Daily Tech News 31 December 2023

• Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cost-cutting and mergers as losses mount in their streaming services. (Ars Technica)
  
  But not, so far as I can tell, giving much thought to making content people want to watch.
  
  Amazon is propped up by the river of money flowing from AWS - and oh boy di I have a rant there - so they won't feel the same pain until Jeff Bezos decides he wants that money for something else. When the axe finally swings there, it will be swift and brutal.
  
  Plus they have a wide selection of old content that you can get access to for a few bucks a month. I think it's A$5 to get MGM's entire back catalogue on Prime Video, which is how I'm watching Stargate. When I'm done, I just cancel that and pick up a channel with something else.
  
  Or just watch Hololive.
  
  

• How do red flour beetles absorb water through their butts? (Ars Technica)
  
  On second thought, never mind.
  
  
  
• Can we build solar power satellites? (CNN)
  
  Maybe.
  
  It used to be completely infeasible due simply to the cost of launching the required material into space. SpaceX has fixed that, and now it's just a very difficult engineering problem.
  
  It does solve the obvious problems with ground-based solar, at least: Put your satellites in the right orbit and the Sun shines all the time.
  
  
  
• Why I'm skeptical of "low code". (Scialli)
  
  Because it doesn't work. Basically.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments