oce 🐆

I try to contribute to things getting better, sometimes through polite rational skepticism.
Disagreeing with your comment ≠ supporting the opposite side, I support rationality.
Let’s discuss to refine the arguments that make things better sustainably.
Always happy to question our beliefs.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Some projects are spun out from major corporations.

    This is most of the FOSS projects in data engineering and data science. They come from tech giants or some dudes who just left tech giants to create a FOSS tool with a paid managed version, and those may get bough back by other tech giants later.

    Example:

    Analytics and AI giant Databricks reportedly paid nearly $2 billion when it acquired Tabular in June, a startup that was only doing $1 million in annual recurring revenue, according to Bloomberg. That’s a pretty outrageous exit multiple, and it was purportedly fueled by a battle between Databricks and Snowflake.

    Tabular had over $30 million in funding, backed by Altimeter Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Zetta Venture Partners, when it was acquired just three years after it was founded. Tabular’s valuation was tied to Apache Iceberg, a popular open source table format that the startup’s founders created while at Netflix. The startup quickly became an expensive pawn in the war between Databricks and Snowflake.https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/14/databricks-reportedly-paid-2-billion-in-tabular-acquisition/



  • I wonder if it is some kind of frustration burst release that finds a convenient path of list effort in the far-right propaganda. Like when people get furious alone inside their own car and call everybody names, or gamers threatening your life online after some loss, because there’s no perceived emotional consequences so they don’t need to restrain themselves, same idea but more extreme. I don’t think most of those people would have the heart of doing such horrible things if they were in front of their target and had to face the inevitable human empathy. Sociopaths with zero empathy are probably much rarer than Trump supporters.



  • Ok, I got time to read it. Drones are only mentioned in one paragraph of the conclusion. Here it is:

    ‘Eco-friendly’ fireworks, which do not use perchlorate and have lower levels of heavy metals, do exist (Fan et al. 2021); the problem lies in their higher cost of manufac- turing (Palaneeswari and Muthulakshmi 2012). The future of ‘firework’ displays may lie in the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones and visible-wavelength lasers for light shows have the benefit of being reusable, have no emissions, and are quiet (Daukantas 2010; Zerlenga et al. 2021). Drones come with their own issues for wildlife, however, usually flying at low altitudes where there are most likely to come into contact with wildlife; a review indicated that many taxa react negatively to the presence of a drone (Rebolo-Ifrán et al. 2019). Even so, drone light shows are less likely to disturb animals, wild or domestic, with noise, nor do they deposit large amounts of pollutants.

    The use of drones is an opening hypothesis, not the subject of the study. Impact of drones is not quantified, it is hypothesized to be lower. The linked papers that I have also checked also don’t quantify the impact but similarly mention it as a potential eco-friendly alternative.

    Would you have a different reading of this article?