It’s not that surprising once you know that their goal is to be completely independent for their US for their military equipment.

It includes the nuclear bomb, missiles, fighter jet, aircraft carrier, submarines, even space capabilities (even if this last part has been lacking a bit lately).

They don’t have the US military budget but they want the same level of technology without any ties to the US.

It means that they are exporting a lot to compensate for the high investments they are pouring into military technology.

Here is the share of global arms export per country.

Germany, Italy and the UK are also big exporters but still behind France.

France’s military industry is having wet dreams thinking about it.

If the US pulls out of NATO France becomes the biggest arms exporter of NATO and I would expect other countries will become less enthusiastic at the idea of buying US weapons systems.

In the meantime Arianespace divided by 3 their number of rocket launches

Similarly seasoning peppers are a staple of Caribbean cuisine. They look and taste almost identical to habaneros peppers minus the heat.

What are you talking about, I was very interested in Greek mythology, it’s just that some parts got the attention of my teenager mind more than others.

The Birth of Venus (Bouguereau)

I stayed in an old house in the UK where the owner had to get the windows and doors adjusted every year because the house was moving so much all the opening size would change.

Are you using an American, Canadian, British or metric cup ?

Because they are all different measurements.

Astronomer hate this simple trick to ruin all observations.

It was Guild Wars Eye of the North for me. I got it just before going in family holidays.

I spent two weeks looking at it.

More specifically SpaceX got a contract to bulls the moon lander for NASA.

So SpaceX is going to land in the moon.

Ikea has a lot of chip board furniture but they also have some decent solid wood furniture for a good price.

It’s usually pine but still for the price it’s a decent quality furniture that could last for a good time in good condition.

Yep, I think we pictures are becoming a valuable as text and it is fine, we just need to get used to it.

Before photography became mainstream the only source of information was written, it is extremely simple to make a fake story so people had to rely on trusted sources. Then for a short period of history photography became a (kinda) reliable sources of information by itself and this trust system lost its importance.

In most cases seeing a photo means that we were seeing a true reflection of what happened, especially if we were song multiple photos of the same event.

Now we are arriving at the end of this period, we cannot trust a photo by itself anymore, tampering a photo is becoming as easy as writing a fake story. This is a great opportunity for journalists I believe.

I really don’t have much knowledge on it but it sound like it’s would be an actual good application of blockchain.

Couldn’t a blockchain be used to certify that pictures are original and have not been tampered with ?

On the other hand if it was possible I’m certain someone either have already started it, it is the prefect investor magnet “Using blockchain to counter AI”

They were also using asbestos and knew it was causing respiratory issues.

They had cloths made of asbestos that they were cleaning by throwing them in a fire. However they knew that slaves in asbestos mine were getting sick because of it

I think a fork happening in a few years would be great, right now the app still need a bit of polishing but they are quickly improving it.

Yes, having a purely non-profit foundation from the start would have been better.

But, for me, it is still a better option than Signal or Matrix for messaging.

Signal is great but they need 10s of millions every year of donations. It means that they rely on the generosity of wealthy individuals to keep going. I’m worried it is not sustainable.

Matrix is better on this aspect since everything is open source, but the UC is not great on my opinion and I don’t fell comfortable switching to it for regular contract with family and friends. To be fair it’s been a while I haven’t used it so I downloaded Element but I am blocked on the account creation (the verification email is not arriving).

To compare I tried creating a new account with SimpleX and in less than a minute I was ready to chat. They rely on investors for now and don’t have a clear business model which is worrying but they are developping fast this way and being fully open source anyone could fork it at any time. The UX is great despite being heavily focused on privacy and security and have features that no other app have, you don’t need an email or phone to chat and if they ever start to enshitify someone can fork it.

Do pragmatically I think it is the best alternative right now and I am curious to see how they evolve.

FAQ SimpleX funding and business model

https://simplex.chat/blog/20240814-simplex-chat-vision-funding-v6-private-routing-new-user-experience.html

Right now it is investors and donations.

SimpleX as a very user friendly interface, uses decentralized server, does not requires your phone number or email and the server is really easy to set up (but not needed, for the regular user it just looks like any other messaging app)

Edit: I forgot to say that their app AND servers are open source.

Same, none of the Brazilian I’ve meet said they ever been murdered.