Exactly, and when something crashes in the ocean it might be full off sea weed errr, I mean non-human biologics. And if equipment from foreign nations were recovered of course they’d get reverse engineered.

Knowing how secretive militaries tend to be about their missions … of course the whistleblower gets stonewalled when trying to inquire about it.

I haven’t seen a single claim that couldn’t be explained with something mundane.

My interpretation is that it’s mostly half-truths.

Do I think governments and militaries around the world have plans for such scenarios? Like retrieving UFOs? Yes, this seems reasonable. Do I think they have run exercises and tested those scenarios for real? Probably, yes. Most likely successfully so. Do I believe that someone with a lot of hearsay could interpret those things as “holy shit, they actually found something”? Yes, yes I do.

Is any of this proof? Nope. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Probably also advertisement revenue. Why would people go on twitter if they can’t see anything? Why would advertisers pay money to show ads to no-one?

I think Elon got quite a talking to.

A few things come to mind:

The “Mr. Robot” promotion was pretty bad - they force installed an extension without user interaction. This is IMHO still the worst thing they’ve done.

Their finances could be seen as a little sketchy, at times, like executive pay vs. layoffs at the start of COVID. The fact that they’re hanging off the teat of Google (or maybe Microsoft, which ever search engine has the higher bid at the moment) could also be seen as a conflict of interest.

Some might criticise Mozilla for a lack of focus. While Firefox was getting stale they invested in Pocket, and VPNs and stuff.

It’s a thing of the past, but there was this whole thing about Brendan Eich …

Honestly most of these things seem pretty par for the course under capitalism.

Yeah, if they had not used an off the shelf part, then people would make fun of the janky controls with “levers and pulleys.” The thing is a simple control scheme that’s well understood and easy to learn. It gives inputs to an onboard computer which interprets pilot intent and steers the vessel (how ever questionable the vessel’s construction might be).

Game controllers are used for all kinds of robots and vessels (often remote controlled) - so the fact they chose a controller does not weird me out at all.

Do I think they could have gotten a better quality controller? Yea, sure. Do I think maybe a wired controller would have been better? My gut says yes, but I don’t know their decision making process and the engineering challenges with running cables.

We have made mistakes.

We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.

And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that’s how it’s supposed to work!

They turned to advertising. That’s fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.

Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you’re done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user’s interests, and show them more “relevant” ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.

And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn’t seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.

And now we’re swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism’s gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up “enshittification”

I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.

There’s still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.