UnderpantsWeevil

Like…we can’t just write off everyone else’s misery and suffering because you personally found a way to avoid it.

The degree of privilege required to even entertain making a living as a YouTube starlet is astronomical.

And, again, free video hosting and distribution! That’s why 99% of people put videos in YouTube. You can host something and pass it around without needing a self-hosted solution to manage it.

That’s the business model. It’s not Netflix

I write, edit, record, and publish everything I create, all by myself.

Patreon, Nebula, even Audible will give you a better cut of the proceeds.

Devaluing smaller creators is going to mean more AI slop

Video slop is even less commercially viable than the audio, pictures, and literature.

Sora got yanked off the market inside a few months due to how badly it burned tokens for video nobody wanted to look at.

YT is also requiring a lot of people to work for free.

It’s really not. No more than a casino is requiring you to roll dice and flip cards.

People can just… not host their shit on the site. Or not be in the influencer/content creator business entirely.

People are being baited into doing this work. People are being scammed and lied to about their prospects. But nobody is actually making you do this shit, much less do it for free.

Imagine if a mechanic’s boss told her they wouldn’t pay her until she changed the oil in 800 cars for free.

She’d be crazy not to pick up and work somewhere else. Or hang her own shingle.

But that’s the hitch with YouTube. It’s not just not-paying-you. It’s also hosting your media for free. What you’re really trading on isn’t revenue from YouTube, it’s free hosting services. And then you need to monetize the content yourself, if you want to generate an income.

Case in point - Ms Rachel isn’t getting rich off her (wildly popular) YouTube channel nearly so much as her toy line and her celebrity appearance fees. Similarly, guys like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones do commercial line reads right in the middle of their shows, fully independent of what YouTube injects. Adam Friedland and Justin Rozniak do paywalled episodes through Patreon. Mr. Beast sells shitty snack food.

Everyone who has made a living on YouTube has ultimately collected the bulk of that money from outside YouTube.

Consistently one of the worst paying social media services and not exactly in a generous market.

today 50TB is expensive

I don’t believe you can go back more than five years and find per-TB rates under the current rate. Ten years is straight out. Twenty years is laughable.

Meanwhile, PBS has an annual operating budget of around $340M. They can afford to manage their own data, at the scale of tens of terrabytes. And I guarantee you that whatever they’re paying Iron Mountain to host the data is multiples the cost of self-hosting.

Refurbished

If you’re a multi-billion dollar broadcast parent company doing long term storage for a 70-year archive catalog, you can spring for new. Maybe even go Big Fancy and get some RAID drives and tape backups, for extra redundancy.

50T isn’t even that much data anymore. You’re talking about maybe $2k in hard drives.

The tricorder from Star Trek is well-established as the formative concept for the modern day cell phone. And the idea of a pocket-computer goes all the way back to the calculators developed by TI, designed explicitly against the size of the CEO’s shirt pocket to guarantee it would fit.

Miniaturization has been a long time coming. It goes back to clockmakers and glass cutters, trying to turn large scale instruments into portable devices. I don’t think it is outrageous to suggest a pocket computer was in the future back in the 1960s/70s.

I do think the speed at which we got here caught people off-guard. But it also set this fantastic expectation for what we’ll do next, such that people speculate on faster-than-light travel and AI holograms and robot battle suits and immortality drugs more freely when they can point to “pocket computer” as an already realized possibility.

AI must be distributed

You get a datacenter and you get a datacenter and you get a datacenter and EVERYONE GETS A DATACENTER!

Everything he says is a neat idea in a vacuum

I gotta disagree. Even in a vacuum, his ideas manage to suck.

Zuck keeps seeing Elon Musk raise the bar on “World’s Dumbest Billionaire” and won’t be satisfied until he clears it.

Archive.is

In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission. The government has paid millions to private contractors to surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE’s operations, according to federal documents, contractors and former Homeland Security Investigations agents.

The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster’s name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history when possible.

To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE “may” be a crime.

Half the joke of the AI bubble is how American tech firms prioritized brute force over efficient engineering.

You and I are the victims

We’re way downstream. The “victims” are all the SaaS and smaller market cap firms that need business compute for accounting and commerce.

Case in point, I got a request for a new server delayed three months because we blew through our Q1 budget for new hardware faster than expected.

That’s not really hurting me, personally. But it means our server teams need to do more with less even as the business expands.

If you were a chip manufacturer and actually believed that there was a big future in AI, you’d be using those investment dollars to build some more chip fabs.

Major new semiconductor fabrication plant projects are expanding across the United States, led by a $16.8 billion SpaceX and Tesla “Terafab” project in Grimes County, Texas, massive expansions by TSMC in Arizona, and Samsung’s ongoing fab development in Taylor, Texas.

Computer hardware depreciates in value very quickly. You don’t buy hardware today so you can install that hardware in a datacenter that won’t be online for another year.

Hardly unusual for speculators to buy up a hot commodity the day of release and then resell it into an inflated secondary market a few days or weeks later.

Until we start sanctioning them, too

I hate to watch the internet die for 2 decades now.

That’s not what “dying” looks like. That’s “mutating”, in the horror movie sense.

Why do people watch these turds? Who cares what some “influencer” does? It’s all fake anyway.

I mean, YMMV. Lots of people don’t watch them. Lots of people just kinda flip through what’s on their feed and land on whatever catches their eyes. Lots of people get this stuff jammed down their throats through different flavors of marketing, engagement, and native-ized slop.

And this is where people “get information”? How about Wikipedia?

Wikipedia isn’t where people naturally go for fashion tips and entertainment promos.

I really think a lot of this boils down to “I’ve completely forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager”. Young people trying to act like old people. Old people trying to act like young people. A lot of it boiling down to hormones, boredem, and Freemium ad-slop being the entertainment they can afford.

orally defending essays

Nice to see. Does require small class sizes and ample office hours. Also kinda rough on kids with speaking issues, heavy accents, etc. But that’s trade offs for you.

Government monitoring of computers

Sigh

More heavy handed government surveillance. Somehow it’s never enough

In fairness, Texas didn’t normally see sub-zero winter weather, even before climate change started ratcheting things up.

But also, that statewide prolonged blackout was more the consequence of poorly constructed gas generator plants trying to squeeze the wholesale price of electricity in the state. They waited so long to turn on that their un-weathered pipes froze. And then the strain on the grid took down tens of millions in infrastructure.

But don’t worry. The state bailed out all the corporate entities and guaranteed a bunch of grant money for weatherizing, so that rigging the wholesale electricity markets will never cause this kind of tragedy to happen again.

Also, funnily enough, we’ve had a bumper crop of solar and wind power since then. And the fact that we can’t toggle these power sources on and off has neutered a lot of the profit-squeezing that gas plants used to exploit.