to launch 3,236 broadband satellites.
Australia's got a new cheapest EV - the GWM Ora. It's a hatchback about the size of a Toyota Corolla but with more internal space due to the compact EV drive-train and comes in two battery sizes. The Standard range will do 310km WLTP and the Extended Range 420km WLTP. Has all the safety features and conveniences you could want for a car in this price range, like 360-degree parking camera, CarPlay/Android Auto and stop & go adaptive cruise. DC charging is relatively slow at 64kW, but not that big of deal unless you're doing road trips in it constantly. Pricing starts at $43,990 + on-roads and it is eligible for a range of incentives depending where you live. I reckon it looks a bit weird. Not ugly, but I don't know if I wanna drive around in it. Meanwhile, used Tesla Model 3s are rapidly dropping in value, or rather, depreciating like a normal three year old car should.
On news that Echo VR's "servers and services will be shut down preventing any further play", John Carmack sent a statement to blog UploadVR outlining his disappointment and what should be done to preserve games in the future. In it he says that "every game should make sure they still work at some level without central server support. Even when not looking at end of life concerns, being able to work when the internet is down is valuable. If you can support some level of LAN play for a multiplayer game, the door is at least open for people to write proxies in the future. Supporting user-run servers as an option can actually save on hosting costs, and also opens up various community creative avenues". He also reckons it's better to slap an "unsupported" banner on it and "just let it keep going until something dies, rather than explicitly killing it". Good read if you're interested in video game preservation in a world where most games have a mandatory online component.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) in TV series Halt and Catch Fire (AMC Studios)
📻 Catch Hell Blues - The White Stripes
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