I appreciate you recognizing us as the OG. We've tracked every launch since 2009!
Who is in space, they seem like nice people, I love the Smarter Every Day crew. (They actually tried to buy my domain years ago.) Pretty lame that they're running those insane Starlink ads but it is what it is.
I also think that would be pretty cool. But, I think one of the things that people have loved about my site is that it really just sticks to answering the question that the URL asks and tries not to get lost in the read-more sauce. At one point we had an iOS app that had more information (and notifications!) but that thing hasn't been updated in a long time.
I liked checking that website, until it listed the Artemis II crew for weeks after they came back. Now I have no idea how accurate it is; I don't know what other source to compare it to.
But maybe there's a more reliable method it uses for tracking the ISS astronauts, and the Artemis II needed more human input or something. For what it's worth, both websites currently list the same ten astronauts.
Yeah you're not wrong. I've updated this site by hand since 2009. There's not one data source so for a long time I was that data source. I'll be honest: I got kind of soul-crushed when Bezos and Elon started sending people up in a way that just started to feel really dirty to me. Honestly I hated updating the site, then having to update it again an hour later every time Bezos sent someone up. It's only been in the last year that I've started keeping it current.
Or Disney releasing a movie called "Frozen" so that web searches for "Disney Frozen" stopped returning macabre rumors about Walt Disney's possible posthumous cryogenic preservation.
Ah, so that’s why they released one of their most successful blockbusters, it was all an elaborate plot to bury the well known and long debunked story of the frozen Walt Disney.
Of course, that's why they used the generic word "frozen" with a lot of meanings, as opposed to the specific word "cryogenic" that people would actually search for.
Well, it could be because google sucks. Allegedly, the way google enshitifies their searches is to include parallel search terms in the query. Why does google enshitify their searches? Because people spend longer on the google site searching multiple times = more ad time.
So, searching for either cryogenic or frozen individually on google may include the other search term, meaning that when searching for cryogenic and disney, you will more than likely get results for frozen and disney, which are probably ranked higher.
So the theory is now that Disney named one of their most successful films "Frozen", not because it's a good name for a story inspired by "The Snow Queen", but it's actually to stop people finding out the rumours that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen by having results about the film outrank results about the conspiracy theory, even though that's trivially overcome by asking about "walt disney cryogenic" instead of "walt disney frozen", but they did that because Disney knew that Google sucks and would somehow be unable to stop pages about the film from outranking pages about the conspiracy theory.
That's a bold theory. Let's test it. Google results for "disney cryogenic":
Was Walt Disney frozen after death?
Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen : r/MandelaEffect
Walt Disney's Cryogenic Chamber - Myth and Folklore Wiki
How a strange rumor of Walt Disney's death became legend
The truth behind Walt Disney's frozen head
Was Walt Disney cryogenically frozen?
Fact or Fiction: Was Walt Disney Frozen?
What is the story behind the conspiracy theory that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen?
8/8 are about the conspiracy theory, 0/8 are about the film.
my theory is, that in hindsight it could look like a straight line from naming a film "frozen," and that in turn, at the height of frozen's popularity and due to googles policies, a search for "disney cryogenic" could return results for the movie frozen, which could lead to the suspicion that it was done on purpose.
i am very surprised to find that my search results for "disney cryogenic" almost match yours perfectly.
When I took the two day Disney "Walk in Walt's Footsteps" executive employee training 25+ years ago, the training that takes you to his secret apartment above the firehouse, and makes you spend an afternoon as a costumed (minor) character, at the end the woman leading us said "Ok! Now it's time for all of you to kiss Walt's frozen head."
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me.
Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are.
The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested.
I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.
After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission.
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
This is an is-ought inference. Americans have not been given an option and use the units they're provided with, which is a frustrating mix of everything depending on context.
In the contexts where you need to prove an image is a real unaltered photograph (court cases, news media, science, etc) privacy is usually not a concern.
Nobody cares if your social media photos are edited, they probably are, it's fine.
I'm pretty sure if signing images becomes the norm, because cameras will do it automatically then social media sites etc will start to care - or at least be thankful for the additional metadata.
EXIF already includes extensive metadata, including phone model and GPS location. For professional cameras, there is often camera and lens serial numbers too.
This has been the case for many years, and so far social media sites never care - they strip that info instead. Why would this change with one more extra piece of metadata?
If freedom is being shackled to an expensive appliance by a yearslong loan and autonomy is being trapped at home if it breaks or you lose the ability to operate it... I'll pass on both.
Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.
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