I’m impressed they could get their momentum going for so long, they were able to burn so much money and only now are investors pulling out? That was a serious hype train! Even if it was meant as lobby sponsoring against standard high speed rail, holy cow what a waste!
We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:
Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.
Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.
Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.
Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.
There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.
The Andromeda galaxy is ~23.6 Zm away. The metric system reaches far.
Earth’s circumference is 40 Mm. 1 AU is 14 Gm. I could get used to this.
I agree with you, at the same time it would be great if our air output would be viewed as “unclean” with masks being the worst fix for that if no better ventilation systems are available. We need to stop recirculating somebody elses waste air in indoor environments to make airborn diseases less common.
I was pretty happy with my lineage-os install that had the play store as the only google service. F-droid for other apps, nextcloud for cloud+calendar. But you need an unlockable phone and a bank that allows unlocked phones for their app.
Lack of ads. And I mean that in a transparancy way, people are going to promote stuff (‘look at this cool project i’ve been working on’, ‘someone needs money in this crowdfunding, after i tell you this long, heartbreaking story’) it would be nice to see markings if a post has a direct benefactor and who that benefactor would be, to decide early if you want to engage.
“Excuse me sir, could you tell me what time it is?” 🧒->👴