A few weeks back there was an article claiming that Amazon had lost some spectacular amount of money on Alexa. It implied that when they started the really didn't have a good vision of how it was going to make money in the first place.

Maybe this is one of their ideas.

To me systemd looks like an artifact of Linux growth. New users and programmers came to Linux from Windows and found things unfamiliar. My opinion is that systemd makes Linux look more like Windows, more familiar, and therefore "better". (I'm largely ignorant on this, but in terms of function and form, how far is systemd from "svchost.exe"?)

What I dislike about systemd is its appropriation of already operational function and the attitude behind it. As I was reading news tidbits on Phoronix over the past many years I would see things like, "I didn't see why they were doing it this way, so I just re-implemented it myself." At this point someone could make a Musk/Twitter comment.

Well keep in mind that I did put out the hearsay note, and thank you for your response.

I won't comment on internal operations at any of these places, and perhaps only the bad things he's putting out on Twitter are the ones getting the publicity. But as I see it he's giving a megaphone back to some bad people, and that I don't like. It's not just those bad people, it's the many who follow them.

He certainly is the guy who transformed the image of the electric car.
When I say that the jury is out, it's on the whole self-driving thing. He has a certain brashness (If you're not failing you're not moving fast enough.) that has certainly worked wonders for SpaceX, and so far that has held into their manned space work as well. The failures in Tesla self-driving have certainly been extensively reported, and that's not an area where failure is an easy option.

I'll just add that such claims may be hearsay, I'd be curious to learn about more substantiated information

Things have emerged recently claiming that SpaceX had a layer of middle-management specifically for handling Musk. More specifically, he's a source of money and publicity, but needs careful steering so that the company can stay on-track. By this account, it's really that he's managed to get a good group of people together and fund them, rather than that he's the smartest man on Earth. He's certainly not making a good impression on Twitter, nor did he for the cave rescue or pretty much any other time when he hasn't stuck strictly to cars or rocketry. (Jury is still out on cars, too.)

I saw him at a local theater after "Wrath of Khan" 2.5 years ago, and he was most certainly running around on stage. I wish to be that active at that age.

Activity, both physical and mental, is one of the most important things you can do for yourself as you age. Conversely, being sedentary is one of the worst. I'm no athlete, but my wife and I are walking maniacs.

I know, I know. I wish, I wish.
But somehow it seems to be a higher priority to placate the desires of willfully ignorant wealthy and powerful people. If you look at history, it seems that that has almost always been the highest priority. We've been getting better for quite a while now, but at the moment we seem bound and determined to reverse that.

That's what I generally do, too. It doesn't stop it from annoying me, to some extent.

I like that idea. Cyanogenmod had a "privacy mode" that would allow things like location and such to act like they're sharing data as requested - but the content would be bogus.

Firefox as-is breaks a bunch of sites for me. They give a "Turn off your ad-blocker" popup, and after a little digging what you find they really mean is, "Turn off your tracking protection." In other words, "Our advertisers want to track you and we won't let you into our site unless you let them."

I've made a few posts about this evil practice and get chided about my tin-foil hat.

Don't know, they probably haven't had time to do the clinical work, so far just the antibody side. I keep my eyes open.

They haven't had time to measure reinfections, true. What they have had time to do is measure antibody response, and that looks poor.