It isn't an "economic confederation". It has a parliament, an executive, a judiciary, and a civil service. I would read the wiki page on the European Union.
Call it what you want but the fact remains that they can write a lot of laws the member countries must follow, for better or worse. GDPR, Chat Control, etc.
Gtalk did not kill XMPP. Very few people were using XMPP before Gtalk, most people were using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and other proprietary protocols. Gtalk supported XMPP to gain traction as a more open messenger and possibly because they implemented the original version on top of XMPP to get it out the door faster.
Gtalk did pull the plug on XMPP but that didn't really change much.
I don't remember EVER interacting with someone with their own XMPP server. Gtalk had nothing to kill.
Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd. I recall several colleagues who established Jabber addresses and advertised them, sometimes as their only IM address.
XMPP was more than Gtalk, but I think that Gtalk was the "death knell" for XMPP, having absorbed it and sort of claimed it as their own. Anyone who would've used federated Jabber addresses in those days is using Mastodon now.
> Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd.
Yeah, just like today, all 4 of them.
Gtalk put XMPP briefly in the spotlight, but for the masses, XMPP never really lived. It was a niche protocol with very niche usage. Just like Mastodon today.
Maintenance, for one. I imagine contributions that are 100% AI generated are more likely to have a higher maintenance burden and lower follow-up participation from the author in case fixes are needed.
> Since its founding in 2009, Uber has incurred a cumulative net loss of approximately $10.9 billion.
Now, Uber has become profitable, and will probably become a bit more profitable over time.
But except for speculators and probably a handful of early shareholders, Uber will have lost everyone else money for 20 years since its founding.
For comparison, Lyft, Didi, Grab, Bolt are in the same boat, most of them are barely turning profitable after 10+ years. Turns out taxis are a hard business, even when you ramp up the scale to 11. Though they might become profitable over the long term and we'll all get even worse and more abusive service, and probably more expensive than regular taxis would have been, 15-20 years from now.
I mean, we got some better mobile apps from taxi services, so there's that.
Oh, also a massive erosion of labor rights around the world.
I suppose my comparison is that Uber eventually turned a profit and mostly displaced the competitors.
I don't see the current investments turning a profit. Maybe the datacenters will, but most of AI is going to be washed out when somewhere, someone wants to take out their investment and the new Bernie Madoff can't find another sucker.
That sounds benign but I'm guessing all of that was in a 24/7 loop and probably running in parallel a bunch of times.
It's like the "unlimited Gmail storage" that's now stuck at 15GB since 2012, despite the cost of storage probably going down probably 20x since 2012.
Companies launch products with deceptive marketing and features they can't possibly support and then when they get called on their bluff, they have to fall back to realistic terms and conditions.
> Post-AGI economics seems to bring cost of production and distribution very close to zero, so this may soon come to pass. Culture might need a minute to catch up though!
Which government?
reply