My suspicion is that they're sending a message. Trump has been busy pissing away strategic alliances while he pisses off the rest of the world with his arrogance, presumptuousness, and American exceptionalism. Tech companies are collateral damage; except they're not really "collateral" when you consider their knee-bending, ring-kissing, and sometimes out-and-out support for Trump.

Just as Austria recently sent up fighter jets to "escort" unauthorized American military planes out of their airspace, the rest of the world is distancing and decoupling itself from the US. Big Tech was already suffering from a lack of trust; now America's other transgressions on the world stage have rendered everything American toxic. That's especially true of companies such as Microsoft that hold the keys to the information kingdom.

Other countries have had enough, and are actively seeking and/or building alternatives to companies and institutions which support American hegemony. Expect lots more news like this in the coming months and years.

Honor unreciprocated is a self-inflicted vulnerability which begs abuse. It's pathetically naive to pretend otherwise. Even coercive strategies like omerta in traditional organized crime are easily broken.

Honor does not scale. There is no benefit in wasting it on the unworthy.

That insult is truly Dogbert-worthy - good job!

I can't comment on Ghost, Beehiiv, or Passport; but even I have heard of Patreon, and that pretty much ensures that everyone and his dog knows about it. I would guess that Patreon and Substack have about equal name recognition among the general population.

That explains a lot.

Or perhaps it runs backward, relative to the universe you just left behind.

Yes. Already verified experimentally.

There are conjectures that every universe (and there are many) is the interior of a black hole. And that physical properties (like time, for example) are discontinuous at the event horizon. Both looking in and from the inside, looking out.

Time, for a traveler heading toward an event horizon, appear to slow down to observers sitting back a ways, watching. So, to the traveller, time in the universe left behind would accelerate. Their trip would seem normal, but the universe they see in their rear view mirror would die due to entropy/heat death and cease to exist as they crossed the horizon. The arrow of time would reduce to zero as they actually reached the horizon*. But once inside (if they survive) the observation would have to be considered relative to the flow of time inside. They might stop accelerating toward the hypothesized singularity at the center and begin decellerating as they travelled into the new universe. Consisting of a distributed but lumpy centerless mass with no singularity. Just as our universe is.

*Particles for whom there is no arrow of time in our universe are called photons. So, passing the event horizon probably involves a matter to energy conversion. Probably not survivable, IMO.

pYeah, right. Topologists don't know the difference between a cup of coffee and a donut.

It will probably sell well to those who don't know better.

Would that the City of Seattle take the same position on fentanyl.

Well, before AI, data centers were just another customer of the local utility. So, the "exact same regulations, environmental and otherwise" was sort of a given. That starts to break down when the DCs build and operate their own power plants.

The whole "Aunt Millie in upstate New York buys her power from a New Mexico solar plant" is sort of bullshit. When she turns her lights on, that power comes from Indian Point.

I worked for an outfit that considered this as a metric. At the staff meeting where this was brought up, I commented that this was unfair. I wrote mostly in C. And all my programs were one line long.

Investment in an AI server farm which never materializes, is probably a net good when compared with investment in an AI facility which DOES get built.

The sad irony is that most of the staff being laid off will be using the services of the company that just axed them to try to land a new job.