when average users start fleeing en mass, it’s already to late, and arguably it’s approaching a critical mass where there is enough common knowledge and “friends who use that” to make the jump easier. Right now, the average user doesn’t have much of a reason to jump, but if Google has to restructure their business model due to their ad monopoly getting crowbarred, they might implement stuff that would be enough to get average users to start jumping.
great, just, one issue.
“The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts“
Nah, screw that, actively sabotage the training data if they’re going to keep scraping data after being told not to. Poison it with gibberish bad info. Otherwise you’re just giving them irrelevant but not unuseful training data, so no real incentive to only scrape pages that have allowed it.
but think of the shareholders! How would they feel if the company stoped growing? They need to cram their attempt at an audio content monopoly down your throat or else they’d only just be a music streaming monopoly.
I wonder how effective it would be just to put a bunch of data on servers meant to poison the training data they’re scraping. Like, make it data that only a bot trying to get everything would find, not something that users would see or encounter.
It’s so absurd, the website’s appeal lies entirely in the user driven experience created by volunteer moderators and user submitted content. Yet the path of profit growth for them lies in company placed ads, and LLM bots spamming comment sections to astroturf. The more they push for profit, the less appeal to users the site has.
That drop largely just cancels out the numbers since November. If it drops further then it indicates a general souring if market opnion.
The problem is that the AI branded software doesn’t run easily on old devices, unless you just stream it from one of their server farms. But they’re losing money every time they run one of these services for you, and the vast majority of people aren’t going to pay them a subscription for that.
They’re trying to justify selling new devices with software now, not giving out software that can run on old devices. You gotta replace your 2017 laptop to run windows 11. Gotta get a new computer with an NPU to run AI models locally. But it’s happening again, users are not embracing these new AI features, let alone buying new devices just so they can use them.
Much like wearables and VR headsets, the interest for these things is largely limited to enthusiasts spaces and isn’t translating to mass adoption. The average person doesn’t care about having their computer writing their email in to a limerick, they just want their email client to not freeze up and crash because they got an email with a weirdly formatted picture.
How am I supposed to scan a QR code sent to my phone… with my phone?
Why… would anyone use this? There are plenty of other perfectly capable free word processors…
Perhaps there is a better term and I should be more clear, but people know, roughly speaking, what “new” does, even “active” is fairly straight forward. They are literally algorithms but not what people are talking about when they complain about “algorithms”.
When people complain about the “algorithm”, in the colloquial sense, they’re talking about some nebulous unknowable method of sorting that only the people at meta and alphabet are privy to the details of, not the literal definition of the word.
I should have chosen my words more carefully but I think the point stands, there is a marked difference between a system where it is clear to the user how things get sorted, and the home, discovery or “for you” systems of major social media sites.
Depending on how you browse, it was not algorithmically recommended. Even if you’re using “active” to filter, it’s barely an algorithm. Certainly not a personalized one, unless you’re just looking at the subscribed feed, in which case the personalization was done by you, not the formula.
That’s kind of the appeal of this kind of website, when there is automatic sorting it’s very straight forward and user mailable.
There is this interesting push and pull with algorithms, they need to show content users will engage with, but, their main value to the companies is that it allows them to easily manipulate what is seen.
They push people to hard they stop using the algorithm, but if they just let the algorithm act purely one what people engage with, then they can’t monetize it.
There is a third access of preventing people from going down self destructive rabbit holes, but they don’t care about that until people start talking about regulating them or start moving away.
I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you!
Well not that shocked actually.
I think that meta might have pulled some stings as well because it was sucking younger user time away from instagram.
Previously there was an obvious cap on the value proposition to scaling data centers, mainly, that they needed population centers nearby who would need storage or processing for thin film devices. Latency is important for these kinds of things, so they need to be near to the demands
Now they think they can make value regardless of demand from local population, through training weights for models, or running models and sending the output to population centers. So suddenly the cost of power to run the systems is what matters, and the most profitable (not the cheapest or most efficient) is fossil fuel.
They see dollar signs with the opportunity to turn power directly in to value without the need for people nearby.
It’ll be really embarrassing for them as the consumer market continues to fail to show interest in the outputs they’re making.
At this point systems that need it are probably a couple decades old at least.
But I’m sure there are people out there who are using some ancient system/program because it does what they need and don’t want to buy a new license or pay for a subscription. Guess they’ll just have to stick with the older versions and keep their systems offline to avoid security issues. Or just emulate an older system when they need it.
That might be a bit niche to pursue. Like the mobile gaming device market isn’t that big, and devoting their limited resources to a niche product seems unwise.
Would be cool if they did, especially if they partnered with Valve to launch it with steam OS, like valve did with Lenovo.
I can’t imagine they’d release a new chassis unless it was something radically different to their existing form factors, and even then, it would have to be a fairly big market sector, since they’re not really big enough to target anything niche.
Replacing an existing chassis would require that they continue developing and releasing new upgrades for the existing chassis in addition to the new one, or make all the internal parts interchangeable with one of the existing chassis, both options seems like an R&D nightmare for such a relatively small company. If they just dropped upgrading the existing chassis… well… that would kind of be counter to their ethos.
They’re probably not releasing a whole new model of laptop, and if they are, it’s probably a specialty design, like a steam deck or a surface as other’s have speculated.
If it’s new components, you can probably drop them in if they interest you.
Would be nice if we could see the same kind of chain of response from other models.
I’d love to see what other implicit biases other groups have built in to their models.
it goes deeper than just “investors are greedy” though. Most people making these investment decisions are doing it at the behest of other people who have handed them their saving in exchange for returns. Those people aren’t privy to the nature of how money is getting invested and why, they hire someone else for that, the investors.
The investors may be making short sighted, stupid decisions, but they’re doing it because they’re pursuing their own personal incentives, get a raise, a promotion, or just not get fired. The managers are doing the same. If they don’t do it, someone else will.
It’s not the fault or moral failing of any one individual, but a fault in the system of incentives. A failure in the fundamental structure of how we decide how investments are made, in how we accumulate capital for investment.