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.

  • 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle








  • Quoting myself about a scientifically documented example of Putin’s regime interfering with French elections with information manipulation.

    This a French scientific study showing how the Russian regime tries to influence the political debate in France with Twitter accounts, especially before the last parliamentary elections. The goal is to promote a party that is more favorable to them, namely, the far right. https://hal.science/hal-04629585v1/file/Chavalarias_23h50_Putin_s_Clock.pdf

    In France, we have a concept called the “Republican front” that is kind of tacit agreement between almost all parties, left, center and right, to work together to prevent far-right from reaching power and threaten the values of the French Republic. This front has been weakening at every election, with the far right rising and lately some of the traditional right joining them. But it still worked out at the last one, far right was given first by the polls, but thanks to the front, they eventually ended up 3rd.

    What this article says, is that the Russian regime has been working for years to invert this front and push most parties to consider that it is part of the left that is against the Republic values, more than the far right. One of their most cynical tactic is using videos from the Gaza war to traumatize leftists until they say something that may sound antisemitic. Then they repost those words and push the agenda that the left is antisemitic and therefore against the Republican values.






  • 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/