megopie

More like continuing to try to will something in to existence that can replace smart phones because they want to be in charge of the hardware so they don’t have to go through Apple and Google.

People liked TikTok, and it got really big, not because of the format, but because its recommendation system was optimizing for “Show people things they like”. If you change that to “show people things I want them to believe” people who don’t already believe those things will stop engaging and move away.

it may take time, but they will migrate. The network effect can slow that down, but a platform like TikTok is distinctly not one built by networks. Like, people don’t go there to fallow creators or their friends, they go there to see random stuff from people they don’t know, and it actively makes it difficult to get a consistent feed from people you fallow.

Whole other part of the company.

Like, Samsung is a big company, really like 3 or 4 companies in a trench coat.

i think the “party with in a party” strategy is much more promising than outright 3rd party runs. As in using the Democratic ticket to make their candidates relevant, but not using the democrats electoral and fundraising infrastructure, instead developing parallel party infrastructure to campaign and mobilize voters.

The DSA (and WFP to a lesser extent) have been much more electorally successful, particularly at the local level, than organizations that just run third party outright. I don’t think the DSA will have much luck in suburban areas, but I think other coalitions with a similar strategy could be successful.

It’s actually really funny, I think a lot of the anti Mamdani people were hoping that Adam’s and Coumo might hive away democratic voters and give someone else a chance, 3rd party or republican, but the republican’s didn’t even have a primary, they just picked the same dude who lost to Adams last time, and no 3rd party candidate has emerged from the wood work to rally the imaginary centrist voter base. So really they’ve just split the “the government should do nothing” voter base. Like Sliwa, Adam’s and Coumo are functionally indistinguishable on policy; just “bigger police budget, more tax breaks and deregulation, more cruelty to the minority target of the week”

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this happen in other local and congressional races. Progressive or socialists candidates win primaries, establishment democrats tacitly endorse a 3rd party run by Their preferred looser of the primary, but instead of splitting their voter base to sabotage the nominee, they split the conservative/reactionary base.

Most professional actors who are decently well known and talented still make most of their income from ad work, and couldn’t afford to stay in the industry without it. Like, really, very very few actors get by just on work in creative production.

I suspect a lot of these layoffs are actually just cost cutting in response to these companies doing really poorly, the idea that the jobs are now being done by generative models is largely a smoke screen to save face and avoid admitting that companies are scaling back operations due to a lack of demand.

Those few cases where they actually are just replacing people are going to vanish the moment that the people hosting the models run out of money to burn and have to charge full price. Like the scale of operating losses is orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen in the past.

This is the thing that really kills me, like, what an LLM can do is not a revolutionary leap, it’s an evolutionary step beyond basic grammar, tone, and spell checking. It’s more capable than traditional auto complete, but it’s not a fundamentally different capability.

Most actors don’t make much money playing roles in theater, movies or TV shows (obvious exceptions for big name stars), rather they do those when they can get them, but make most of their money doing ads. If that ad work disappeared, way fewer people could afford to be actors and the overall talent pool would shrink.

Same goes for people doing drawn art or photography, the commodified work provides a stable income that allows them to pursue the career and creates space for them to produce genuine art.

There is absolutely a lot of issues regarding things going on in certain discord servers, or in certain subreddits, less so on twitch or steam.

But a lot of those issues are due to different use cases being pushed into proximity by being pushed off other platforms, ether by moderation decisions, or by their structure and user engagement maximizing algorithms making certain communities unviable.

So you end up with communities that need forum or chat room style organization being pushed in to close proximity to communities that run afoul of corporate moderation. This was less of an issue when these things might have just headed off to dedicated websites, but with everything ending up on platforms now, you have this milieu of mundane game or hobbyist communities, communities for mental health discussions, communities about drug usage, explicit adult content, and fringe politics, all right next to each other. Thus cross pollination between all of them becomes inevitable at a far higher rate than if they were on separate platforms, or on a mega platform with a bunch of other things that would dilute the cross pollination.

I’m not even saying that any of those are explicitly bad things that shouldn’t exist, just that having them all confined in such close proximity is a time bomb. This is not a result of careless management by these companies, but rather the result of pressures pushing these things off of other major platforms, and thus forcing them on to ones that are inherently more permissive.

They get things wrong at a far higher rate than most of the websites that tend to end up at the top of a web result, and they get things wrong in weird ways that won’t stand out to users in the same way a shitty website will. These probabilistic text generators are much better at seeming like they have the correct answer than actually providing it.

It’s crazy how much money they are losing, and that’s with most of their compute being provided by Microsoft at cost, if not for free in exchange for the use of their models in Microsoft products.

Both they and Anthropic talk about their business as if they’re a software as a service company, but most SAS doesn’t get more expensive to run the more users there are, not to mention their conversion rate of free users to payed users is abysmal. Like, it’s an unsalvageable train wreck of a business model, I don’t see ether surviving more than a year unless they radically change their business models.