NIce board!
I almost started out with keyboards, but I ordered a kit from gboards.ca (fully expecting there to be delays), and the person behind that just went poof, and so did the money :/
In the meantime I've been playing around with my g305 mouse (ported ZMK to it, no sensor driver yet) and some other projects, but I still want to build a split at some point, I even have the switches laying around already.
I could imagine it functioning as a tax-funded budget, but coordinating such a thing globally and coming to a consensus seems impossible, that's something we're really bad at, and it would have the very same underfunding problems as other even more urgent expenses have.
As an existing alternative to ad-funded sites, I've seen non-profit news survive on donations and tax deductions, so maybe strengthening that model could work, but it would only help with larger entities that can be registered.
We need something to replace ads, that's for sure, or at least decrease their influence.
I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.
But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.
At this point, I'm happy to admit I ethically sourced a recent Nintendo game meant for a certain portable console, just out of pure ~~spite~~ love, even though I'm not really that into it!
They're doing great things to promote their brand for sure!
Electronics, once you realize that you can pretty much build anything you need if you can find a chip for it you're unstoppable, at least as long as you can gather the energy to work on it (or to finally fix your broken soldering station)
Not really (I wasn't using Google directly anyway), I think it fills a slightly different niche than search engines.
It's good as a fuzzy search for the sum of public knowledge, since it can understand quite complex queries and point you in the right direction, then you can go to regular search engines to find more specific stuff.
Bing was fun to exploit, but I don't really see why it's useful, it tends to always look up information which means it provides less of its own knowledge, I can do the searches myself better than an LM. Maybe it can provide more concise answers than all the SEO crap everywhere, but that can be avoided by searching on specific websites like reddit.
This is actually pissing me off, Twitch was already bleeding out with some moving over to YouTube, it deems like they're completely out of touch and about to just give up on their position. So the new situation will be, we have one giant instead of two, everything will be Google.