Problem is, Ubuntu’s track record with projects like Upstart, Unity, Mir, Snap, Netplan, Amazon integration, the Rust coreutils rewrite, etc. makes the “only cautiously and where it truly makes sense” promise seem rather hollow.

No, that would be Azure Linux

Very basically, what’s happening is that every file that is read (including the binaries and libraries that make up the services you run, etc) is loaded into memory and stays there until that memory needs to be reclaimed for something else. It’s a good thing. It means that the next time that file is needed, it can be accessed directly in RAM rather than reaching out to the filesystem.

These day’s I’d be more worried that I’d be taken to some malware infested lookalike.

Yeah, I used to type “putty download”, click “I’m feeling lucky”, and go.

It worked 100% of the time. I wouldn’t try it these days, even if I needed putty.

Yahoo Japan is actually a completely separate company.

Yahoo itself is still extremely popular in the US, just with a different demographic than we (the sort of people on the fediverse) regularly interact with. Their sports, finance, and news sites are some of the most popular on the internet. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant in the web search space these days though, and hasn’t been for a long time.

I think we don’t hear much about it because it has found a niche and is staying within it. It’s profitable, but not on an “infinite growth forever” trajectory so it rarely makes the news. Honestly kind of respectable.

That’s overstating it. There’s a reason Google took over: it was better pretty much all around. The original Google algorithm was a really amazing tool for finding quality content on the web as it existed in those days. That was before SEO drove all these focused efforts on gaming the system.

With that said, Alta Vista definitely was the most promising tool before Google, and it had some potential if it hadn’t been so poorly managed by DEC. They simply saw it as a cool demo for their Alpha server platform, and never had any vision for it as a meaningful product on its own.

Something that clearly doesn’t resonate with mainstream social media users at all.

I’ve actually seen quite a few people and organizations moving back to Twitter. While these are just a few anecdotes, I suspects there’s a trend. I can’t explain it.

In fairness, I’ve seen people with Actual Intelligence do the same thing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pair my bike with my phone so I can upgrade the derailleur’s firmware…

I agree that Snowden didn’t have much impact on a broad population, which is really disappointing. However, his leaks went a long way toward encouraging broad use of encryption on the internet. Before Snowden, http:// was a perfectly normal thing to encounter in your browser. Not it’s rare and triggers warnings when it is encountered. Similarly, encrypted SMS (iMessage, RCS, etc) is common, etc. Snowden’s leaks accelerated the deployment of all of these techniques, which is better than nothing.

Rivian’s CEO also says “AI Defined Vehicles” are the future and that this is what buyers really want, so screw that guy.

Social features do not make a social network. Maybe it’s just where I cycle (Northeast and Northwest USA) but approximately 100% of the people that I ride with post their rides to Strava. That is what makes it a social network.

Further, all of the alternatives that you listed have limitations that prevent them from being viable alternatives to Strava even if people were interested in migrating. Mainly these are related to device integration.

There are many alternatives for tracking and analyzing performance data, but I’d posit that that’s not what most Strava users do there. For most of them, it’s a social network, and that’s it’s focus as it goes public. There’s no alternative “athlete focused” social network that allows planning and organizing group activities, has tight integration of activity info (e.g. tracking that the group bike ride averaged 20mph over this route, or that person X and I competed in the same park run, and here’s the finishing time for each of us, along with a few photos and some performance data like pace and heart rate).

Because of investor pressure to generate actual meaningful revenue, Strava is going to rapidly enshittify leading up to their IPO and after it. The unfortunate thing is that they’ll largely get away with it, because there’s really no alternative for users to move to.

God how I miss living in an urban area. Until two years ago, I’d bike with my kids to their school every day. Where we are now, it’s 10 miles of deathtrap pavement away. ☹️ I wouldn’t feel comfortable riding most of it on my own, let alone with my kids.

Fuck cars. Quality of life is so much higher when you don’t have to depend on them.

You absolutely can store HIPAA data in the cloud.

Latency is one of the big selling points for Outposts. They have customers wanting to control industrial equipment from their cloud resources, but the nearest AWS region is too far away to provide the low latency connectivity they need. With Outposts, they get the cloud, but with on-prem network latency.

That was David Brin in The Transparent Society. He has continued to riff on the theme periodically since then.