This is just hog wash.

They are buying it for 60bn worth of SPCX Class A stock. This is Cursor’s board taking anything they can get for a company that has no future. Not a criticism against Cursor, but their market is standardising on Claude Code, and their value would rapidly head towards zero.

Class A stock has no voting rights. This is the investors of Cursor literally saying “being on Musk’s train to the moon is literally better than whatever future we have right now”.

If we’d stayed in the EU it would have been a legal requirement to employ ZKP.

Myeah, sure, maybe, maybe not. But whatever the source, anonymity does enable well-resourced actors to affect opinion change.

It is possible to create anonymous age verification. I doubt the UK will pursue, but it is possible. Check out what Denmark did.

We ban alcohol, violent films, lottery tickets, over the counter medicine for children and not for adults.

Age verification and identification is not the same thing.

I think there’s a rational argument for saying anonymous social media is what Russia, China and other dictatorships use to undermine and affect public opinion, to be fair.

I’m not saying therefore anonymity shouldn’t be allowed. I’m just saying there’s a nuance here…

And guns! Making them illegal did nothing for people using guns to murder each other!

… oh wait.

All social media is designed to be addictive, though. It’s their entire business model.

And Adobe PDFs are not the same as PDF/As and yet somehow the world still turns and PDF readers of all sorts find their way around.

I’m not saying OOXML is a great standard. I’m saying it’s a fine standard for the specific purpose of having a format that Microsoft can no longer claim IP rights over, so that should Microsoft suddenly feel pressurised to remove Office functionality from Europe, Europe still has a workable solution that’s compatible and interchangeable with the 99.9% of all editable document files sent around.

The EU wants to not depend on US software.

The format is standardised. It might not be a standard you like, but it’s a standard that the US can’t “take away” from the EU. Microsoft, especially in cloud form, can remove access to Office tomorrow if they’re pressured to by the US government.

We might have a desire for better file formats. The EU doesn’t give a monkey about our crusade, it purely cares about not having US leverage hanging over them like a sword. And the underlying file formats, exactly because it’s a ISO standard (however poor it may be) is fine for this purpose.

Whether you use Firefox or Librewolf you are entirely dependent on the hundreds of full timer developers Mozilla’s got working on the Gecko codebase.

I dropped out based on the price hike. We just weren’t getting the value. I bought a couple full evergreen games that I get back to often and then just lived without the rest. Also cancelled Netflix and a couple of other subscriptions. Just too much money to spend and enough time.

Running your own email server is easy.

Getting your email accepted by other servers is hard.

Hosting anything publicly requires a significant amount of hardening.

Neither of those two tasks are easy or low maintenance. I self host almost everything and I’ve run my own mail server (with occasional rejection). It’s not worth it for me; I now use a commercial, paid provider for email.

All video is art.

The aim of compression is to preserve as much quality while limiting the size.

Denoised video compresses better but now it doesn’t look like the original.

Adding grain makes it look (somewhat) like the original.

Thereby you’re preserving as much quality (ie similarity to the original) for as small a penalty as possible.

Of course grain is an art choice. Every single grading decision is an art choice. Compression should aim to preserve this art choice, no?

Of course it’s a benefit. All I’m saying is that least where I live plenty of people drive the car to a supermarket and do their weekly shop while the car charges (or similar, there’s charging a everywhere in car parks near retail).

You can charge it at charge points surely?

I mean you don’t refuel your car at home, do you?

Myeah but it’s just a server - the clients just use Matrix.

Not sure what you’re saying here.

Are robotics good enough right now to suppress a population? No, clearly not.

Will they be good enough in 10 years? Quite possibly.

Why do you think the global rich list is so busy investing in robotics?

Before, when things to too far, even the soldiers would revolt.

Now, all you need is electricity to suppress the population.