Last week I was making jokes about Silicon Valley Bank collapsing and over the long weekend it collapsed, kinda. If you want all the details, Matt Levine's articles covering the situation are excellent reading and Ben Thompson has a solid summary too, but to summarise even further (that's what I'm here for!): lots of stuff about bonds and maturity and interest rates and how banks work, but valley VC types panicked when word spread that SVB couldn't give everyone their money if they wanted it due to some poor investment choices and kicked off an old fashioned "bank run". The FDIC/government stepped in and created a "full-service FDIC-operated 'bridge bank' in an action designed to protect all depositors", with its new CEO saying the bridge bank is "open and conducting business as usual".
Meta is "exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates" according to The Platformer. Details are "scant", "still in its earliest stages" and "there is no time frame for it being released", but sources are saying that Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, is the lead on the project dubbed "P92" and it supports ActivityPub - like Mastodon. I don't know what it would look like in practice, but as the article ruminates, "A decentralized social network with top-notch design and user experience, a functional trust and safety team, and Meta's skilled growth hackers" together with "the power of Instagram, which is already at global scale and counts among its users most of the public figures that would be necessary to kick-start a new text-based network" might be something people use. It'll still have the Meta stink all over it though.
The Space Shuttle might be a museum piece now and SpaceX gets all the reusable spacecraft attention these days, but did you know about the Boeing X-37B Spaceplane (aka Orbital Test Vehicle)? There's two of them, run as part of a classified project run by NASA and the US Space Force. The payloads are also classified, but they've had 6 missions between the two X-37Bs, with the last mission concluding in November 2022 after orbiting Earth for a whopping 908 days. It's basically a Space Shuttle, but also a drone. No humans on it. What it's doing up there we have no idea. I doubt it's anything wholesome.
X-37B 1 sits on the runway after landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility on 12 November 2022, the 909th day of the OTV-6 (USA-299) mission (United States Space Force)
📻 The Cincinnati Tilt - Rickshaw Billie's Burger Patrol
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