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From a distance they look almost like ordinary sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white flag of Denmark.

But these 10-meter (30-foot) -long vessels carry no crew and are designed for surveillance.

Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known as “Voyagers,” have been put into service by Denmark’s armed forces for a three-month operational trial.

Built by Alameda, California-based company Saildrone, the vessels will patrol Danish and NATO waters in the Baltic and North Seas, where maritime tensions and suspected sabotage have escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

Paywall? https://archive.is/TzfCE

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Do people in France have flags on their cars? Do they sell clothing with the flag for Zimbabwe everywhere? Do people dress as their country's mascot for every day events?

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/30028880

A community dedicated to taking back the wealth of the 0.01%, for the sake of human kind

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https://t.me/russianocontext/6995

In today's episode of Kill The Messenger, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson reveals how full of bullshit is the writer of the original article.

The messages were published in the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation room: https://matrix.to/#%2F%21sWpnrYUMmaBrlqfRdn%3Amatrix.org%2F%24XpQe-vmtB7j0Uy1TPCvMVCSCW63Xxw_jwy3fflw7EMQ%3Fvia=matrix.org&via=element.io

https://paper.wf/alexia/matrix-is-cooked is fascinatingly incorrect

Until the 6th of November 2023 when they—in their words—moved to a different repository and to the AGPL license. In reality, the Foundation did not know this was coming, and a huge support net was pulled away under their feet.

fwiw, the Foundation had a front-row seat in the fact that Element (as incorporated by the folks who created Matrix) had donated $$M to the Foundation over the years, but wasn't going to survive if it kept giving all its work away as apache-licensed code - which in turn would have been catastrophic for the Foundation.

Yes, the high expenses for the Matrix.org homeserver are largely because they are still managed by Element, just not as donated work but instead like with any other customer.

nope, Element passes the hardware costs (and a fraction of the people costs) of running the matrix.org server to the Foundation without any overheads or markup at all.

Either way it shows that Element is seemingly cashing in on selling ,Matrix to governments and B2B as a SaaS solution without it going back to the foundation

Element has literally put tens of millions into the foundation, and is continuing to do so - while some of the costs get passed to the Foundation, Element donates a bunch too (e.g. by funding a large chunk of the Matrix conference as the anchor sponsor, and by donating time all over the place to help support trust & safety etc)

At the same time I can't help but think that this could have been prevented. Even Matthew himself recognizes that putting the future on Matrix on the line with VC funding and alike was not the best idea for the health of Matrix.

No, even Matthew knows that Matrix would never have been funded without routing the VC funding from Element into... building Matrix. We tried to fund it originally purely as a non-profit, but failed (just as it's a nightmare to raise non-profit for the Foundation today even now that Matrix exists and is successful!). If you need to raise serious $ for an ambitious project, you either need to get lucky with a billionaire (as Signal did with Brian Acton) or you have to raise on the for-profit side. Perhaps it would have have been best for Matrix to grow organically, but I suspect that if it did, it would have failed miserably - instead, it succeeded because we already had a team of ~12 people who could crack on and jump-start it if they could work on it as their dayjob; the team who subsequently founded Element.

Ultimately, for-profit companies will do what makes them profit, not what's the best option. Unless the best option happens to coincide with making the most profit.

No, Element is not profitable. Nor is it trying to maximise profit. Right now it's trying to survive and get sustainable and profit-neutral (i.e. break-even) - while doing everything it can to help keep Matrix healthy and successful too (given if Matrix fails, Element fails too).

Unfortunately, supporting the foundation through anything more than “in spirit” and a platinum membership is out of their budget, apparently. I think that morally they owe a lot more than that.

wow.

the FUD level is absolutely astonishing, and I really wonder what the genesis of this is

so, absolutely, spectacularly, depressing

this, my friends, is why we can't have nice things.

In response to an other person suggesting that the publisher is also known as a reasonable person on the platform:

Interesting, the matrix handle that seems behind this blog seems always to have been quite a reasonable person

somewhat why i’m wondering what the backstory is, and whether this is an unfortunate example of spicy lies outpacing the boring truth

Today, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) wrote to five major pharmaceutical companies, calling them out for paying $0 in federal taxes for profit earned last year, despite earning billions of dollars. These companies, which are Abbvie, Pfizer, Amgen, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson, have taken advantage of tax loopholes created by President Trump’s 2017 tax bill and have lobbied for even more tax giveaways.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250617111845/https://gothamist.com/news/mayor-adams-calls-for-broader-protest-mask-ban-after-no-kings-march

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It always throws the "Trakt authentication expired" and requires re-authenticate.

Aliens be judging your kinks and fetishes... 👀

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40326766

A Canadian Indigenous leader who greeted world heads of state arriving for the Group of Seven summit says he was “filled with rage” and considered leaving before Donald Trump arrived — saying the U.S. president has “caused much pain and suffering in the world.”

Instead, Steven Crowchild prayed, consulted with his peoples’ leaders and ultimately opted to stay on the tarmac for a long conversation with Trump that he hopes will call more attention to promoting peace, protecting clean water and other issues key to Canada’s First Nation peoples.

“It was really intense, to say the least,” Crowchild told The Associated Press on Monday, recalling his lengthy encounter with Trump on Sunday night in Calgary for the G7 in nearby Kananaskis. “When I woke up on Father’s Day, I didn’t anticipate I would be seeing world leaders, and one certain individual that has caused much pain and suffering in the world.”