Hackaday Links:
There are a bunch of newly created millionaires this week, following news that European tech investment firm Prosus has acquired Stack OverFlow for $ 1.8 billion. While not a household name, Prosus is a big player in the Chinese tech scene, where it has a roughly 30% stake in the Tencent Chinese internet company. They've reduced their stakes in the company a bit recently, raising $ 15 billion in cash, which we assume will be used to finance the purchase of SO. As with all of these changes, there is considerable angst in the community about the impact this could have on everyone's favorite coding help site. SO executives are all adamant that nothing will change,
And speaking of issues in the community, if you thought the Audacity issues were over, think again. It looks like Audacity's new owners, Muse Group, are now asking contributors to the open source audio project to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) in order to contribute code for the project. The reason given is that Muse wants to change Audacity to a GPLv3 license, which he cannot do for existing code written under GPLv2. They say the CLA and subsequent license change will allow them to distribute Audacity on platforms where they are currently not welcome, like Apple's AppStore. It all sounds perfectly reasonable, but after the ill-conceived attempt to get telemetry into the code, the community has none of it. They're right :
From the ever-expanding State Department of Oversight: Remember that as of this post, you have less than 48 hours to opt out of Amazon's new Sidewalk feature, if you choose. All of those smart doorbells, cameras, thermostats, and speakers will automatically be included in Sidewalk on June 8, with the goal of creating a large mesh network that extends connectivity to a wide area network. The result of this is that you will be sharing your bandwidth with everyone coming to your neighborhood, and if you don't like it, after June 8 you won't be able to do anything about it. You have been warned.
Palace Cleanse Time: How About This Image Of The Shining Clouds On Mars? The image - or rather the images, as it is a composite stitched and color-corrected to match what the human eye would see on Mars - is from Curiosity, the rover that has peacefully explored Gale Crater for decades. years now. While the iridescent clouds, probably dry ice crystals high in the thin Martian atmosphere, are spectacular, we are really taken by the rocks. It looks like a place you've seen before, whether it's driving through Arizona or New Mexico. Damn, it kinda looks like where they filmed all those shots on location in old Star Trek episodes - you half expect a guy in a rubber lizard suit to peek behind those rocks. The point is, unlike many of the images that come back from planetary exploration, these make it clear that Mars is a place, somewhere that, while very alien and hostile, is also familiar enough to s 'identify.
The EV market is starting to get crowded, so anyone who wants to play it will need to have some sort of competitive edge to survive. And what better benefit than a car with the potential to pay for itself while parked? This is the idea behind the Daymak Spiritus, a three-wheeled electric vehicle that looks rather futuristic. The two-seater launch is scheduled for 2023, with mining hardware and an integrated crypto wallet. The car is charged for solar power, but judging by the small PV panels on the dashboard and rear deck, we think owners are more likely to turn grid power to Ethereum and Doge. rather than sunlight.
