If you want to do business with the US (either directly by selling/buying to/from them, or indirectly by using US equipment) you need to comply with US export control regulations as they apply internationally. Even if you are a Dutch company wanting to make chips at TSMC you need to make sure your chips are US export control compliant. TSMC may be a pure play foundry in reality they can’t make anything nor sell to anyone. Don’t get me wrong, it is messed up but that’s the reality. The EU has similar regulations but they only apply to the internal market which makes more sense.

Isn’t that too complicated for no reason? Just keep them under public control. No need to incentivise anyone, no need to share dividends to anyone.

It’s the be-all end-all justification for anything

Early on when Google wasn’t shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can’t be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.

There’s 1 million % this will happen again. It’s textbook EEE.

Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook’s strong arming tactics. Facebook’s server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.

Fuck them

You search for anything slightly niche, everything past page one is just rubbish. It’s especially jarring when searching for something programming related and 80% of the results are auto-generated stuff scraped from Stack overflow. It reminds me of Amazon where you search for a product and almost all results are chinese-made clones of what you are looking with randomly generated names.

There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate