Hedge funds and private equity firms demurred on investing in NTP, reportedly claiming that the foundation didn't have a credible plan for improving engagement.

All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done

Genuine People Personalities

...This is my embarrassed face.

I had previously assumed you were speaking of allocating $1M across all projects used by Google. In fact, you were speaking of giving $1M to each such project.

One would wonder what sorts of strings would be attached to such largesse. Still, that would indeed be game-changing and amazing.

Google could create a new corporate policy to provide a minimum of $1M/year to any open source project it uses.

That would be real innovation.

While acknowledging your noble intentions, no, it wouldn't be innovation. It would be cheaping out.

In the San Francisco bay area, $1.0E+06/year gets you maybe five skilled engineers. Set against the quantity of Open Source projects used by such organizations -- FFmpeg, GStreamer, OpenSSL, ssh, rsync, gcc, gdb, coreutils, nanopb, Samba, Lua, Python, Perl, Git, Vim/Neovim, Yocto, ImageMagick, Blender, the Pipewire framework, the Linux kernel, the Debian packaging system, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc... -- five engineers is miserly.

Google appears to have understaken the expense of spinning up an ocean-boiling slop machine to automagically generate plausible bug reports, and then casually fire off an email to the maintainers.

Note that Google has not undertaken the expense of assigning an engineer to also write a fix.

That they are not doing that is a conscious, management-approved choice.

...Y'know how Google relishes in closing bug reports with "WONTFIX - Working as designed?" I think FFmpeg should close slop reports from Google with, "WONTFIX - Unfunded."

Yeah, but you see, from marketing perspective what sounds better? The Line or the Dot or the Pimple?
They had these 3 choices, they made the more sensible one even though it has nothing to do with a good or sensible city outline.

IMO this is a good thing, not a bad one.

- market is a collection of all people involved, who is better suited to decide on what the value is other than all of the people as a collective vote?

- they are removing the money from the gullible, which may be argued is a better way to redistribute the money (all done willingly even though misguidedly).

- the market has already decided that the parents of heirs were productive enough, that even their heirs can now enjoy the fruits of the labor of the people who made the money.

- dangerous by what measure?

And just like oracles, they are right only half the time. The answers I've gotten from AI to fairly complex questions were truly horrific so far.

"Africa" is a continent, not a nation, and the very first sentence of the summary says this is "after more than a decade of planning."

The summary says merchant fees will reduce "by an average of 0.1% over several years" so I'd say the chances of this making anything cheaper at point of sale is on par with the sun going supernova in the next several minutes.

"Hey, everyone! Don't pay any attention to those Japanese translators who'd been volunteering their time and expertise for the last 20 years that we just insensitively and comprehensively shit on... Look! New mascot logo! Giz cash..."

(Narrator: New revenues did not materialize.)